In the Business Facet of this Great! All the Time! blog, you will learn in detail the following ideas:

• The concept of Greatness! must drive you to be Great! in business.
• A Great! business leader fulfills the five functions of mentoring, marketing, management, money, and moving on.
• To be Great! in business, everyone in your business must brand, broadcast, attract, connect, relate, serve, Cha-ching!, Cha-ching!, and repeat.
• The P¹⁰ Principle is the best way to set up and run a Great! business, allow the you to fulfill the five functions of a business leader, and allow everyone in your Great! business to enjoy The Overarching Concept of Greatness!

First, let me apologize. This is not going to be a bunch of easily scannable posts. Running your own business takes a lot. Doing “that” sometimes takes reading a dense post or ten. These will be those. Nonetheless, here goes.

Most business blogs (or books or seminars or courses, etc.), including this one, cannot and, therefore, should not be taken as gospel by which to live. To do so is, as Richard D’Aveni, once a professor of strategic management of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said, “to set yourself up for a fall.” There are no absolute, infallible “visionaries” in business or any other human aspects of the world. Ten years after the 18 businesses were qualified as “visionary” by Collins and Porras in Built to Last, half of those businesses have seen big downs following their prior visionary years of ups.

Good business blogs and books do, however, do one thing. They inspire people by showing examples of Greatness!, examples of people who have “done it,” whatever “it” is supposed to have been, or is supposed to be, or might be at some time in the future.

And, if they have done it, then you can do it, too, right? Well, not necessarily. Just because others have, in their circumstances, “done it,” does not necessarily mean you can do it in yours.

Most of the visionary businesses listed in Built to Last, Good to Great, and others were huge and had been built up over scores of years from more humble beginnings. They were selected because they had become visionaries, had survived the pangs of middle age, and shown they were (in their time, in their prime) great; which “Greatness,” defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great, consisted of financial performance several multiples better than market average over a sustained period of the then recent past. Money is, as they say, the way of keeping score.

You, on the other hand, are just starting out, not even sure exactly what your embryonic enterprise, being gestated in your parental womb of entrepreneurial potential, is or will be. But what you do know is, you are tired of being whatever it is you are tired of being and you want to start your own company and you want to be “Great!” in business. And you want to do more than merely perform financially several multiples better than market averages over a sustained period of the future.

And I know how you feel.

I know how you feel, because many times in my life I have felt the same way, but let me tell you what I found out. The vast majority of people, “nine nines (999,999,999) out of a billion (1,000,000,000)” as I call them, fail to achieve the Greatness! they deserve because they define their greatness the wrong way. And while they may achieve what they think they want over the short term, sooner or later they come to realize the greatness they thought they wanted and thought they had is gone because they focused almost exclusively on what money they could take out of their enterprise instead of focusing on what they could do for the other people, places, and things among which they found themselves.

And so, having realized this epiphany, I shifted, as instructed by Covey and others, my paradigm and changed my definition of greatness and came up with my own definition by which to measure myself against the world. A definition by which, regardless of whatever circumstances in which I found myself, I would be able to see myself as a successful person and a definition by which I could honestly and truly call myself “Great! All the time!”

This concept of Greatness! now drives pretty much everything I do and how I do it in my personal, business, legal, health, and financial facets of my life (and pretty much any other facet I have). Focusing on Greatness! helped me learn from my mentors the five functions of a Great! business mentor. Greatness! helped me see the six “Must Do’s” everyone must do in order to be Great! in business. And studying people and companies I thought were Great! at fulfilling those five functions and doing those five Must Do’s led me to develop the P¹⁰ Principle, which I use to own both my own businesses and my own life.

And that is what you can learn by reading this blog. First, you can learn the concept of Greatness! Second, you can learn the five functions fulfilled by a Great! business leader. Third, you can learn the six must do’s you must do be Great! in business. Fourth, you can learn the P¹⁰ Principle is the best way to do what, when, where, and with whom you must do the six must do’s. And, fifth, most importantly, you can learn why it is important to do all this in the first place; before you launch your business; before you invest more of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in your business in a less effective and efficient manner than you should and probably would if you do not use the P¹⁰ Principle.

So, let’s begin with the end in mind and discuss in Part 2 of this Run Your Own Business series of posts just a bit more detail on the concept of Greatness![reminder]Out of curiousity, what type of product or service do you presently think you want to deliver in your own business?[/reminder]