Friday, October 8, 2010 at 6:24AM OnBiz ADVICE: Know what you're NOT doing--Read Hastings.
In this short video clip, Netflix founder and CEO, Read Hastings, may surprise you by inviting you to think about what it takes to be successful in management--and to which he attributes his success--in terms of what you're not doing. Frequently, students of business think that they have to do everything that their competitors are doing--and then a little more in the way of something special. Like Hastings, my experience has been that it's mostly what you don't engage in doing--and which others are--that really makes a huge difference in performance outcomes. In effect, it's thinking about strategy...but from the other end of the telescope!
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What’s the point behind OnBiz ADVICE?
OnBiz BEST ADVICE is meant to serve one over-riding purpose: to show that successful individuals--who most people only see in the media from afar--frequently attribute their accomplishments in life to what sometimes comes down to a very simple philosophy or guiding principle. As I reflect on all my days and years as a business professor spent teaching others how to be managers, it strikes me that most of my students have the misguided belief that success as a manager in the world of commerce is a function of being "smarter" or more knowledgeable that everybody else. In reality, many people who enjoy the benefits of success in commerce attribute their material accomplishments and their acclaim as managers to what most of the time can be credited to simple, guiding precepts which have little to do with being brighter and more to do with being wiser than everyone else!
I'm indebted to FORTUNE and CNN's Moneyline "Best Advice series" for these video clips that make it possible for ordinary people like you and me to "meet"--if only briefly--special people in the world of management and hear in their own words what advice they have benefited from the most.
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