Summary

When he was 26, Chip Conley broke the two cardinal rules of starting a business: he invested in an industry about which he knew nothing and he ignored the mantra "location, location, location." He bought a notorious "pay-by-the-hour" motel in a seedy San Francisco neighborhood.A dozen years later, Chip is the "boy wonder" of the American travel industry, famous for his entrepreneurial genius, creativity, and sense of fun.InThe Rebel Rules,Conley shares his success secrets. He focuses on the primary traits -- vision, passion, instinct, and agility -- that characterize today's fast company leaders. His guidebook doubles as a toolbox for anyone -- whether a virgin entrepreneur or a corporate manager -- who wants to walk in step with today's business innovators.The Rebel Ruleswill show you how to:Tap into your natural talents and focus on what you can controlBuild a fanatical customer base and create great buzzEngage employees and encourage them to break the rulesKick butt in business and still have a lifeWith exercises and activities that will develop these and other business skills,The Rebel Ruleswill transform the way you approach your career.

Author Biography

Chip Conley is the founder and owner of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a management company that operates twenty-five diverse businesses. With an MBA from Stanford Business School, he lives in San Francisco.

Contents

FOREWORD by Richard Branson

I. INTRODUCTION
The New Rules of Business
Rebels Rule with Courage and Authenticity

II. FEELING EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD AGAIN AND ACTING LIKE IT
1. Getting in Touch with Your "Inner Rebel"
Are You a Rebel?
Finding Your Glass Slipper
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Richard Branson
Thinking of Your Life as a Novel
Reconnecting with Your Childhood Passions
How You Bucked the Norm: An Exercise
How to Create Your Own Personal Mission Statement
Learning from Your Job History
The Frustrations Table: How to Bring About Personal Change
2. What It Takes to Be a Rebel
Putting Your Whole Body into It
Eyes Represent Vision
Heart Represents Passion
How to Make Sure You're Not a Jerk
Gut Represents Instincts
Feet Represent Agility
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Steve Jobs
The Thirty-two Traits of Successful Rebels: How to Identify Your Own Unique Imprint
Form Good Habits and Become Their Slave
How to Use Your Past to Guide Your Future
3. What Do You Stand For?
Your Conviction Oven
Integrating Your Values into the Workplace
How to Create a Values Inventory for Your Company
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Anita Roddick
Creating Your Company's Core Values
Identifying Misalignments in Your Company
Core Values Create Company Value
Finding Meaning in What You Do

III. CREATING A REBEL REVOLUTION: THE FOUR TRAITS OF GROUNDBREAKING LEADERS AND COMPANIES
4. Birthing a Rebel Company
Chip's Story
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Nick Graham
How to Write a Foolproof Business Plan
How to Create Your Own Business Model
The Ten Questions Any Entrepreneur Should Ask Himself Before Getting into a New Business
5. Communicating Your Vision
The Visual Vision
How to Create Your Own Visual Icon
The Verbal Vision
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Howard Schultz
The Aspirational Vision
6. Creating a Passionate Culture
How to Figure Out Your Employees' Priorities
Creating a King or Queen of Corporate Culture
Developing Your Own Cultural Program
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Herb Kelleher
7. Building Corporate Instinct
Open-Book Management
The "Hunch Knack" Wins the Game
Using Dashboards to Spread the Message
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Michael Dell
Leaders Are Learners Who Teach
How to Create a Smart Company
Creating Your Own Corporate University
The Importance of Sharing Knowledge
8. Promoting Fast Footwork: The Agile Company
Inspiring Innovation in Your People
Creating a Fast and Flexible Company
Getting People to Embrace Change
How Rebel Companies Make Whoopee
How to Create Change
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Dee Hock
Seven Tips for Improving Your Company's Agility

IV. BECOMING A MAGNET FOR GOOD PEOPLE
9. Recruiting and Coaching Rebels
Creating the Right Mix: Identifying Your Recruitment Needs
Hiring Tips for the Harried Rebel
How to Become the Boss You Always Wished You'd Had
How to Interview Your Potential Employer
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: John (Jack) Welch, Jr.
Inspiring Heroic Performance
10. Collaborating with Young Talent
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Master P (Percy Miller)
Boomers Versus Xers
Learning to Xercise
How to Create a Joint Commitment
11. Managing Diversity Like a Potluck
Diversity Goes Beneath the Skin
Creating a Diversity Audit
Creating a Work Climate Survey
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Oprah Winfrey
Diversity Is Created One Person at a Time
One Last Story

V. BUILDING A REBEL REPUTATION IN THE WORLD
12. Customer Service: Employees as Entrepreneurs
Empowering Extraordinary Service
Appreciating Your Frontline Service Personnel
How Your Staff Can Calculate the Lifetime Value of a Customer
Determining Your Customers' Moments of Truth
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: George Zimmer
Engaging Your Customers in the Service Strategy
Treat 'em Like Royalty -- You'll Be Rewarded with Loyalty
Seven Tips That Will Make Your Company a Service Leader
13. Creating Brand, Building Buzz
Making an Emotional Connection with Your Customers
Permission Marketing: Getting the Green Light from Your Customers
Viral Marketing: Turning Your Customers into Foot Soldiers
Buzz: The Collision of Culture and Commerce
The Power of the Media -- Both Old and New
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Ian Schrager
How to Write a Killer Press Release
Get Busy Buzzing

VI. THE RISKS OF BEING A REBEL
14. The Most Common Challenges Facing Rebel Companies
A Tool for Understanding Your "Company DNA"
The Ten Perils of Rebel Companies
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Martha Stewart
How to Get Rich Quick
15. Being a Rebel in a Big Company
The History of Heretics
Getting Rid of Fear
Developing a Sponsor
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Charles Schwab
How Big Companies Can Encourage Rebels
Thinking Like a Venture Capitalist
How to Make Big Feel Small
Five Tips for Inviting Rebel Behavior to the Corporate Boardroom
16. Rebel Without a Pause
Are You on the Path to Burnout?
How to Avert Burnout in Your Company
"My Life Is My Message"
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Frying
Business Rebel Hall of Fame Profile: Ted Turner
My Cure for Burnout

WORK CLIMATE SURVEY (Sample)

REBELS' RESULTS AND RELATIONSHIPS GRID PRESCRIPTIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Introduction: The New Rules of Business

With unsettling speed, two powerful forces are

converging: a new generation of leaders is coming to

power in the business world, and a group of "fast

companies" is rewriting the rules of doing business

around the world. The result: a revolution as far-reaching

as the Industrial Revolution 100 years ago.

--Fast Companymagazine

A generation ago, rebels staged sit-ins and set their bras aflame. Today rebels create start-ups and light their companies on fire. We live in a time of rapid change. Today's business leaders do not try to anticipate the future. They create it. The ones who build the right model become billionaires.

A changing world demands daring, break-all-the-rules leaders. The Industrial Revolution took nearly a half-century to mature and was based upon increasing "muscle power" by forty- or fiftyfold. Today's digital revolution is happening virtually overnight and in magnitudes of a millionfold. The effect of this change is pervasive. We're all touched by it.

Maybe that's why rebel entrepreneurs have become the world's business folk heroes: they are a barometer to our brighter future. Personified by pop icons like Richard Branson, today's business success stories are high-profile rebels, authentic and courageous initiators of change. Their companies are a direct extension of who they are. Ironically, these nonconformists provide us comfort and hope: be yourself and you'll be a success. Never before has the business world experienced such a universal quest for originality and such a disdain for the status quo. AsBOBOS in Paradiseauthor David Brooks writes, "It's Lucent Technologies that adopted the slogan 'Born to Be Wild.' It's Burger King that tells America, 'Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules.'"

REBELS RULE WITH COURAGE AND AUTHENTICITY

The day I began writing this book, I found under my computer monitor an old postcard of James Dean, a forty-year-old poster child for disaffection, apathy, and danger. James Dean: the "rebel without a cause."

For me, though, the business rebel succeeds because of an obsessionwitha cause. While many shaggy new business leaders of this digital era may look like a James Dean character or sport a disaffected-youth image, their impatience and determination are fueled by a contrarian concept or cause -- often a simple desire to beat the big guys.

While the money being made on stock options are the gravy, what inspires these rebels isn't usually money. It's the need to prove themselves, the sense of mission in their product or concept, the desire to experiment, and their love of the work itself. Today's Internet generation has learned that there is no better place to make an impact than in the business world.

Professor Frank Farley at Temple University calls these rebels the "Type-T Personality," those thrill-seekers who are willing to take risks to test their limits. They're drawn to challenges, paradoxes, and new ideas. They break rules, resist authority, and can't stand calm. They're some of our best-known entrepreneurs -- and some of our most feared sociopaths. How can you tell the difference?

The litmus test for rebels is whether they are courageous and authentic, whether they stand their ground against the voice of conventional wisdom. Like Bob Pittman, president of America Online, who helped create MTV at a time when everyone said, "Music is meant to be heard, not seen." Or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who while barely of legal drinking age founded the modern version of the personal computer after the experts at Xerox said there wasn't a market for such a contraption. Like Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, rebels wear their values on their sleeves and use their companies as a vehicle for change.

Rebels stage revolutions, internally and externally. The greatest rebels are those who have completely changed their industry. They don't stop at challenging the status quo, they break the mold. Sam Walton did this in retail. Jeff Bezos did this with e-commerce. Martha Stewart's done it with brand identity.

The successful rebels are those who can capture the minds and spirits of their organization and leverage that "intellectual capital" into a sustainable force to be reckoned with. Rebel companies can't just be judged by their balance sheets. Today's new math requires that intangible assets, such as capacity for learning, networking prowess, and brand reputation be virtually as relevant as the warehouses and equipment. Competition today is about how much innovation an organization creates, not about how many factories it builds.

The old-school behemoth companies that have fallen asleep at the wheel (I call them "Rip van Rockefellers") enter the new millennium with RIP chiseled on their corporate forehead. Why didn't Maxwell House create Starbucks (as my friend Seth Godin ponders)? Or why did it take so long for Merrill Lynch and other traditional brokerage companies to jump on the online trading bandwagon (yet Charles Schwab was able to make the leap quite early)? Success handcuffs yesterday's champions as they tinker with yesterday's successful business model. Newcomers have an advantage in today's rebellious marketplace as they're willing to scrap the old model for something improved.

What makes this particular time unique is the confluence of factors that have thrust rebels into the limelight. The corporate reengineering and downsizing of the early 1990s forced middle managers to rethink their concept of job security. The net result: For every job wiped out at a major company in the mid-1990s, 1.5 jobs sprang up in its place, mostly in small firms. By 1995, only 10 percent of all American jobs existed inFortune500 companies, a group that accounted for 20 percent of all jobs thirty years earlier. And with the proliferation of personal computers and the emergence of the Internet, anyone with an extra bedroom can create their world headquarters at home. For the first time, the playing field had been leveled for David and Goliath.

I learned my own Rebel Rumba when I started my company at twenty-six. I broke the two cardinal rules for starting a business: pick something you know and think location, location, location. I had no experience in the hospitality industry, and my first two key decisions were picking an unpronounceable name (Joie de Vivre) and purchasing a bankrupt "no-tell motel" in the wrong part of town. My friends called me "Mr. Bad Ass-ets."

Joie de Vivre Hospitality has grown into one of the largest hospitality companies on the West Coast, with twenty-five businesses under its umbrella and annual sales exceeding $50 million. Fortunately, our mission ("creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of life") helped us find the enthusiasm to overcome many of the classic obstacles a young rebel entrepreneur encounters.

Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaker, winemaker, hotelier, and rebel through and through, said, "Everything I love has in one way or another become a business for me." This was a guiding inspiration for me as I grew a company that challenged the status quo. I followed my heart creating projects that hadn't been done before -- hospitality businesses that would attract a guy like me as a customer. While my goal wasn't intentionally to shake up a stodgy industry, the result of my company's creative endeavors was to force my elder hotelier peers into a little professional soul-searching.

Joie de Vivre is a classic rebel company, an "incubator for entrepreneurs." My greatest challenge has been translating my passion for calculated risk-taking to the employees who operate our hotels, motels, resorts, campgrounds, restaurants, bars, and day spas. The common thread throughout is creating products and an atmosphere that fosterjoie de vivre.

Virgin has taken a similar eclectic approach globally -- with airlines, colas, record stores, and even bridal shops -- all with that quirky and fun sensibility that defines the brand. Fortunately, Joie de Vivre's odd business strategy has succeeded, as we were recently named San Francisco's "Emerging Growth Company of the Year" -- no mean feat in a community brimming with prosperous Internet start-ups that could just have easily won the award.

The Rebel Rulesis your wake-up call -- a personal handbook to help transform you into a groundbreaking leader in whatever you do and to give you another way to look at the traditional business model -- whether you're a young hipster in a start-up or a middle-aged manager in a multinational conglomerate. Those of us who continue to use the old rule book are going to be left behind. Though the world may seem increasingly out of control,The Rebel Rulesfocuses on what youcancontrol: your own habits and aptitudes.

My purpose is to help you capitalize on your own natural talents by showing how other rebels have flourished using theirs. There is no right kind of rebel. Ross Perot has little in common with Master P other than the fact that they've both revolutionized their industries. It isn't enough to dare to be different. You need to dare to be yourself. Hopefully,The Rebel Ruleswill provide you the philosophy, attitude, and strategies you need to find your own path.

The entrepreneur starting a business will learn valuable lessons and hear straight talk from people who've learned from the school of hard knocks. The corporate manager will learn how America's largest companies have realized you have to "think small to grow big" and how they're dramatically altering their rules to encourage rebellious behavior because otherwise they'll be "Amazoned" or "eToyed" to death (challenged by an Internet start-up such as occurred to Barnes & Noble and Toys "R" Us).

The rebel working for a nonprofit or in the government will see why the principles in this book apply universally to anyone who wants to create a humane and empowered workplace. Today nearly every organization is becoming more rebellious, helping their people recycle themselves as entrepreneurs.

Being a rebel is like sipping from the fountain of youth -- you're infused with irrepressible enthusiasm and boundless energy for your mission. Ideally, your chosen work is a natural extension of you. One of the best compliments I ever received was when someone told me they could see my "messy, unique fingerprints all over the product." Work should be like grown-up fingerpainting.The Rebel Ruleswill help turn your fingerpainting into a successful, unique business model. Your legacy isn't just the company you've built. It's the business model you've created and taught your people.

Excerpted from The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business by Chip Conley
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