On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.

What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science

Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.

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Running a business is hard.

The below movies are great for a break and can help you remember why you got into business in the first place.

This post was brought to you by Process Street, proces management software for teams. Check out the process manifesto.

Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

“I believe in total immersion, if you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich. You have to unlearn all the thoughts that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts – rich thoughts.”

Wolf of Wall Street is a must-see for individuals who are partaking in new ventures, small-to-medium-sized businesses or even large corporations. The film is based on the true story of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort; a stockbroker who eventually runs a firm that engages in securities fraud and corruption on Wall Street in the 1990s. While Mr. Belfort was taken for fraud and corruption, the story is fantastic: a man who starts out as the lowest on the totem pole rises up and soon makes close to $1 million dollars USD per week. Needless to say, Wolf of Wall Street is packed with motivational pieces and a quick lesson on the do’s and don’ts in business.

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A book about disasters, human error and a simple tool that could well be the answer

Surely we don’t need any more bureaucracy, do we? Writer and surgeon Atul Gawande says yes, in fact we do. Box-checking and form-filling are often seen as the direct opposites of efficiency, but how many skyscrapers just tumble down out of the blue? Not very many, and The Checklist Manifesto explains why. It all comes down to recognizing that checklists are a powerful weapon in the fight against human error. In a series of anecdotes/case studies spanning from Gawande’s familiar operating theater to the secretive world of venture capitalism, the author makes rock-solid arguments in quick succession about why we all need more checklists in our lives. But not just any old checklists…

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Click here to get the interactive checklist

Warren Buffet is known as a god among investors and entrepreneurs. He is currently the 3rd richest person in the world and the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company that owns hundreds of brands including GEICO, Dairy Queen, Heinz and has major investments in American Express, Coca-Cola, and IBM.

Warren Buffet is known for making stellar investment decisions. Putting his money on business fundamentals and long-term success rather than worrying about new fads and market movements.

So, what is the secret to Warren Buffet’s success?

In Robert Hagstrom’s book The Warren Buffett Way, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York, 1994 he reveals a checklist that Warren Buffet uses when making investment decisions.

Obviously, this is a high-level check before due diligence but it’s the first step Warren Buffet takes when making an investment decision. Read it, use it.

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Process Street started in an unexpected place: the beaches of Thailand.

I was 24, had just quit my 6-figure sales job, and was ready to leave the rat race and travel the world.

Just months before taking off, I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek and discovered dropshipping — moving a product directly between a manufacturer and customers without keeping it in your own storage. It wouldn’t require making or storing any product, it wouldn’t require a giant team or a huge investment, and best of all, it wouldn’t require an office.

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The most useful Checklist Manifesto quotes

After publishing the Checklist Manifesto Review and following up with the Checklist Manifesto Summary, I thought it’d be fun to share the most memorable The Checklist Manifesto quotes by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book is packed full of useful knowledge, and not just from the author himself.

He interviews professionals from the man responsible for foolproof checklists given to pilots flying incredibly complex Boeing airplanes to a group of high-powered venture capitalists. All the people in the book have something in common – they want to reduce risk. And Gawande himself, like every human being with a will to survive, is no stranger to risk reduction. For him, however, it’s vitally important.

The Checklist Manifesto is the story of how this simple checklist was made.

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Predictive analytics: a term you may be familiar with if you have even the smallest window into the recent developments in enterprise technology. There is very real hype buzzing around terms that tech startups love to plaster all over their marketing campaigns, such as “artificial intelligence”, “deep learning”, and “blockchain” – but what does it all mean?

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Do you recognize this mission statement?

To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

That’s Google‘s. What about this one?

To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.

Of course, it’s Tesla.

And finally, how about this?

It’s our responsibility to simplify cutting-edge products and continue to progressively promote and future-proof manufactured solutions, all while striving for technical leadership.

I made that one up! Awful, isn’t it? But the thing is, it almost sounds feasible.

Company mission statements can act as strong guidelines that help promote an attitude and culture that works towards your company’s goals. Or, they can mean so little that you might as well have generated them using a joke tool like this.

So, what goes into a great mission statement?

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Uber currently has drivers operating in 633 cities worldwide. From nowhere they have stormed the market and disrupted taxi services globally.

Uber is one of the biggest successes of the sharing economy.

But what is it about Uber that allows for it to dominate the market?

There is of course the convenience of ordering through the app and all the benefits of the product but, as reported in The Richest, one big plus point is the drivers themselves. Consumers prefer them to taxi drivers.

Partly this is down to having an internal rating system to incentivize drivers to provide high quality services. However, to keep standards high Uber qualifies and onboards drivers to prepare them for their task of protecting the Uber brand.

In this Process Street article we’ll look at how Uber does this. We’ll investigate:

• The importance of effective onboarding
• How Uber enters a new market
• The Uber driver application process
• How Uber onboards new drivers

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“FACEBOOK ACQUIRES INSTAGRAM”

“TWITTER ACQUIRES VINE”

“GOOGLE ACQUIRES WAZE”

The biggest acquisitions of the hottest startups are hugely public. But because the most newsworthy acquisitions are the biggest, we’re led to believe those are the only kinds of acquisitions that happen. That’s simply not the case.

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