10 Lessons from Great Businesses | The Generalist

10 Lessons from Great Businesses | The Generalist

In the world of business, there are certain lessons that can be learned from successful companies. These lessons can help guide aspiring entrepreneurs and provide valuable insights into what it takes to build a thriving business. In this article, we will explore 10 lessons from great businesses and discuss how they can be applied to your own ventures.

Lesson 1: Be a painfully persistent recruiter (Stripe)

One of the key lessons from Stripe, a successful online payment platform, is the importance of being persistent when it comes to hiring. Stripe's co-founder Patrick Collison notes that the company took a long time to hire its first employees, and even longer to recruit certain key team members. By being patient and persistent in the recruiting process, Stripe was able to build a strong team that contributed to its success.

Lesson 2: Obsess over pleasing your customers

Every successful company cares about serving its customers, but truly great businesses are obsessed with pleasing them. By going above and beyond to meet customer needs and expectations, these companies are able to build stronger customer affinity and improve customer retention. To please your customers, you must obsess over them and constantly strive to exceed their expectations.

Lesson 3: Understand the power of incentives

Charlie Munger once said, "Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." Incentives play a crucial role in organizing a company, optimizing performance, and capturing upside. By understanding and aligning incentives within your organization, you can motivate your team to achieve their best work and drive success.

Lesson 4: Think beyond your company, think like a nation-state

As technology becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, companies and protocols have the potential to act as pseudo-nation states with significant impact. By viewing your work at a state or civilizational level, you can gain valuable insights and lessons that can be applied to your business. This broader perspective can help you identify opportunities and navigate challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Lesson 5: Embrace innovation and differentiation

With online marketing becoming saturated, finding innovative ways to advance your story and differentiate your brand is crucial. Great businesses, like OpenSea, have found success by preserving optionality and building innovation into their products. By focusing on the long-tail of assets and staying adaptable, these companies have been able to thrive in a competitive market.

Lesson 6: Focus on your strengths, outsource your weaknesses

Great businesses understand the importance of focus and prioritization. Rather than trying to do everything, they focus on intensifying their most pronounced advantage. Tiger Global Management, for example, outsources its diligence to consulting firm Bain, allowing them to move quickly and rely on their expertise in picking winners. Red Bull similarly outsources the production of its beverages to focus on marketing. By deepening your advantages and outsourcing commoditized operations, you can position yourself for success.

Lesson 7: Define yourself by what you're not

Sometimes, the best marketing strategy is to define yourself by what you're not. This approach can help you stand out from competitors and carve out a unique position in the market. Telegram, for example, has positioned itself as a user-friendly private alternative to Facebook's surveillance state. By counter-positioning themselves against their direct competitors, they have been able to differentiate their brand and attract a dedicated user base.

Lesson 8: Embrace reinvention and disruption

Great businesses never sit still. They are constantly in a state of reinvention and internal bottoms-up disruption. This approach not only opens up new opportunities but also protects against competitive displacement. By constantly challenging the status quo and looking for ways to innovate and disrupt, you can stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge.

Lesson 9: The power of referencing and connecting ideas

In the world of knowledge management, the concept of Zettelkasten, or slip-box, offers valuable insights into the power of referencing and connecting ideas. By creating a network of links within your notes, you can enrich your thinking and make unexpected discoveries. The quality of a note is determined by the quality of its references, not just its content. By seeking out references that are unexpected and connecting disparate thoughts, you can bring new insights and ideas to your work.

Lesson 10: Communication with the slip-box is about context and observation

The true value of the slip-box comes from combining ideas and taking them to a higher level of abstraction. By articulating answers to specific questions through the creation of relations of relations, you can unlock the full potential of the slip-box. This process requires forming references around shared context and discovering connections that couldn't be anticipated before. The slip-box becomes a valuable tool for communication and discovery when used in this way.

In conclusion, there are many valuable lessons that can be learned from great businesses. By being persistent in recruiting, obsessing over pleasing customers, understanding incentives, thinking like a nation-state, embracing innovation and differentiation, focusing on strengths and outsourcing weaknesses, defining yourself by what you're not, embracing reinvention and disruption, leveraging the power of referencing and connecting ideas, and communicating with the slip-box in a contextual and observational way, you can position yourself for success in your own ventures. Remember, success in business is not just about hard work, but also about learning from those who have come before and applying those lessons to your own journey.

Actionable Advice:

• 1. Take the time to hire the right people for your team, even if it means a longer recruitment process.

• 2. Obsess over pleasing your customers by going above and beyond their expectations.

• 3. Focus on your strengths and outsource your weaknesses to deepen your advantages and position yourself for success.