Amen of the week: “So many people told me it was not a good idea to start a restaurant, especially a fast-food restaurant. There was so much wrong with it—it was too spicy; everything was done by hand, from scratch. Everything was wrong. But that’s why customers liked it; it’s different, in the right way. If you have an idea, just go for it. If everybody is telling you that it’s wrong, maybe that’s an indication that it’s an original idea.” - Steve Els, founder of Chipotle (The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/09) If you’ve ever eaten at a Chipotle, chances are you fell in love. Since its IPO in 2006, the company has gone from ~500 to over 2,000 stores, and its stock has gone up over 1
Most of my clients in the early 1990s thought the world was ending. I had just arrived at Merrill Lynch fresh out of college, just as Bill Clinton had arrived in the White House fresh out of Arkansas. My clients thought he was a socialist, especially when his wife started talking about healthcare. America at that time was still licking its wounds from the late 1980's implosions of the stock market, S&L’s, real estate, and emerging markets. No doubt about it: the world was ending. Any reasonable person could tell that. You would have sounded like a moron in 1992 if you had been telling your friends that America’s greatest years of innovation and growth were about to begin. Sound familiar? How
