Success through Values

             This week I was able to learn the importance of maintaining my values during the process of building my business.  We as entrepreneurs and leaders can choose what kind of environment we want to have within our organization and what way we want to work in, and this week I learned that we need to work in a way that we can have trust, positivity, and capability.  I watched three lectures by Guy Kawasaki, Frank Levinson, and Carly Fiorina, who’s name you might recognize from the Republican Primary Race for the presidential nomination.

               Guy talked about trust by stating that a business needs to trust people before people can trust the business.  He mentions examples of Zappos and Amazon that trust people to make returns and be honest about that.  This isn’t exactly a traditional reference, but it reminds me of the current fifth season of ‘The Arrow’ on CW.  Oliver Queen, or the green arrow, gathers together a new team and wants them to trust him and listen to him, but his assistant, Felicity Smoak, insists that he has to trust them first.  When he reveals his true identity and lets them know about his life a little bit, then they do begin to trust them.  Guy Kawasaki mentions that as a business owner, we need to trust our customers before we can expect our customers to trust us.

               Frank Levinson talks about how they try to hire nice people and let them have a good work/life balance so that they can get and keep good people in their business.  We have to keep our lives in balance and let others do it in order to live a fulfilled life.  There is no use in working ourselves or others to death to try and be successful because no one will have the opportunity to enjoy that success.

               Carly Fiorina talks about three keys to being a successful leader: capability, collaboration, and character.  I focused on capability because I had already gleaned some insights on the other two from Frank Levinson’s lecture.  She talks about keeping innovation and creativity alive to be able to adapt.  That is what she said leads to a successful business and happy life.  Levinson also mentioned in respect to this keeping lines of communication open with customers.  We need to hear them, because they ALWAYS know what’s wrong.  If we want to help people, we need to listen to people and apply creative solutions to their problems.  That is how we help others and make our lives happier and more productive, not to mention successful.