.... Digital Clones, Inc.

Venture Integration:
Key to Entrepreneurial Success

A great team comes about by bringing together great skills. But how do you know which skills you need to succeed?

Sure, there are all the "have to have" skills, many of which you will start out by contracting: accountants, lawyers, realty experts and so forth. They need to be there. But they only provide for the legal shell of your organization. What about the working team itself?

You can't get the right skills into the team until you know where in the real world you'll be operating. You can't get the right team together until you really know what business you're going to be in. All of this calls for great powers of observation on the part of the entrepreneur.

As it happens, the classical or standard expression of the scientific method:

  • Observe (gee, what's going on out there?)
  • Hypothesize (perhaps it would be possible to make money by...)
  • Experiment to test the hypothesis

    works just as well in entrepreneurship as it does in the laboratory. That tells you what could be going on in a market, and what you could do to exploit it. Those observations will give you a clue as to the skills you need to bring into your venture.

    But that same methodology will guide you in the formation of every aspect of your new organization. Using well chosen people, you begin to build business processes to draw revenue out of that market. If they don't work, no problem: you take what you learn from that experiment and build it into a new, and hopefully better, process.

    This is our approach to Venture Integration. It's not merely getting all the right pieces in one place. It's about learning how those pieces fit together to create the most effective means of achieving your business objectives in the shortest time possible. You observe your market and your team. You plan on approaching the market with the best your team has to offer. You execute the plan, and bring home the lessons to build another and more successful plan.

    The WorkingTOGETHER Library
    In our investigations of group dynamics and corporate culture we discovered that all forms of group control and production fall into two classes: competitive and collaborative. In other words, many, if not most, working groups are also a context for competition among group members while they are also supposed to be working on common group goals.

    We also uncovered, by contrast, groups where collaboration is the dominant form of group behavior and dynamics. Digital Clones developed a library of MP3 audio programs for download that reveals many details about collaboration in a wide variety contexts. You can go to The WorkingTogether Library to look at the table of contents and download programs of interest.

    • Real Brain Power at Work

    Here are some products that distill many aspects of our approach to superlative business results...

    Optimizing Luck
    Dr. Thomas Meylan and Dr. Terry Teays were both managers at NASA's International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) Project. They believe that their post-NASA experiences in business and in other federal agencies proves that a uniquely powerful culture had formed at IUE. Meylan and Teays tracked down and interviewed all the surviving managers who had a substantial hand initiating the Project, and building it
    into the great organization that it became. The results of these interviews, interpreted through their subsequent leadership experience and research into organizational evolution, are recorded in Optimizing Luck. More here.

    Evolutionary Psychology
    We apply a system-level view to everything. The planet Earth operates on processes that generate an ecosystem. The ecosystem operates on processes that generate human beings. Human beings operate on processes that generate adjustments within the ecosystem, to the point that the means of survival in modern civilization become the features of an artificial and virtual ecosystem that overlays the natural ecosystem.

    If you are building a business, you are building a system to tap wealth from that artificial ecosystem. For very ambitious entrepreneurs, this insight helps them identify their strategic opportunities with great clarity. It helps them identify the best personnel to operationalize their strategies. It further helps them build a work environment that facilitates everyone's efforts to achieve their best performance. These advantages together help them achieve success in vastly shorter time scales than entrepreneurs of lesser capability.

    We have four PDF version papers which document our seminal work in applying evolutionary psychology to industrial psychology. These were originally published in The Quarterly Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. Please download them and share them as you please. More here.

    Facing Challenges
    A critical success factor in any venture is the leader's deeply held sense of personal responsibility for the venture and everyone involved. Yet this is not a common trait. Most people want circumstances to improve, or to have success simply handed to them. Successful people don't wait for externals to improve. They improve themselves to meet the challenges that come with making decisions and being ambitious. While
    Facing Challenges falls more in line with the self-help genre, it's strong emphasis on personal responsibility to achieve personal success has been an inspiration to many high achievers. More here.


    (c)2010 by Thomas Meylan, PhD, All Rights Reserved.
    EvolvingSuccess and LO+FT are registered trademarks of Digital Clones, Inc.
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