Impact:
How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams
A guide to building entrepreneurial teams that sustain innovation and drive impact.
The Leadership Chasm
Most leaders today have earned their roles through subject matter expertise, a capacity for impact, and innate leadership skills—the star engineer turned manager or the rising scientist turned lab director. This initially takes leaders far, but team performance ultimately hits a wall when leaders lack team-building expertise.
Entrepreneurial leadership isn’t just about execution—though that’s foundational. It’s also about building high-performing teams that can innovate and adapt over time.
Impact helps leaders build engines of innovation in the behaviors they cultivate and the people they hire, develop, and retain. It is written from the trenches, provides actionable strategies, and presents an end-to-end guide to building entrepreneurial teams.
The Core Framework:
The Aligned Autonomy of Mission Athletes
At the heart of Impact is the synthesis of two powerful principles:
✦ Aligned Autonomy — Autonomy maximizes the brainpower and horsepower applied to innovation and minimizes the forces of soul-crushing bureaucracy. People need autonomy to maximize creativity and ownership, but teams need aligned autonomy to stay mission-driven and focus on impact. Unaligned teams punch in too many directions, and even if what they do is virtuous, their impact is diluted over time.
✦ Mission Athletes — Who you hire, promote, and retain is foundational to team culture and performance. Entrepreneurial teams need mission athletes—people committed to a shared mission and continuous personal and team growth. The best athletes seek feedback, compete against benchmarks, embrace challenges, live by values, and work by principles.
By cultivating aligned autonomy and surrounding yourself with mission athletes, you create a self-reinforcing culture that innovates, adapts, and executes at a high level.
Who This Book is For
✦ Startup founders & executives looking to scale their impact
✦ New leaders who want to grow with confidence and competence
✦ Experienced leaders seeking a fresh approach to team performance
What You’ll Learn
✦ How to use purpose to inspire and align
✦ What values are really for, and which matter most
✦ How to institutionalize mastery across the team
✦ What autonomy really means, and how to unlock it
✦ How to define individual success
✦ How to hire, develop, and retain mission athletes
✦ How to exit team members, with decency and speed
✦ How to avoid the common pitfalls of growing teams
Build It. Protect It. Scale It.
Entrepreneurial success depends on teams that create, innovate, and solve problems—repeatedly and better over time. This book is your guide to making that happen.
Coming in 2025
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