When a group of people get a sailboat to sail to its full potential, such as when you are racing, you have to come together. This is my definition of synergy–the cooperation of two or more people to create something greater than the sum of the individuals.
Back around 1985, Bob Green and I invented host-based email. We were probably two of a few hundred people who came up with the idea of electronic email. At that time, many businesses had computers that employees were logging into every day and those computers were becoming powerful enough to host email applications.
Great businesses combine three critical ingredients:
We were recently in Florida for the American Trucking Association annual conference in Orlando, Florida. After working much of the weekend at the conference, Karalee and I took a day off to explore NASA’s Cape Kennedy. We are both science geeks—after all I asked Karalee out after a Chem 120 lab in our first year at the University of British Columbia.
I wrote in my last blog post Vision, Goals, and Actions about how critical it is to take a time out, create a vision for your company, and then plan the five year, one year, and next quarter plans, complete with measurable key productivity indicators. This post is about those key productivity indicators.