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Entrepreneurial Organizations Culture and Leadership
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Entrepreneurial Organizations Culture and Leadership
2/14/07 - Purpose of this new section is to provide a background for students of entrepreneurship in organization, culture and leadership aspects of startups.
Hawkins (Palm, HandSpring) believes that you have to be conscious and methodological about your company culture. The culture starts at the top and permeates to the bottom. The culture at Palm is a product culture. High integrity is not just internal, but integrity with vendors, suppliers and customers. A lot of companies keep secrets, but the transparency has been very good for Palm. A good, solid culture can help a company go through the hard times.
Neeleman (JetBlu): We realized that people where the whole aspect of our business. Herb Kelleher of Southwest had a strange saying: I don't care about my shareholders, I only worry about my employees. Because if my employees are taken care of, my customers will be taken care of, and then my shareholders will be taken care of.
Neeleman (Winster): It is easy to focus on shareholders and forget what really creates and drives the business. In 32 years, Southwest has never laid off an employee. Neither has JetBlue, which has only been three years, but we have been through September 11th and a war. We have learned that it is all about taking care of our people.
Debra and Randy believe that leadership skills and the ability to handle change comfortably are the key characteristics that have been useful in their respective careers.
Jerry Kaplan talks about companies having personalities which reflect the personalities of the founders. If you know Bill Gates, you know Microsoft. Entrepreneurs should think about what personality they want the company to have and what personality they themselves have as the founder.
We have a slogan inside Autodesk called fail fast forward to counter a fear of failure within an established organization. Our goal was to have employees understand that failure is very acceptable within an established organization--the key is to identify it quickly, and move forward with lessons learned. This is an attempt to break free those who are worried about risk-taking.
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