John Wooden is famous for saying, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to act on this Yoda-like utterance. That’s why I’ve rephrased it (glancing nervously at the sky, hoping to avoid a lightning bolt) in my own words:

Be decisive, but don’t rush in.

Sports is one of the most popular metaphors for business, along with war. Famous players and coaches can make a mint off of books and speaking engagements. The same holds true for successful generals.

But here’s the funny thing–a lot of ex-athletes and ex-coaches (as well as ex-soldiers) have failed in the business world. Not all of them–just look at the success of guys like Roger Staubach and Magic Johnson, as well as military men like AG Lafley of Proctor & Gamble–but more than the general population of folks with similar advantages (rich, famous, well-connected).

It’s not because athletes or soldiers are unintelligent; many are smart and capable. The problem is that their instincts are ill-suited to business success.

The business world operates on a different time scale than sports or combat. How often do we talk about how fractions of a second separating victory and defeat or life and death? For athletes and soldiers, reflexes and instant aggressive reaction are the keys to winning.

I’ve been in the business world a long time, and even during the era of “Internet time” I cannot recall a single instance where a fraction of a second meant the difference between success or failure.

Be decisive, but don’t rush in. It’s rare that time frames less than a day matter, and unheard of for time frames of less than an hour.

When something happens, take the time to make the right decision.

This is not an excuse for dithering…being decisive and aggressive is incredibly important to business success. But recognize that whether you respond to that proposal in 1 second or 1 hour generally doesn’t impact your options and that you can come up with a much better decision in an hour than you can in a second.

Rather than thinking of business as sport or war, think of it as chess. Every move must have its purpose. Make the right decision.

I often hear people advising young entrepreneurs to “work harder” or “work smarter.”  While this is good advice, neither is the ultimate secret of business success.

Working harder is a good starting point.  There’s no question that all other things being equal, I’ll put my money on the harder worker.  The problem is that many people think that hard work is good in and of itself.  Not true.

I’ve known plenty of “grinds” who beavered away, expending vast quantities of effort, but without getting commensurate results.  At the end of the day, while the gritty, hard-working underdog makes for a nice story, he usually doesn’t win Superbowl MVP.

When folks realize that hard work is insufficient, they usually graduate to the next step: Working smarter.  “Work smarter, not harder” is a time-honored maxim, and yes, it is often effective.

The entrepreneur who builds a better mousetrap is more likely to catch a mouse than the entrepreneur who works hard running from mousehole to mousehole trying to catch rodents with his bare hands.

But people who truly understand success know that working smarter is still a tactic, rather than a strategy.

Those who press on past working harder and working smarter discover the ultimate secret of business success: Working on the right things.

Trying to catch mice is fine, but wouldn’t you rather devote your time to starting a company that changes the world and makes you mind-bogglingly rich than to catching mice?

I’d rather be Steve Jobs than the world’s greatest mousecatcher.  Heck, I’d rather be even a moderately successful entrepreneur like Evan Williams (the founder of Blogger and Twitter) than the world’s greatest mousecatcher.

Focusing on working harder and working smarter begs the question of judgment and prioritization.  It’s the worker-bee mentality: How can I better carry out the wishes of my boss.

When you start asking yourself, “What is the most important thing I can work on,” you’re finally taking on the responsibility of being your own boss.

Don’t go into entrepreneurship, then chain yourself to an invisible boss by focusing on working harder and smarter.

Be your own boss.  Work on the right things.

This week one of the companies that we advise had a major technical meltdown. Their service was offline to all of their customers, and things looked like the outage was going to last for awhile. Within seconds of the outage being detected, the entire company sprang into action. All of the technical folks began working on the issue at hand, marketing began crafting a message for the press and customers, and support handled any of the incoming inquiries. This frenzied effort was wonderful to see and really showed the dedication and skill of the team. The net result of this effort were a shortened downtime, ZERO customer complaints, and a great internal sense of pride on the excellent effort put forth.

This made me think of a memorable quote that every entrepreneur should live by, “It is not important how many times you fall down, it is how many times you get up.” In running your business, you are going to fall down.  Things are going to break, you are going to miss sales numbers, bad things will happen. The key is not to worry about those things. The secret is to adopt/adapt and move forward. You will build a stronger company by overcoming problems more than you could from never experiencing the challenges at all.

Recently we were advising a company that was hiring a new class of sales reps. In the interviewing process, one of the candidates did not fit the profile that was being explored. He didn’t have the experience, education, or general background they were looking for. What he did have was a lot of tenacity and energy. He had done a lot of research on the company and was fervent in his efforts to get the job. We advised giving the guy a shot, and the company hired him.

Unfortunately in this case, the hire is probably not going to work out. His other skills (e.g. written communication skills) seem to be lacking in a manner that keeps him from being successful. In the next few weeks, the sales rep probably is going to be let go.

Even with this failure, we still would advise hiring someone like this again in this exact situation. Being hungry and tenacious are great attributes to inject into a start-up environment. Effort and raw energy often make up for a little less education and employment history. But there are some general warnings to keep in mind when hiring these types of fliers:

• The position being hired should not be 100% mission critical. Your CEO or senior positions should be the only exact fit for which you are looking. One bad sales rep in a class of 3 or 6 will not cripple your company. A bad CEO or VP of Sales will.
• Be ready to cut the person loose. If a person isn’t making the grade, cut him or her loose sooner rather than later.
• Make sure you give him or her the initial training and environment for him or her to be successful. If you cannot support an under-qualified person, think twice about hiring him or her.

If all of these things can be accomplished, finding a diamond in the rough can be a great thing for an emerging company.

One of the toughest things for an entrepreneur to do is to cut ties from something they started. It does not matter if it is a positive severing of involvement (e.g. a personally profitable acquisition) or a bad ending (e.g. closing down a venture because it failed), entrepreneurs alway feel like their ventures are their children.

Unfortunately, these thoughts may be the most destructive of any that an entrepreneur may have. At Wasabi Ventures, we are all parents. We all have children that we love and adore. We would do anything for them and often we wear the rose-colored glasses of parenthood that show everything our children do as wonderful. And as entrepreneurs, we also love and adore our “children”, i.e. our companies.  But these emotions blind us from always doing the smart thing. Turning down a lucrative acquisition offer because we don’t want to see someone else run our creation or changing direction as the company is bleeding cash are both examples of this misguided love.

Luckily, there are solutions to this problem.  Having a great advisory board is probably the best remedy.  These independent mentors and assistants are detached enough from the blood, sweet, and tears of running the company that they can offer clear assistance.  Great advisory board members should be like great friends or relatives who can give you feedback about your children.  Sometimes it takes that independent third party coaxing to choose the correct path.

In startups, just as in basketball, one of the most important qualities to look for in a teammate is “feel for the game.”

I have the (mis)fortune of being a Los Angeles Lakers fan. But one of the joys of being a Lakers fan is getting the chance to watch Luke Walton play basketball. Luke has an incredible feel for the game. Basically, what this means is that he understands the rhythms of the action, and knows how to do the right things at the right time to help his team win, whether it’s rewarding big men who run the break by getting them the ball, or knowing how to space the floor to give Kobe Bryant room to operate.

Because of his feel for the game, Walton is a key player for the Lakers, despite the handicaps of being slow, (relatively) short, and unathletic.

Similarly, some people have a feel for the startup game. They know when to raise money, and when to bootstrap. They can sense the right time to launch a product–not so early as to make a bad impression, not so late as to be a me-too competitor.

Working with someone who has a feel for the game is a joy. Progress can seem effortless, and wins just keep piling up.

On the other hand, working with someone who lacks a feel for the game is frustrating and unproductive. You can’t trust them to do the right thing on their own, and micromanaging them simply produces a time-consuming and unreliable robot.

Feel for the game may not be obvious from a resume–it’s not about going to the right schools or working at the right companies, just as basketball isn’t simply about obvious factors like height and athleticism. But once you’ve worked with someone, you’ll never be in doubt.

Entrepreneurs are often very independent. You generally don’t choose the risks and pains of starting a company unless you’re pretty dead set against having a boss tell you what to do. But don’t let this independence blind you to other perspectives.

I recently worked with a great team of young entrepreneurs. They had done a phenomenal job of building a product that their customers loved, but were having problems figuring out how to sell it to big companies.

Off the top of my head, I ticked off the usual things you need to make an enterprise sale: analyst coverage, trade press, white papers, case studies, etc. They were amazed, because trying to figure out this world had been so difficult for them.

The key to remember is that your hard is another’s easy. Maybe you’re great at programming, but you think “the revenue thing” is a dark and somewhat sinister mystery. To a business guy, it’s a simple matter of selling a product to the same customers that he’s sold to for decades.

That doesn’t mean that the business guy is any smarter or more capable, just that he has different skills and experiences. Remember, to a business guy, extreme programming is what you call it when coders drink Mountain Dew and code while skydiving.

The ideal path is neither the arrogance of believing that what you do is more important, or the cringing self-flagellation of always looking to others for approval. Focus on doing the things that others find hard, but you find easy, and find partners who can do the things that you find hard.