1. Don’t take risks in 2010. This is a year when you should be cautious. Focus on relentless execution instead.
2. Focus on what you can influence, which always begins as something small but gets bigger as time goes on. Don’t focus on what interests you.
3. Align, align, align: value is created when people are aligned in a common pursuit. The old “I win, you lose” no longer works in a network-oriented, highly-connected world. The people and companies that are winning are organising the economics of the ecosystems in which they operate.
4. Play to your strengths – you can only create an “unfair advantage” by doing something you’re good at that you love. If the timing is right, you can build significant value. If you’re a “big” company, you should use your strengths to provide scale to smaller innovative companies. Provide reach and distribution capability to the young firms that are innovating – don’t try to innovate yourself.
5. Unleash the momentum of the individual. Iqbal Quadir, founder of GrameenPhone and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Legatum Centre, says: “Aid to governments has empowered authorities and not necessarily citizens. Mobile phones, the internet and similar technologies that empower the individual turn that on its head, and shift the power to the individual – making individual capitalism the force for prosperity and democracy in the 21st Century.”
6. Stay hungry, stay foolish and remember you’re going to die. As Steve Jobs wrote in a Commencement Address to Stanford University in June 2005:?“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.... Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”
Julie Meyer is chief executive of Ariadne Capital and a Dragon on the BBC’s Online Dragons’ Den.
