Left sizing your organization

Imagine if you went to a pitch, say, at the Valley (or wherever it is one goes to raise money for new ventures) and went without a business plan, or cash projections, or even a product. 

Imagine if you confessed to not having a mission statement or a vision.

Imagine if instead of the above, you went with a simple document: a profile. The profile of the individual most likely to innovate, enterprise and think without boundary. Imagine selling, amongst other things, curiosity and a sense of adventure, but no product.

The proposition is simple enough. The idea is to gather the people. Screen and select from a large sample of the best and brightest, with pre-defined psych metrics and tests to determine a balance of skill mixed with experience. Unique personalities, suited not for a particular market or product, but a particular organizational ethos. 

This involves the conscious creation of human resource excellence as the basic foundation, the premise that with excellence in thought and clarity of general purpose, people can achieve whatever challenge they are posed.

Imagine if your best business idea was simply to gather the best team of individuals you could and give them a strong set of incentives, and environment, to be all that they can be.

Imagine than asking for salary before research, compensation before Capex, and motivation before motive.

If a Venture Capitalist could be convinced to have a team in place first, and then seek to create a market, product or revenue channel around this team, than I would like to meet him or her. People create opportunity; seek them out first, seek out the ideas and products later. Visions, plans, processes, procedures are all follow-on activities. They should never be initiating ones.

Great men do great things. Great things do not create great men.

It’s an approach so naive and delicately unattractive, it might actually work.