On a plane recently, I was listening to an interesting interview with Troy Hazard, President of the Entrepreneur’s Organisation (EO) on the May 2007 edition of Qantas Airline’s “Talking Business” channel.
EO is a self help group founded 20 years ago for entrepreneurs under the age of 40 (this has since been moved to 50) running their own companies having revenues of over US$1M . Total sales of all EO members worldwide is currently more than US$85 Billion. Members of the group include Michael Dell and a variety of other experienced business and entrepreneurship luminaries.
The interesting thing to about Troy’s account of EO was how it provided entrepreneurs and business leaders with a very effective Community of Practice, some 10 or more years before the concept of Communities of Practice gained currency. For example, Troy described how the community has helped him:
I think for me it stopped me from making a lot of mistakes. I can actually pinpoint about a million and a half that I’ve saved over the last ten years in things that I haven’t got wrong because of the information I’ve got from the peers and their experiences around the planet. The ability to be able to send an email out and say, “hey look, I’ve got this problem with this particular issue in my business, I really need a hand with it,” and have 20 and 30 people come back to me and say, “I did that and here’s how I fixed it” or “here’s how I went wrong, don’t do that.” That alone has been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to me.
Troy also discussed learning a number of lessons from participating in the community, including
- “Shut Up and Listen” (i.e. listen to the wealth of other people’s wisdom)
- Cascade “critical numbers” (e.g. 20% of revenues) down to meaningful targets throughout organisational units (as described in Balanced Scorecard)
Consequently, Troy was motivated to help the community that had helped – and still helps – him:
I think that’s probably one of the reasons that I’ve spent so much time in a leadership position with the organisation. It’s because it’s my opportunity to say, I owe it so much. It’s my chance to say, here I’m going to give you a hand and try to grow members and member experiences all over the world
