No Man’s Land by Doug Tatum
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines who you will be when you can’t help it
Oscar Wilde
This is the book that changed everything. It’s my secret weapon. It transformed my thinking in ways that I can now directly correlate to certain successes within the business. I didn’t have to read it. When I was offered this book by a retired Tech Industry CEO I had just taken the leap from the CPA track I was on into a small company looking to grow.
But I read the book. I digested it. I attempted to correlate every chapter to something that was tangible within the company and thinking through how the business could be impacted by a change.
Below are my short-hand notes that I still find interesting today. Great one-liners!
Your Options as Company:
- Small Giant
- Grow & Change the Market
- Be acquired and become R & D (for example)
- Die!
4 Parts of Map (These are the key metrics that MATTER)
Market, Management, Model, and Money
“You can’t fly an airplane based on how you feel, but rather on the basis of what your instruments (numbers!) tell you.”
- Misalignments start when Entrepreneur is no longer the center
- Must make systems to bring back the ‘value’ originally created by Entrepreneur
“Value was born out of a set of skills & passions held originally by the Entrepreneur but ultimately captured by the business itself.”
- Systemize customer interactions
- Separate high touch processes that can be automated
- Think about what to change and talk to employees & customers for new insights.
- Hire the right leaders
- Business Model must align with the overall value structure of the Entrepreneur
- In order to stay in business you must run it like a business
- Hire people who have been where you want to go
- They made mistakes on others dime
- Need a team with answers not mainly questions
- Entrepreneur to do what they do best
- Get out of the details & focus on growing
Judy Starkey on making the tough Team Member calls:
“You hired someone and at the time this person seemed like a beautiful yacht sailing around the Caribbean. But now you need a huge oil tanker. It doesn’t mean the employee isn’t a beautiful yacht – it just means that your needs have changed.”
Think about your business as a living machine for making money and creating value. How does it work right now?
What kind of operational reports can you create that will allow you to predict the company’s net income prior to creation of year-end Financial Statements?