Launching A Business That Can Learn And Grow There are three templates to starting a business. Get this first step right, and success will fall into place.

"One reason that America continues to do so well as a market," an economist explained to the audience at a recent conference, "is that they are still leading the charge to do new things. In addition to pioneering new products, they are still pushing the boundaries of frontiers like space-travel and technology. They don't merely copy the products made in other countries. They make and do entirely new things, and that matters.

"By contrast," he explained, "many of the older economies, like Europe, are just "kicking the can down the road'. They don't really have a vision for the future. They're just trying to maintain what is, to survive a little longer."

Grow or shrink

Companies, countries and entire economies are all broadly following one of these two approaches. One is the bold, growth option, while the other is only about maintaining what already exists. The trouble with maintaining, however, is that, in a dynamic system, you tend to be either growing or shrinking. A dynamic system rarely tolerates anything simply standing still. To stand still is, often, to shrink.

Once in a lifetime chance

Your company, team or organisation's founding moment is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this one right. Are you simply going to kick the can down the road? Or do you want to build spaceships? Are you going to be a soulless "also played'? Or would you prefer to do something new and meaningful? Mission matters greatly.

In Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper than Yours (and what to do about it), Salim Ismail calls it a "Massive Transformative Purpose'. The stronger your purpose, the more you attract tribes of people, both as aspiring employees and as a supporting community of customers.

This is not to say that you are obliged to invent something brand new and original. A good deal of research is showing that pioneers in a new industry do not tend to do as well, or last as long, as the "settlers' who come after them. One reason is that the pioneers have to make all the initial mistakes. The settlers get to enjoy greater leverage, by observing what has already worked or failed, then capitalising on that learning.

The idea of founding a company that thrives on meaning has more to do with how meaningful the work is,
and how much of a drive to achieve goals is built into your corporation.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is certainly not the pioneering organisation in space-travel. We have left earth's atmosphere before, decades ago. In that sense, SpaceX is a settler, and not a pioneer. That said, it is nevertheless a strongly goal-oriented, purpose-driven organisation. You don't have to invent something entirely new to create a mission-driven company.

The Israeli Defense Forces is highly mission-driven, because it has to be. Pixar is mission driven, because it chooses to be, and because it believes in magic.

Being mission-driven, from the top to the bottom of an organisation, changes the energy. It converts "mere work' into "shared purpose'.

Which blueprint?

Sociologist James Baron and his group of experts led a study in the mid-90s looking at how people founded their companies, across a wide spectrum of industries, including hardware, software, medical devices, research and manufacturing.

The study asked about their original blueprints. What organisational models did they have in mind when they started?

Baron determined that there were three templates for starting a business. You might start your company based on:

• A Professional blueprint, in which you hire people with a preference for specific skills (prior to its fall from grace, Kodak hired people based on specific educational qualifications)
• A Star blueprint, in which you hire "superstars' based on future potential, placing a premium on choosing or poaching the brightest hires. You look for raw potential, not current knowledge
• A Commitment blueprint, in which you believe that skills are nice, but cultural fit and buy-in to shared values is more important. You build strong bonds to the company. Employees tend to be passionate about the mission.

Baron and his experts tracked the firms through the 1990s and into the next decade. Those that used the Commitment blueprint, which prioritises a shared sense of mission and values, greatly outperformed the others. The failure rate for firms with a Commitment blueprint was zero.

Failure rates were substantial for the Star blueprint, and more than three times worse for the Professional blueprint. It seems these approaches don't keep people going in the same way that buy-in to a mission does.

Nevertheless, the Professional blueprint, which prioritises the specific skills on people's CVs, tended to be the most common.

There were two other rare blueprints: Autocracies and bureaucracies, focusing on detailed rules and procedures. These blueprints were the most likely to fail, and autocratic was most likely to fail out of the two.

This is an important point: Rules-based organisations and dictatorships, according to this finding, are so likely to fail that investing in them is not worthwhile. But where a culture of people is part of a mission, they are most likely to succeed. Translation: Autocracy rarely ever works, and systems of intense rules and guidelines work slightly less badly.

• Rules and dictatorships = likely to fail.
• Mission-driven culture = 100% success rate.

Most real-world autocrats would probably agree with this finding, if they heard it. Then they would continue to run their business as autocrats, because, they'd say, "My situation is different, I happen to be right, and people should do what I say."

When you're an autocrat, it's hard to know that you're an autocrat. When you create your business to follow a mission from the word go, and you allow a degree of genuine democracy in which others can outvote you for the good of the mission, you instil the possibility of overcoming this blind spot, sometimes in spite of yourself.

But wait

Now, here's the kicker: The Commitment culture is extremely effective in starting an organisation and ensuring its initial survival. But over time, the same study found, it is not the best performer.

The challenge is that when organisations mature, encouraging layer upon layer of like-minded people tends to discourage innovation and original thinking. Too much shared value = groupthink.

So, what's our total moral? In a best-case scenario, we need to start with a common mission and committed people, and focus on growing. Once we've matured, we need to make a point of bringing in diverse thought, in order to avoid too much homogeneous thinking and yes-mannery.

In Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant shows how these findings map perfectly onto the rise and fall of Polaroid. Like-mindedness worked well to get the brand going initially, but then, ultimately, the same like-mindedness prevented them from learning, growing, changing and adapting in a volatile market.

Like the IDF, they had a strong sense of shared purpose. But unlike the IDF, they were incapable of a belief system that said "the only tradition is that we have no traditions'. They were not a learning and growing organisation.

The more a company develops a culture, the more it will tend to hire for that culture, and the more resistant its own people will be to new ideas or contrary views.

So what if…?

What if you decided to be an organisation on an important mission, rather than merely a group of people kicking the can down the road?