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Keeping goals aligned and top-of-mind in a startup helps increase the likelihood of success. Too often company-wide goals aren’t understood by team members and aren’t discussed on a regular basis. In addition to common best practices like an LCD scoreboard in the lobby here’s another, most subtle technique: set the personal and shared startup passwords to goals. The idea is that there are a fair number of accounts that need to be shared amongst team members as well as used personally and these can be used to reiterate goals (make sure and change them at least quarterly).

Here are some example startup goals encapsulated in passwords:

• 10NCin2011 (10 New Customers in 2011)
• 500kMRRinQ3 ($500,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue Q3)
• 50SQLinSept (50 Sales Qualified Leads September)

The great thing about this approach is that it forces team members to think about the goals more often, much like the new advertising services that use CAPTCHAs to engage with brands.

What else? What do you think of using startup goals in passwords?

As part of the Dreamforce Executive Summit there was a private lunch with the famous HBS professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen, best known for the book The Innovator’s Dilemma (at Duke I had economics classes with Matt Christensen, Clayton’s son, and remember him to be very sharp). A year ago Clayton Christensen had a stroke and has since gone through rehabilitation to learn how to speak again. His talk was sharp, funny, and insightful.

Here are a few notes from Clayton Christensen’s talk:

• Decentralization is disruptive, and is hard to catch
• Pace of performance improvement outpaces ability to use improvements
• Entrants typically win at disruption
• Disruption generates repeated upside surprise
• Decentralization follows centralization (think about what has happened with computing and how that will happen with healthcare)
• The right product architecture depends upon the basis of competition

Clayton Christensen told great stories, anecdotes, and really drove his point home that innovation is disruptive. The most common story followed the pattern that a big company doesn’t want to compete in a smaller, less profitable market and an upstart figures out how to be successful in the smaller market slowly moving up market until the big company is defeated.

What else? What are your thoughts on Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation?

Pivot entered the startup vernacular a few years ago when Eric Ries popularized it on his blog with Pivot, don’t just jump to a new vision. Previously, I’ve espoused the benefits of iterating and believe it’s important to differentiate between the two. Each term has its place in the startup world and should be used accordingly.

Here’s how I look at pivoting and iterating:

• Pivoting – A wholesale change of the current business model in an attempt to capitalize on a different market opportunity
• Iterating – A minor change of the current business model in an attempt to capitalize on a closely related market opportunity

Pivoting is simply a much more drastic form of iterating. When I talk to entrepreneurs and they tell me how they’ve pivoted recently, most of the time they actually mean iterated. Iterate is something you can roll out quickly and casually. Pivoting is a wholesale change to the business and typically takes much longer to execute.

What else? What do you think of the differentiation between pivoting and iterating?