我是如何失败的

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

这篇文章最初出现在LinkedIn上。

When you start out as an entrepreneur, it’s just you and your idea, or you and your co-founder’s and your idea. Then you add customers, and they shape and mold you and that idea until you achieve the fabled “product-market fit.” If you are lucky and diligent, you achieve that fit more than once, reinventing yourself with multiple products and multiple customer segments.

But if you are to succeed in building an enduring company, it has to be about far more than that: it has to be about the team and the institution you create together. As a management team, you aren’t just working for the company; you have to work on the company, shaping it, tuning it, setting the rules that it will live by. And it’s way too easy to give that latter work short shrift.

但是，如果你要成功地建立一个持久的公司，它必须远不止于此：它必须是关于团队和你们共同创建的机构。作为一个管理团队，你不仅仅是为公司工作；你还必须为公司工作，塑造它，调整它，制定它将遵循的规则。而把后一项工作看得很淡是很容易的。

At O’Reilly Media, we’ve built a successful business and have had a big impact on our industry, but looking back at our history, it’s also clear to me how often we’ve failed, and what some of the things are that kept me, my employees, and our company from achieving our full potential. Some of these were failures of vision, some of them were failures of nerve, but most of them were failures in building and cultivating the company culture.

在O'Reilly Media，我们已经建立了一个成功的企业，并对我们的行业产生了很大的影响，但回顾我们的历史，我也清楚地知道，我们经常失败，有哪些事情使我、我的员工和我们的公司无法实现我们的全部潜力。其中有些是愿景的失败，有些是神经的失败，但大多数是建立和培养公司文化的失败。

What do I mean by culture? Atul Gawande summed it up perfectly in his recent New Yorker article Slow Ideas. You have a system and a culture when “X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. ‘You must’ rewards mere compliance. Getting to ‘X is what we do’ means establishing X as the norm.”

我所说的文化是什么意思？阿图尔-加万德（Atul Gawande）在他最近的《纽约客》文章《缓慢的想法》中完美地总结了这一点。当 "X是人们日复一日所做的事情，即使没有人注意，你也有一个系统和一种文化。你必须'奖励单纯的服从。达到'X是我们所做的'意味着将X确立为规范"。

What I got right

我做对了什么

I did a good job setting the guiding star for the com...