Business Half-Truth #2: Look after your employees first. I’ve seen too many turn this into making customers a distant second (or third). Yes, team is important. And if you treat your team as an investment, rather than a cost, then your business should reap rewards. But “employees first” works well ONLY IF you have a culture that’s obsessive about creating value for your customers (and in my books, the community as well), or if there’s a unifying vision or purpose about creating…

Entrepreneurship and business become noble when you’re doing it to improve the lot of those around you, not just yourself. I love this from Nassim Taleb. “Some people take risks and some people labor in the fields. You have the option of doing either one or the other. But my point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risks for the sake of others, period.” The best business owners I’ve known are those that get this intimately. They may…

There is still a face-off between Purpose and Profit in much of the business press these days. This is counterproductive. If we’re looking at businesses (not charities), then they need profit to achieve their purpose. Having a more than bucketload of purpose and less than a thimbleful of profit is a guaranteed way to ensure your purpose is either denied, or short-lived. Businesses (and capitalism) shouldn’t be driven by profit maximisation. Profit is a means to an end, not the ends itself.…

I’m all about the team and the culture. That, to me, is what differentiates businesses, what makes some great, others mediocre, and yet others appalling. But that greatness doesn’t happen without sales, without revenue, without cash and without profit. Sales, profit, revenue and cash are like oxygen. Oxygen doesn’t make us special – what makes us who we are is our interests, our values, our experiences. But without oxygen, all of those would be irrelevant – we wouldn’t even…

I’m always astonished by how many people decide to park their sense of humour outside the office. Work is a serious business. Or rather, work delivers serious results. But we don’t have to be over-serious in the process of getting there. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of work scenarios that wouldn’t be better if humour was injected into them. And probably the fingers of a chicken at that.

I read Tim Ferriss’s 4 hour work week probably a decade ago, and met him when he came to do a reading in London not long after. It was a great book, which had a real impact on my life, including my wife and I taking our 4 kids out of school to travel around Latin America for 6 months. As a guide to creating a lifestyle income, I think it’s up there with the best. The challenge is that many people have taken that book to be a guide for creating a scalable business. It really isn’t…

I’ve worked in places where making the numbers right on a spreadsheet meant playing with people’s lives. I’ve also worked in places where supporting people’s lives made the numbers right on the spreadsheet. If you run a business, it’s your choice which way you want to go. It’s your choice what you make the priority. But I’ve always found that putting people first is not only the more human way to run a business, but also the only sustainable one.