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When fear gets in your way, do you choose to take the risk, or do you choose certain failure?

Me: So, what stops you from launching your blog? You have an amazing story to tell.

Client: Well, I guess I’m afraid that I don’t really have anything interesting to say. That I will fail.

The point that my client was missing was that she couldn't fail unless she even didn't try. Imagine the results if we each committed to do one thing that spikes our fear of failure. Imagine if you were able to complete this statement with a modicum of confidence:

In the next three months I will face my fear of failure and take the following steps to achieve (fill in the blank with a goal that conjures up the fear of failure.)

Step one:

Step two:

Step three:

Now imagine what it will feel like in three months when you've actually done it! (Feels good, right?) So what's stopping you?

The fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to success. Yet every successful person I've ever spoken with has battled this fear. What separates them from the rest? Why is it that some of us have the ability to look our fears straight in the eye and others carry the burden of failure without ever giving their dream a chance to develop?

"People who are afraid of failure have confused failure with mistakes," says success psychologist, Ann Vertel. "Mistakes aren't failure, they only feel like failure. True failure is in quitting or not learning, everything else is part of the process of learning and growing."

We have to make mistakes in order to understand what does and doesn't work. And we must continue to push through our barriers to see what we are truly capable of. Vertel gives the example of professional athletes who, she says, take themselves right out to the edge of failure—on purpose. "They do this in order to discover their breaking point,” says Vertel. “Then they train to that point over and over, slowly moving it further and further out. This is called mastery. You can't know your level of success if you don't know how far you can go."

And Michael Jordon is the perfect example, as demonstrated in this popular statement: "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And, that is why I succeed." If Michael Jordon wasn't afraid of being judged, why should we be?

CrowdSPRING co-founder, Ross Kimbarovsky is no stranger to failure. When he and his partner, Mike Samson, launched the crowdsourcing site in May of 2008, their users were frustrated by the crowdSPRING experience; not a problem that a start up, or any other company, wants to face. Poor technology forced them into low budget, temporary fixes on the site and ultimately the entire content management system had to be rewritten, but not before major losses were incurred.

"Successful people are successful for many reasons," says Kimbarovsky. "Successful people look at mistakes or failures as opportunities to learn. People who fear failure rarely have such learning opportunities. And very often, even if they do, the fear of failure completely paralyzes them."

The co-founders learned that failure educates and motivates, and cost-cutting measures didn't save them time or money in the long run. We've all heard the famous Henry Ford quote: "Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." And that's exactly what Kimbarovsky and Samson did. Today crowdSPRING positions itself as the world's No. 1 marketplace for crowdsourced creative services.

So what if you were to actually give yourself permission to fail, recognizing that nearly every other entrepreneur in the universe has made mistakes and learned valuable lessons from them? And, that those lessons are what they cite as the reason for their unlimited success? Wouldn’t you be willing to experience a new learning curve if you knew that success lies ahead?

"To be uber-successful you must give yourself the gift of failing fast and failing often," says Vertel. So why not return to the beginning of this article, fill in the answers to my questions and give yourself the gift of a few big, bold failures? You will find that the act of learning from your mistakes is far more rewarding than doing nothing at all.

The only thing worse than failing is sticking with a doomed business long after its fate is sealed. Here's how to know it's time to move on.

Every small business struggles. Struggle is what you signed up for when you became an entrepreneur. (I'd say we're still struggling at Sageworks, and we've made the Inc. 500 twice.) Even the most successful business builders have all gone through moments when they wondered whether they should call it quits and try something different.

And, let’s be honest: Sometimes the answer is yes: It just isn't worth it to keep pressing. How do you know it's time? Here are three ways:

1. You See Little Revenue (and No Profit) After Many Iterations

It takes between three and seven years to become established. I'd like to offer a more specific date, but it depends too much on your industry. I can only say it will take the most complex businesses seven years to start up.

In this beginning period, you consistently change your products' make-up as you receive feedback. A pull from the marketplace should develop—and grow. This means revenue flows in, and profit follows.

If you reach the end of the development stage, and you see stagnant or declining growth, then it's time to get out. Again, I wish I had a precise growth number, but it's entirely industry-specific. It should be a healthy amount, though. And don't waste your time if your revenue has flat lined. Avoid clinging to the hope that you'll find a way to make it grow again.

This happened to me when I ran a consulting business in the 1990s. Revenue rose, but then fell flat after Year 3. I continued for another three years, and I regret it. I should have realized scaling the business any further was impossible: A company would hire a single consultant—they'd pay me to tell them what to do—but they would balk at hiring an entire company of consultants.

2. You've Borrowed A Lot of Money

The fundamental goal is always this: Make a profit. Too much borrowing can keep you from achieving it.

By "borrow," I mean receiving any financial capital that isn't yours. This can mean the old-fashioned sort of seed funding—a bank loan or some money from family—or outside equity financing such as venture capital and angel investment.

This financing can disrupt a revenue stream. Too often now I see companies eschewing revenue and profit for outside funding. Sure a Series D round may sound good, but, to me, that's a fundamental flaw. Companies today can rely on funding to grow their business, forsaking organic growth, and soon too much funding can distort a business's value.

If you stopped taking funding, would your business still grow? If the answer is no, then you have a problem. Just because you're a successful fundraiser doesn't mean you run a successful business—at least as I would define it.

3. You Hate Working Weekends

You start a business with the loftiest goals and ideas. It's your passion. You don't notice how early you start or when you go home.

So, when you start feeling like you don't want to work a weekend, that's the biggest red flag I know.

This business is your dream. You shouldn't care how long it takes to perfect it. Or when it needs you. You've lost that entrepreneurial drive, and that's exactly what fuels you and your business through any struggle.

What do hyper-creatives, emergency room nurses, and CEOs have in common? Dr. Aaron Blackledge has identified a particular neuro-chemical pattern. Do you have "entrepreneur brain?"

Aaron Blackledge doesn't like to stand still. He possesses kind of mindset that is often too fidgety to stand the tedious process of going into through education. So instead of settling into higher education, Blackledge doubled down and completed his pre-med in nine months. He decided to open Care Practice in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2008 with the goal of shaking up traditional doctor's offices: Instead of relying on insurance referrals, he swarmed social media with information about the clinic, treating its opening like a buzzy new restaurant launch. The formula was a hit with the area's start-up crowd. Thee and half years later, he's seen more than 8,500 patients. And treating these largely tech-savvy and entrepreneurial-minded clinets has revealed a common thread about how the entrepreneurial mind works—and how to treat it. He spoke with Tim Donnelly in advance of delivering a talk Saturday at Summit Series, entitled: "The Entrepreneur's Mind: Understanding Our Most Powerful Resource."

How did you go from medical student to entrepreneur?
I was a young doctor that had worked in the system. I had come from art school, I was a hypercreative, I had gone to medical school because I had thought "if I have an M.D. I can pretty much go around and do whatever the hell I want." I was so frustrated with health care, I couldn't find out why health care was so non-intuitive. It made absolutely no sense how it was structured. All these different places I've worked from ERs to urgent cares to to hotel doctor to house call, and I was like, "OK screw it, I'm going to build a clinic that makes sense to me and I don't care what it takes." I really wanted to prove a point that a young doctor with no name-recognition, no funding, no backing, could do what people thought would be impossible.

What did you want to change about the system?
Go on Google, and search for a doctor's office. There's no doctor that's hired a graphic designer who is outside of their immediately family. Let's brand, and create something hip. Let's not take insurance but let's not charge a huge price point. Let's launch through social media platforms." We opened in 2008 right during economic Armageddon. Everyone was writing my obituary. We cash-flowed in about eight days and we had a full practice in three months. And people just couldn't believe it, how busy I was. But I had created this thing that become huge overnight.

Who was your typical client?
I had created the clinic for myself—for what made sense to me. At first I thought it was just really popular and it spoke to lots of consumers. But what it really did is it appealed to people like myself, hyper-creative people, people who can't stand to wait in lines, people who can't stand anything that's not intuitive, they use the internet for everything. They'll take their insurance card, they'll try to find a place, and they'll see me on Yelp and say, "Oh screw it I'm just going to go to this guy." We became really popular with entrepreneurs, programmers. We probably have 2,000 people that write code and probably at least 400 CEOs of tech companies.

What have you learned about the way an entrepreneur's brain works?
I'd always just gone and done something new and creative and innovate anytime it struck me. And building a brick-and-mortar business, suddenly I was dealing with stuff that wasn't innovative, and suddenly I was losing my physical activity level. I was fidgety. But I've never had this kind of success. Everything was perfect, I was living the ultimate dream doctor's job. And I knew inherently that if a giant boulder fell from the sky and destroyed my business and my entire life savings, I would be totally happy.

I was trying to figure out why this was. I had more and more tech people coming in, so I was dealing with more and more issues of hyper-creatives: Addiction, struggle, relationship problems, smoking, chronic fatigue, ADD. These are people who were burning themselves out. I had all these patients strating to come, people moving here from all over the world, diagnosed with ADD, trying to take Adderall. I don't understand this diagnosis. It makes no sense to me. The description is like written for a 12-year-old boy who can't get his homework done.

Wait, so everyone's on Adderall these days?
People are taking Adderall to write code all night. No one's following any instructions or using this stuff properly, everyone's borrowing stuff from other people in this entrepreneurial community. And it's really just a mess. I watched this PBS documentary on ADD and I was in shock. I realized "Oh my God, that's my brain, that's how my brain works." I don't meet any of the criteria for ADD, I don't have the dysfunction, I just related to that neurochemical pattern and what they were describing.

We asked: do you feel more comfortable sitting in traffic or sitting in a burning building? To which, 15 CEOs all around the table all said in unison, "in a burning building."

I was on a Summit Series cruise after that. I worked out a series of really obscure [potential symptoms] to question people about. I went on the boat with all these famous people and I was shocked to realize: It wasn't 20 percent of the people, it wasn't 50 percent of the people, it was like 85 percent of the people [who shared these characteristics]. It was like a parlor trick. I could totally freak people out and I could tell them about their struggle and I could say, "Well I bet you tried this." And they'd say, "How the hell do you know that? My wife doesn't even know that." We did an event in Seattle for CEOs a couple months ago. We asked: do you feel more comfortable sitting in traffic or sitting in a burning building? To which, 15 CEOs all around the table all said in unison, "in a burning building." When you have a rush of fight or flight, you get norepinephrine and dopamine in your brain, which actually calms you down.

This isn't just CEOs, though?
I realized I've created a clinic that attracts people like this. They are emergency room nurses, Navy SEALs, firefighters. All these subsets of people that fall under a specific neurochemical pattern. They'll actually be calmer than they are in their normal lives. A lot of the SEALs are very similar. They constantly need to be on mission doing something stimulating at all times. If they don't they feel discombobulated, constantly feel agitated, get in trouble, get in fights. They only feel serene when they're in the field under fire or under the danger of fire. I was like, "Wow, these are entrepreneurs." I'll go to Start-up Weekends and talk about this with a bunch of young hackers and stuff. Almost every time there will be some kid who will pull me aside out of the crowd and whip out his bars or something and say "I'm a year out of Afghanistan."

What can this teach us about treating entrepreneurs?
They're people that balance their neurochemistry by constantly doing something stimulating or innovative at all times. If you sat in a room with hyper-creatives and tech entrepreneurs, and asked, "How many of you can go to the beach and sit under and umbrella for more than 15 minutes?" probably 90 percent of them would say "no." And the 5 percent that said "yes" would not realize that they're not allowed to have three electronic devices working under that umbrella.

I have all these patients that have $15 million in the bank and are 27 years old, and they're running around in flip flops and T-shirts advising six companies, building a school in Ethiopia, running around the world. They can't stop. Boredom is like a torture for entrepreneurs. So they constantly crave stimulation.

I have all these patients that have $15 million in the bank and are 27 years old, and they're running around in flip flops and T-shirts advising six companies, building a school in Ethiopia, running around the world. They can't stop.

The most important thing for them: They're meant to be physically active. I encourage every one of my tech entrepreneurs to find intense activity that's both creative and social. Unfortunately some of them get off track and get into some of these triathlon things and ultra marathons. They lose some of the creative component and they run themselves into the ground. They're running three hours a day and working 12 hours, and they're just killing themselves. But if they're physically active in a creative social process they actually can achieve balance. This is the way their brains are designed, this is the way they're meant to be in the world.

How else can they achieve balance?
A lot of these people will do bike rides across states or go surfing in Nicaragua, all these crazy things, but if they're lost, everything is new. Everything is new process: Where's the bathroom? Where do I eat? It's incredibly stimulating for their brain. They can do relaxing things. They can sit and read a book. A lot of them really love to travel.

Hyper creatives, they leave work and they go home and think about work all night long. These people can't stop. None of these people can read instruction manuals. Their brain likes to anticipate and it makes them feel better to figure things out. So therefore I can't give tell them to do these 15 things and you'll feel fine, because they'll never follow instructions.

Chained to your desk? I've been there. If you're still stuck working for a giant company, you need to know these two things right now.

I owe a lot to Corporate America. My mom single-handedly supported our family by working a corporate job for almost 30 years. It paid her a salary that afforded my upbringing and provided invaluable benefits that are sometimes taken for granted like health insurance, a 401K plan, and a pension. I have also worked in Corporate America. During my tenure, I acquired tangible skills that I leverage everyday as an entrepreneur. Yet when I think about the times I felt most stifled, complacent, or doubtful about my capabilities on the job, these emotions occurred most during my time on the corporate grind.

The dynamics of Corporate America can be a double-edged sword for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit. On one hand, it provides you with critical training and baseline skills that can serve you well as an entrepreneur. On the other hand, if you have any ambition to introduce a concept that changes lives or how business is done, or if you simply just want to run your own show, there are two simple reasons why the corporate environment can eventually kill your chances of turning these desires into action:

• Corporate America Creates a False Sense of Security. With the surety of money and benefits, it's possible to become comfortable working in a role that may not use all of your talents. It's also viable that as you develop functional mastery, your impetus to excel in other areas wanes or you loose sight altogether of a scenario where your impact spans beyond the company environment. Coupled with ongoing tenure and the perks that come along with, the incentive to do anything but status quo quickly diminishes. God help any downturn or clash with a manager that, like at any corporate job, could cause the illusion to swiftly fade.

• The corporate climb is slow and at each rung you're reminded that there is so much still to do before reaching the next level. At most established corporations, formal decisions require several layers of approval before anything gets done. As one waits in line to get their project's time to shine, corporate training can actually program the employee to believe they must still "check more boxes" to demonstrate they've got the skills to do what it takes or be promoted to the next level. In turn, the employee begins to believe that they’re not ready to rise to the next level, let alone forge into a new venture where the outcome is completely opaque.

The good news is there are plenty of people who despite the aforementioned obstacles, take the leap of faith and pursue ventures, even some while simultaneously working for Corporate America. Yet to do this effectively, it's important to remember:

• Knowledge is power. the most important component is knowledge of "self." If you know there's more that drives you than taking a paycheck or living life comfortably, be honest with yourself and seek your passion, even if that means trying to figure things out after hours!

• Mitigating risk is key. While you've got a guaranteed salary, stack your chips! The money will come in handy one day—trust me. Get all of the cross-functional training you can in preparation for the day when you may have to do it all, when starting a business.

• You only live once. Our time on this earth is limited and way too short to doubt your ability to do great things, even if you don't know it all. There are several living entrepreneurs, from Andrew Mason to Mark Zuckerburg, that remind us what's possible, even with limited experience. So seize the moment and live each of your days to the fullest!

What wine inspires me to live my life to the fullest? The very same wine that Napoleon Bonaparte devotedly drank up until his final days, South Africa's Vin de Constance. Á votre santé!

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We're living in a world of beta tests and products that are released and then improved. How do you know when you're done and it's time to ship? Three entrepreneurs give their advice.

One of the hardest things for a start-up to decide is "When is my product done?" I've worked in many start-ups, and I am advising several start-ups now. Last week after my article about the Minimum Viable Concept, this issue came to a head at one company. The challenge of when to open the website or let the world through the door is a monster that many teams wrestle with. Paralysis by analysis can lead to missing a market opportunity. But, can you get another chance to make a first impression if your product is truly bad?

Adam Seifer, co-founder and former CEO of Fotolog.com, one of the oldest and most popular photo sharing sites on the net, said: "I frequently find myself trying to convince partners, advisees, etc., that one of the biggest risks a start-up has is to not launch anything at all—to get so caught up in talking about what you're going to launch and so fixated on details that it feels like you're making progress when instead what you're really doing is moving asymptotically closer to something that doesn't ultimately matter as much as you think it does."

Some companies have truly embraced the world of continuous testing, also called "using your customers as test subjects." Google's Gmail was listed as a "beta" or test version for about five years. Apple's "Siri" voice service is still considered a "beta" (and given that it works for me about half the time I'd say that is an accurate label.) But are these kind of tests for everyone?

"Not so fast," said Art Chang, CEO and Founder of Tipping Point Partners, a New York City-based "institutional entrepreneur" that serves as a seed investor and founder of software start-ups. "Siri is a 'feature' on the iPhone, but the iPhone works. Gmail is an extension of the Google brand, and though it started a little shaky, by the time it came out of beta, it was solid. If you're an established brand you can experiment, but for a traditional start-up, that first product represents a brand promise. So, it may be better to reduce features and functions to have a product that works really well, and does what it is supposed to do. Twitter and Evernote both started as very simple products, and expanded after they got the core right."

Seifer told me about a current project he's working on, launching "maybe next week. The team was really stuck for a long time noodling around on the same minor things and having the same hypothetical discussions. After I pushed and pushed to focus and get something complete—even though it's a simplified version of what we hope to become in the near future—it had a dramatic effect on our productivity. Having a first version of a site live and real allowed us all to buckle down, stop dealing in hypotheticals and stop deferring decisions, and possibly most importantly, start getting real feedback from real users and outsiders."

John Borthwick, CEO and Co-Founder of Betaworks, a kind of incubator/studio that builds and invest in companies, said "The whole idea of 'done' is a concept that we're getting rid of, because nothing is ever done. The name Betaworks is a play on 'a factory building stuff' but also emphasizes that Betas work. The world is about continually improving and evolving. I remember what Brian Eno said (in Wired in 1995) about unfinished products , and how you're constantly in the creation process. Before the user participates the product isn't done—they make it what it is. This old view that you create, publish and you're done, is outdated. You put something out, then users arrive, they comment and your thing morphs into something else, then you update and others engage—done is never."

Borthwick believes we are now learning how to live with unfinished products as a society. "The process of marketing and designing and getting feedback is changing. We're entering into a different era of what it means to be done. Examples include everything from Trader Joe's to Nike Customized shoes to fashion companies condensing cycle to idea to design to in store in a very short time. "

These entrepreneurs and investors believe there are ways to figure out a core of a product, launch it, and constantly iterate after that. Is this easier for software than hard goods? Initially I thought so, but then I remembered when razors had 1 blade instead of 5. Is it true that nothing is done until someone else tries it? When are you done? What helps you make that decision? Let us know in the comments.

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Chinese tech outfits are gaining steam against their Silicon Valley counterparts. Here's a look at a few rising start-ups you should know about.

Could Beijing become the next Silicon Valley? Despite red tape that makes doing business in China a real hassle for some entrepreneurs, it would be almost impossible to argue that China isn't becoming one of the next hot markets for start-ups. Last year, 138 venture-backed companies in China went public, raising about $21 billion, according to VentureSource. Impressive, no? Here's a look at seven start-ups every investor, entrepreneur, and small business should know about.

Diandian

A service similar to Tumblr, Diandian (which means "bit by bit" in Chinese) was founded by Jack Xu, formerly an engineer at Renren. As of June 2011, the number of Diandian registered users had surged to one million, which means Diandian gained 11 users every minute from April to June, according to Asian tech blog TechNode.com. "It took Twitter more than a year to have the same magnitude base of users," the site noted, "and 10 months for Facebook….Diandian grows as five times as the growth rate of Facebook."

Lashou

Americans aren't the only ones caught up in a group-buying frenzy. Lashou Group, China's biggest group-buying site, is gaining steam. According to SEC reports (the company has filed for an IPO) Lashou grew from about 53,000 users in March 2010 to approximately 16.8 million as of September 30, 2011. And, since launching just two years ago, approximately 6.8 million paying users had purchased over 43.3 million vouchers for services and product. "Given that China's Internet users reached 425 million as of the end of 2010, which represented 32.4 percent of the Chinese population," the filing noted, "…we believe significant market opportunities exist for our future growth."

Meituan

If Lashou is China's Groupon, Meituan is China's LivingSocial: it's group buying site founded by serial entrepreneur Wang Xing, who also founded the Facebook-like site RenRen.com. According to a recent press statement, Meituan.com's monthly growth rate has, without interruption, exceeded 20 percent since launch, with revenues nearing $40 million in November.

Douban

Douban.com may be the biggest site you've never heard. Launched in 2005, it's essentially a social network for people to discuss movies, music, and TV. With more than 7,000 musicians and about 5 million registered users, it ranks as the 109th most popular site in the world. We do discuss a lot of Chinese clones or 'mini-innovators,'" noted one blogger at TechRice.com, a Chinese technology blog. "Here, we're happy to highlight Douban as a true example of homegrown innovation."

Duducars

Founded in August 2011, Duducars may be new to the start-up scene, but its ambitions are high. The company is China's first car-sharing service; it's essentially a network of cars for people who need a vehicle anytime and anywhere. "This Zipcar-like service, with its combination of apps and RFID cards to unlock rentable vehicles (owned by the company), looks to be on-course for funding and growth in 2012," noted TechInAsia.com.

Unitedstyles

Unitedstyles, which launched in January 2011 and is based in Beijing, is a fairly disruptive idea: it allows users to create custom woman's apparel by sketching it out, adjusting, and sharing the design with Facebook friends. "When asked who their closest market competitor was," TechCrunch noted, company founder Marc van der Chijs "held that UnitedStyles was "totally new"; "There isn't a lot of innovation in business models in fashion."

8 Securities

Launched in October of last year at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing, 8 Securities is the first online investing tool in Hong Kong. It combines social elements (like tracking your favorite traders) with a trading portal where you can select markets, trading tools, news, and research. "Change does not come until the conventional way of doing things is disrupted for the better… and that is our mission," the company notes.

A Silicon Valley CEO tells how he learned that company values aren't a nice add-on. They're mandatory to holding your business together.

You've got the idea for a company and posess the necessary skills. Maybe you even have money, co-founders and a solid business plan, but one Silicon Valley CEO says there’s one additional, essential ingredient your new company might be missing: values.

You may think of things like mission, values and culture as nebulous but nice additions to the real nitty gritty of entrepreneurship, a distant priority when compared to sound planning and a good grasp of finances. Justin Moore, co-founder and CEO of data backup company Axcient, once thought that way too. When starting an earlier business, he explained in an interview, he thought: "I'll just hire great people and we'll have this cool, fun culture. We'll build this awesome technology and have this great company. Values are touchy-feely things and culture just happens. You hire great people, you have great culture."

Now he's a changed man. Why? "It doesn't work," he said simply of his old approach, explaining that his new thinking makes values central to his business philosophy:

At the end of the day companies are all about people. My passion is to build a market-leading, market-changing billion-dollar company. I’m passionate about building a company that changes the world in some way and it takes having incredible people who do incredible, exceptional things and work really closely together towards a common goal.

In my opinion [values are] the best way to hire really brilliant people and build an organization where you are a collective force, where your value as an organization is three, four, five times the value of the individuals because you work so well together and everyone raises everyone else's game. They are the best weapon that a company has in terms of hiring top talent, retaining top talent and motivating top talent to play to their absolute top ability and therefore succeed as a team, so that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

Moore clearly has strong feelings about values, but even if his passion has convinced you to make them equally fundamental at your company, a central question remains: How to go about actually doing that? With something as subjective and intangible as values, how can entrepreneurs actually ensure that their team shares a common sense of what they're aiming for and how they should behave along the road to that goal? Moore has three main suggestions.

Having a values-driven company doesn't just happen, according to Moore, who suggests that "early on in the company, if you're a single founder or you have multiple founders, get together, put a bunch of stuff on the white board that's important to you and really establish and narrow down clear values, a clear mission and that kind of culture you want to create at the start." And don't even dream of choosing values that you don't firmly believe in as attractive company window dressing. "You are the moral compass as the CEO," says Moore. "If you don’t truly believe them, if those aren’t literally the most important things to you, then people will cue off that because people are very perspective and you undermine the entire value system of a company." Also important according to Moore is focus. Forget a dozen values and keep your list to, at most, five, or no one will remember them (or take you seriously) anyway.

Real values mean you have to make tough choices, and make no mistake, that could come down to canning your star performer if they’re not playing by the company's values. "I don't care how good that person codes or how good a sales person they are, if they're not a team first player, if they don’t operate with integrity, if they don't fit our value system, I’m going to manage them out of the business," insists Moore.

"Reinforce values, culture, and the mission at regular touch points with employees—interview, onboarding, employee reviews, all-hands meetings, all-hands e-mails, on the walls," says Moore. So if you claim to be customer-focused, there should be e-mails going out regularly from the very top of the company congratulating those who live up to this value. Reviews need to reflect how well employees are living up to the team's value. Moore also has regular brown bag lunches with the reports of his direct reports to solicit feedback. He asks them: "How can we improve? What can we do better? What can we do better on culture? How can we improve the product? The ideas that come out of these meetings are amazing," he says.

Making the right hires is also critical to Moore who, despite having around a hundred employees to oversee, interviews every single potential hire. "I strongly believe in companies that are less than a couple hundred employees and not hiring at too crazy a clip that the CEO should interview everybody before they’re hired simply to screen for culture and values," says Moore. He urges interviewers at his company to listen to their gut instinct when it comes to cultural fit and values, and to employ a range of questions from several interviewers to crack the surface gloss of interview polish and uncover a candidate's true beliefs and behavior.

If all of that sounds like a lot of work for something as seemingly nebulous as values, Moore a bit of advice for you: "Remember it's all about the people and you should never be too busy to focus on values and culture."

Your genetic tolerance for risk, coupled with new productivity gains through smart technology, can help your company revolutionize its industry.

Mankind's most innovative, large-scale achievements: building the Pyramids of Egypt and the Panama Canal—even putting a man on the moon—were each accomplished with roughly the same number of people: 100,000. Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon professor who researched these epic projects, makes the observation that 100,000 may well be the practical limit on the number people it was possible to organize, using pre-Internet technology. Von Ahn is fascinated by the question: If we can put a man on the moon with 100,000 people, what can we do with 100 million?

I'm interested in the opposite question: If it took 100,000 people to put a man on the moon 40 years ago, how many would it take today?

The answer is certainly a fraction of that number: Elon Musk's SpaceX company is successfully sending unmanned vehicles into space with fewer than 2,000 employees. And many more of the best-known new companies in the United States today also employ very small staffs. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, notes that the size of the average American company is down from 25 employees to 10 in just 25 years.

Most of the national discussion around the current U.S. recession has focused on the negative impact of this radical increase in productivity: our "jobless recovery." I think this is a pressing issue that industry and government need to address. But there is one simultaneous, positive impact on our society and economy from smaller company sizes that we should also include in that debate:

Scientists study fruit flies to gain rapid learning about genetic traits specifically because they are prolific, inexpensive to maintain, and adapt quickly to change. You could say the same about small companies today. For example: Years ago, two behemoths owned the photography industry, Kodak and Fuji. But innovation in photo sharing has been driven by the dozens of start-ups like Flickr, Ofoto, Photobucket, Picasa, Shutterfly, and now Instagram, that have launched over the past 10 years. Similarly, photo taking has been revolutionized by software and device companies such as Apple, RIM, Nokia, and Sony. It's my contention that rapid product development and market testing of their products and services—something not possible inside most big companies—is what's created the most value for the photo-sharing public over the past decade. And Kodak declared bankruptcy last week.

There are numerous other industry examples, and I'd welcome hearing from readers about their personal experiences. It's my contention that competition among a large number of small teams to solve important problems gives us, collectively, the best shot at getting to a right answer, the best product and the biggest breakthroughs.

It's my contention that competition among a large number of small teams to solve important problems gives us, collectively, the best shot at getting to a right answer, the best product and the biggest breakthroughs.

Astro Teller, who leads New Projects for Google, told a great story to the Mindflash.com staff recently that made this point brilliantly. A university testing incentives to innovation ran an experiment in which students in one pottery class were told their entire semester grade would be based on the quality of their final piece. Students in another class were told that 90 percent of their grade would be total weight of the clay they fired during the semester, and just 10 percent on the quality of their final piece.

The final pieces created by the second group were incomparably better, because those students learned more, went faster and explored more. The takeaway has to be that in an environment where we reward experimentation and reduce or eliminate the risk of failure, we get better outcomes—sooner.

Now, I readily admit that it's one thing to burn through a lot of clay, and another thing entirely to burn through people. The human and economic cost of assembling and dissolving businesses can't be ignored. But for those with the willingness and ability to try, fail and try again, these technology-driven productivity gains are driving each of us the opportunity to create something truly innovative for the benefit of all.

This was recently confirmed for me by a quick tag-cloud analysis I did of the biographies of about 100 of the country's leading technical, political and thought-leaders.The word appearing most frequently in their biographies? Former.

Success, if not handled properly, can lead to the demise of a business. Sustain long-term growth by following these steps.

A funny little thing happens on the road to success. Often the prosperity of the business can outpace the ability of the business to maintain that success. At this point most of you are probably wondering what am I talking about. Rapid success can lead to failure? Get real. But it can. And I have seen it repeatedly in all scales of businesses over the past few years.

How does it happen? Let’s say you bring a product to market. It is received well by the public. They begin to buy. You begin to make money. All is good. You begin to advertise the product more and to different segments. Maybe you even diversify and offer variants of the original goods or services to capture a greater market share. You make more money. You are happier than ever. You spend more on advertising. More money flows in. The cycle continues.

One day you get a disturbing memo from accounting. It seems the business is losing money. Not drastically. Not in leaps and bounds but slowly over time. Even though you are bringing in more money than you ever imagined possible there is a slow bleed causing your expenses to exceed, if ever so slightly, your revenues each month.

Your first reaction is typically one of disbelief and anger. Obviously, accounting has made an error. You explain to them your grand vision, how next month you are rolling out more products and services. How revenue has tripled in one year and will double again next year. The accountant looks at you with that blank stare and says the immutable truth of business and accounting: "Numbers don’t lie."

Often as entrepreneurs we become so focused on bringing the product to market, advertising the product, and selling the same that we fail to grow all aspects of the business in unison. As a result, while the business attains its ever-increasing benchmarks in sales it is growing upon an infrastructure that is not keeping pace with the growth of the business. Flaws in management systems slowly begin to be revealed. Quality control is not in sync with the growth. Eventually a tipping point is reached in which these flaws, caused by the failure of the business to grow its infrastructure at the same rate as sales and advertising, cause the system to collapse.

Don’t think this can really happen? It does, and to some of the biggest companies in the world. Over the past few years we have had dealings with one of the largest hand-held device manufacturers in the world. Since 2000 they rocketed to success riding a wave of innovative technology and cutting edge marketing. They went from being a scrappy start-up to one of the world’s leading hand-held device manufacturers with annual sales tipping the charts in the billions.

However, over the past two years this modern titan has experienced a dramatic fall. Sales have plummeted. Once the industry’s leading innovator, today they are, in large part, viewed as a one-trick pony whose time has come and gone. Their latest products come to market with little fanfare and even less consumer interest. Last year their devices, in large part, stopped working due to some technical glitch which took days, and in some cases, weeks to remedy. They have fallen so far from their lofty perch it is now rumored among the major financial papers that the company may be forced to sell off assets to avoid bankruptcy or face the inevitable later this year. Oh, how they mighty have fallen.

How could this happen to such a juggernaut of technology? Notably, within the course of our dealings with them we noticed a few flaws in their structure that inhibited our ability to effectively communicate with the company. In hindsight, these were symptoms of fatal flaws in an organizational structure that had simply failed to keep pace with the growth of the company.

For instance, for months we attempted to reach their online marketing department through various channels only to have our efforts constantly thwarted. Discussions at certain levels had to go through a bureaucracy which was maddening. Ultimately a deal fell apart that, in our opinion, would have been extremely lucrative for all parties. Why?

The answer did not reveal itself until months later when I was having lunch with the company’s general counsel. In short, he revealed that because their company had grown so large so quickly he did not even know who to call within his own organization to get us to the right people to close our deal. In short, he had no idea who to get on the phone to complete our negotiations. Every time he tried to find out he got passed around from department to department within his own company ultimately with no one offering to take responsibility to speak with us. In short, their structure had failed to keep pace with the growth of their company to the extent that even people within the company could not determine who was in charge of various aspects of the company.

Accordingly, despite a meteoric rise to the top of one of the world’s most competitive industries, the afore referenced company is now in a financial free-fall approaching its eventual demise. What can you learn from all of this? You must grow your organizational structure in proportion to your business. Here’s how:

1. Create a Scalable Management Model

As your business grows you must develop scalable management and quality control systems. In the beginning management and quality control is easy. Perhaps your business begins only as a solo entrepreneurial endeavor or one among just a few people. Everyone has a defined role and everyone knows what everyone else’s role in the company is. Nonetheless, as your business grows and duties become more segmented among new employees, a management structure must be put in place to ensure accountability against established benchmarks as well as to make sure quality control of your goods and services remains constant.

In this regard, each position’s duties and responsibilities should be defined in writing. An organizational chart should be constructed and maintained which clearly defines who is responsible for what, who reports to whom, on what subjects, and how often. If properly segmented over time you will see your organizational structure begin to resemble a pyramid with the CEO on top and increasingly widening rows of persons with specific defined roles thereunder.

2. Define a Quality Control System

As your company grows you must make sure that the quality of your goods or services is maintained despite its increasing size. As such, you must determine what elements should exist in a quality control system and then assign the responsibility of maintaining that quality to someone within your management model.

For instance, let’s say that you run a call center that, in the early days, existed with only a handful of people. At the beginning it was easy to make sure that everyone used the same scripts and delivered the same quality of customer service for your inbound clients. Yet as you grew it became less clear who was in charge of maintaining that level of customer service on the phones and, as a result, a systemic problem has now developed within your organization. Not all of your sales team are using the same scripts. There is inconsistency in call backs of inbound customers. As a result, your sales and margins begin to slip.

To combat this you must create a quality control system to make sure your systems are being performed on a daily basis and assign a manager in your organization to oversee the same. For every business quality control will differ. If you operate a call center those benchmarks may be overall sales as measured against knowledge of the product, responsiveness, etc. For example, a factory may need to make sure that the work being performed by assembly workers is consistent so that each product leaving their station is assembled perfectly, or within measured perfection, every time. But without a quality control system unique to your business the quality of your product will flounder over time.

Once established, a manager or management team must be specifically assigned to oversee the execution of the system. You need to be able to point to one person, or a team if you are large enough, and say that they are responsible and/or accountable for the quality of your company’s goods or services. This structure, like your sales force, advertising, and other segments of your business, should grow at the same rate as the rest of your business.

For instance, let’s say your business originally consists of an assembly factory with 20 workers assembling various parts of your products. Your initial quality control systems can be managed by one full-time manager. If you grow to 40 workers assembling more and more of your products it is reasonable to assume you will now need two quality control supervisors. If you grow to 60 workers you will need three.

Now the actual number will vary for every company. It suffices to say you must know that it has to grow as well alongside your workforce. And within that growth even those added quality control team must have its own division of responsibility with well-defined roles for quality control of the company.

3. Execute the Systems 100 Percent of the Time

Now that you have created a scalable management model with a defined quality control system it’s time to make sure it is executed to perfection.

Each person within the management and quality control team by now should know their respective duties and responsibilities. Even so, you must ensure that those systems and assignments are executed without deviation 100 percent of the time. To this end, especially for small and mid-sized businesses, we have found that it is very effective to use daily and weekly checklists to make sure individuals are performing their assigned tasks in a consistent manner.

For instance, a front-line quality control manager may have a daily checklist of five quality control matters to be reviewed on Monday, seven on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, etc. They are responsible on each of those days for performing those tasks and then recording that they have been completed. The manager above them has his or her own checklist of matters to do which includes checking with the subordinate manager on a daily basis to make sure that they performed all of their assigned tasks. It is a simple system but vital to making sure the systems that are created are executed and executed 100 percent of the time.

The person responsible for executing the front-line systems reports to their manager that they have been completed. That manager then reports to their supervisor that all tasks have, or have not been done as required. If all works properly, we are only speaking about a few minutes out of the top level manager’s day to deal with the reporting of the underlying systems. But it makes sure that all of those systems are running and running to perfection.

4. Listen to the Numbers. Numbers Do Not Lie.

Lastly, even when you set up the systems and grow management and quality control systems in pace with your organization’s growth you must still always be mindful of the numbers. Numbers don’t lie. If used properly, they will tell you where additional oversight or changes are needed within your organization to increase efficiency, sales, and quality.

Returning to our opening discussion, let’s say sales are great. They are growing at an unbelievable pace. Yet your accounting department tells you something is amiss. Something is wrong. Your expenses are outpacing your revenue growth. The numbers don’t lie and they will tell you more about the health of your business than anything else.

So what do you do when the numbers tell a story you don’t like? Use them. Use them to determine what the problem is. Create a system to fix the problem and then assign it to someone to manage and create the internal systems to ensure those systems are run to perfection 100 percent of the time.