The Rebel Rules

The Rebel Rules shows you how you can run a business by being yourself, relying on your vision, instinct, passion and agility to call the shots, stay innovative and maneuver your business like a startup, even if it’s long outgrown its baby pants.

A leader can only be a leader when he or she is guiding others towards something. That something is your vision. But the word vision itself already infers that while this is a goal you can see, it’s still far out of reach. Your best bet, therefore, to make sure you don’t lose anyone along the way, is to keep talking about and describing it, so everyone else looks in the same direction as you.

Your vision is unique to you, so it’s your job to make it accessible to others, or you’ll get very lonely in your quest very fast. Chip says a great way to do this is to come up with your own vocabulary for your business. It’s kind of like a set of inside jokes – something only you and your employees share, which makes you all part of an inner circle.

For example at Disney World, there are no customers, just “guests” and at Joie de Vivre, there’s no service staff, just “hosts.” Use words that describe the values of your vision and you’ll always know whether you and your staff are on the same page.

These words should be simple, because if with a little work, every parent can describe anything to their intelligent, seven-year-old son, you too can make your vision simple for your employees to understand.

Think of what Jack Welch did, when he took over GE: he said “we’re either going to be number one or number two in every industry we’re in – if we can’t be one or two, we’re out.” It doesn’t get much simpler than that, does it?

Another challenge you’ll likely face is getting your instinct to trickle down your organizational chart. If your staff can’t make good gut decisions, you’ll never be able to give them the responsibility they need to treat your customers the best way possible (for example by issuing $100 gift certificates as apologies for mistakes on their own). You want every single member of your staff to think like you, the CEO, in the way they make decisions. A great way to make this happen, according to Chip, is to use rules of thumb. For example, Chip has made a rule to make the company’s finances and decisions in that regard public to all staff. Buffer is a great example of this too, with their Baremetrics public revenue dashboard. One way Chip did this was to explain the…