Making Your Business Fearless By Charles Chuck Leaver
Charles (Chuck) Leaver is CEO of Ziften Technologies who have their headquarters in Austin, Texas.
This motivating video created by Steve Blank and posted by the Commonwealth Club was a must see again for me today-- The Step By Step Guide To Building A Great Business.
Steve has tremendous insight and he is a very intelligent man who also has a very good sense of humor. There are several things that he said in the video that resonate with me:
I like the quote from the video, "there are no facts inside your building, so get the hell out of it!"-- There were some hard lessons learned in Silicon Valley based on this. Weekly visits to our clients and prospects by our key execs is the norm at Ziften. Being relatively new, we want to make our business model as realistic to our market as possible, and determine how we can add value.
Listening to our customers is the most important thing we do. Steve rightly talks about how tough it is for entrepreneurs to listen to the market rather than try to force their opinion onto it. One of my key activities is to encourage staff members to prioritize listening over talking-- after all, customers and prospects are far more interested in hearing how we solve their problems than how smart we are!
In the video Steve talks about innovation and how it is perceived in the USA as opposed to other parts of the world. I share this belief very strongly. We are lucky in the USA that there is a belief that failures from the past, where there are lessons learned; will provide an experienced exec who will bring a great deal of value to a startup operation. Where there is fear of failure there is little innovation.
My people are encouraged to take risks without the fear and blame factor which occurs in many companies. This has resulted in our team making significant progress faster towards the aim of closing the gap between efficient security technologies and very effective enterprise client security. This is very significant-- we will soon be in a position to release new information about our unique value proposition in endpoint security so make sure that you look out for that!
Steve has tremendous insight and he is a very intelligent man who also has a very good sense of humor. There are several things that he said in the video that resonate with me:
I like the quote from the video, "there are no facts inside your building, so get the hell out of it!"-- There were some hard lessons learned in Silicon Valley based on this. Weekly visits to our clients and prospects by our key execs is the norm at Ziften. Being relatively new, we want to make our business model as realistic to our market as possible, and determine how we can add value.
Listening to our customers is the most important thing we do. Steve rightly talks about how tough it is for entrepreneurs to listen to the market rather than try to force their opinion onto it. One of my key activities is to encourage staff members to prioritize listening over talking-- after all, customers and prospects are far more interested in hearing how we solve their problems than how smart we are!
In the video Steve talks about innovation and how it is perceived in the USA as opposed to other parts of the world. I share this belief very strongly. We are lucky in the USA that there is a belief that failures from the past, where there are lessons learned; will provide an experienced exec who will bring a great deal of value to a startup operation. Where there is fear of failure there is little innovation.
My people are encouraged to take risks without the fear and blame factor which occurs in many companies. This has resulted in our team making significant progress faster towards the aim of closing the gap between efficient security technologies and very effective enterprise client security. This is very significant-- we will soon be in a position to release new information about our unique value proposition in endpoint security so make sure that you look out for that!
This site was created in Austin, Texas.
Charles Chuck Leaver
Ziften Technologies Inc CEO