ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH MACAPAGAL
Clients and journalists frequently ask me what secret sauce drives the success of the ultra-successful, especially the world’s top CEOs and self-made billionaire entrepreneurs. Is it some magic gene or super talent? What sets them apart?
In my role as a “global management guru” and “coach to the world’s top CEOs,” I have had the good fortune to interact with many of them. And I can confidently tell you from experience: There is fundamentally not much difference in talent or genes between them and most people.
What is their secret sauce, then? Why do they rise to the top and build legacies while others struggle?
Principles
A big part of their secret sauce is the mindset they cultivate, as well as the beliefs they adopt and the principles they live and work by.
From American billionaire investor Ray Dalio to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, all self-made billionaire entrepreneurs across many different industries challenge the status quo and what other people believe. They question the beliefs most people hold and ask if they are true. Then they form their own beliefs based on their analysis, life experience, mistakes, failures and successes.
Ray Dalio even wrote a book about this process and his principles for life and work called “Principles.”
Learn from Elon Musk’s ‘First Principles’ approach
When SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, only a few gave it many chances for success. But SpaceX eventually reached revenues of over $2 billion in 2018.
How did Elon pull that off?
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price.”
Musk decided to buy the raw components for rockets at a discount and manufacture the rockets himself rather than paying tens of millions to purchase a finished rocket.
Challenge the status quo
SpaceX doesn’t follow traditional business practices standards in the space industry, such as outsourcing. Instead, SpaceX has created its supply chain, manufacturing everything from rocket engines to electronic components in its rockets in-house.
As a business leader, your job is to produce results—without the baggage of how other people do it, have done it or want you to do it. This applies to family businesses as well. Over 83 percent of our clients are family business conglomerates and the pressure from the family on the new heir to the crown to do things the way they want to is often high. Dare to be you
A third generation South American heir to an international food conglomerate had a chip on his shoulder because the responsibility of living up to his father’s expectations wore too heavily on him. He tried to be like his dad, who founded the company. It did not help that the entire family would closely watch his every move. After he had made his first major mistake, he froze in his decision-making.
He would forever delay decisions and ask for more information until significant opportunities had passed. While my team and I empowered his business to pivot and made it future-proof, I personally coached him to be his own man and how to make his own decisions confidently.
I helped him realize that he had to grow into the best version of himself, not into a clone of his dad. The company’s future depended upon him doing things his way, including making his own mistakes.
Identify the beliefs that hold you back
One of our clients, a wealthy German heiress to a family business media empire, spent most of her time traveling for leisure and still wanted to be a successful CEO. As a result, the business was bleeding money.
Every business needs someone at the top who can get stuff done and is hands-on. But she wanted to have her cake and eat it too: run the business and take a third of her time off. I made her realize that she should instead move to the chair position and give up day-to-day operational control of the company. She had to let someone handle it who is all hands on deck. Jeff Bezos, Amazon and the ‘two-pizza’ team
Jeff Bezos is another CEO renowned for doing things differently. One of the most known practices at Amazon is the ‘two-pizza team’ rule. The concept is that it’s too big if a team can’t be fed with two pizzas. Smaller teams enforce productivity and encourage hands-on problem-solving.Bezos also read customer emails and complaints, and forwarded them to the relevant manager with a single character “?”. This was a clear signal that the manager needed to look into the issue, address it and report back to Bezos. His active involvement in customer service shows his commitment to understanding and solving ground-level problems.Additionally, Bezos is known for his “working backward” approach. It involves writing the press release before a project begins, forcing the team to consider the customer perspective and the end goal from the start.
Think big and look at challenges differently
I enjoyed lunch with the founder of a home improvement retail giant in Asia. He built the company from scratch into the industry leader it is today. While we had lunch, the Forbes List of the wealthiest people in Asia came out. It was a proud moment for him because he had just become a billionaire and now it was on paper for everyone else to see. It was a memorable moment and I was happy to share that with him.
When I asked him about the three most important principles behind his success, he replied, “First, I always thought big. Even when I just had one little store, I always asked myself: How big can I make the whole business? How big can it get? I started with the end in mind and did not put any limits on my vision. I always wanted to make it as big as possible.”
“Next,” he continued, “I have always looked at challenges differently from most people. While most people complain about challenges, I have always seen them as huge opportunities. This reframing of challenges has allowed me to look at each challenge and ask: What is the opportunity here? And the more you ask this question, the more you find the answers. This has allowed me to grow my business exponentially, even in hard economic times.”Steps
As a business leader, do things as they need to be done for your business to produce the best results—without the baggage of how other people do it, have done it or want you to do it.
- Dare to be you. Do not copy; do not imitate.
- Find the solutions that work best for you and your business, even if they may be unconventional or defy the norm.
- Identify the beliefs that hold you back.
- Think big and look at challenges differently. INQ
Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates. For more information and inquiries: www.TomOliverGroup.com or email Tom.Oliver@inquirer.com.ph.