Jim Collins’ Top 10 List; A Company’s Ideal; Facebook IPO; Embarrassed

HEADLINES:
 

Jim Collins' Top 10 List — Jim led a highly insightful 3 hour opening session at last week's Fortune Leadership Summit in Atlanta (and beamed to 9 locations around the globe). He capped it off with a top 10 list for growth firms:

1. Change "what" questions to "who" questions
2. Double your question to statement ratio
3. Embrace the "Stockdale Paradox" – keep getting up when knocked down
4. Discover your personal "hedgehog" – what are you both passionate about and best at
5. Be clear your Core Values, Purpose, and BHAG
6. Establish a 20 Mile March
7. Create a "Stop Doing" list
8. Turn-off electronic gadgets one day every two weeks
9. Focus on getting a huge return on your next "luck event."
10. Strive to be useful (would the world miss you if you/your company was gone?)

A Company's Ideal — Jim Stengel, named four times the #1 Power Player in marketing and the former Global Marketing Officer of P&G, outlined the most important marketing decision a company must make – what he calls their "ideal" – and how you convert this into a handful of measurements that allow you to track progress. Take 3 minutes and watch my interview of Jim where we explore two examples – go to www.gazelles.com and click on the "Grow Author Jim Stengel" link. BTW, Jim doubled P&G's revenues during his 7 year tenure as GMO using these ideas, including taking Pampers from $3 billion to over $10 billion and increasing profit 5 fold! He now helps mere mortals like us do the same.

Best Olympic Commercial — Jim's legacy continues at P&G. Here's the video we showed just prior to his keynote – how a powerful ideal, themed around the upcoming Olympic games in a few weeks, continues to drive P&G brands. Take 2 minutes (and a tissue) and watch.

Create Your Own X-Prize — the second standing ovation of the day was for X-Prize founder and author of Abundance, Dr. Peter Diamandis. Best known for creating the $10 million Ansari X Prize which unleashed the private space race (I'm literally watching Elon Musk's SpaceX Dragon hook up to the International Space Station as I write this), Peter outlined how various smaller prizes have solved a myriad of problems and why all of us can do something similar. The beauty of a prize is you only have to reward the winner and not the other 349 teams that compete. And typically over 10 times the amount of the prize is spent winning the prize (maybe governments should pay heed to this approach before they waste our money betting on a myriad of companies!). Take 2 minutes and watch my interview with Peter as he describes one such prize, unknown to many, that unleashed 350 competing teams with one of the top teams coming from a meet up in a tattoo parlor! Go to www.gazelles.com and click on the Dr. Peter Diamandis video link.

Facebook IPO — kudos to Mark Zuckerberg and his team for not leaving a bunch of money on the table at IPO time – seems they priced it about right, which is why the rest of Wall Street is up in arms – they weren't able to steal billions from the company. In turn, the NASDAQ/Morgan Stanley debacle is another thing – and as is always the case, the small investor gets the short end of the deal. For an interesting look at where Zuckerberg gets his strategies, take a look at this May 18 NY Times blog. Hint, they claim he practices with video games!

Kudos to Eduardo Saverin — as if already paying hundreds of millions in taxes to the US Government isn't his "fair share," certain government officials continue to beat-up the most successful in our society. Brazilian-born Saverin has renounced his US citizenship after moving to Singapore in 2011 and now a bill has been proposed to bar him and other wealthy Americans from ever visiting the US if they renounce their citizenship – please know how embarrassed I am for such childish behavior on the part of some of our government leaders in the U.S. BTW, massive amounts of capital are flowing to places like Singapore and exiting places like France with a proposed top tax rate of 75%.