As an entrepreneur trying to build a business of lasting value, stories of courage and persistence always inspire me.

Here are two quotes from the recent books I have been reading:

From “Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life” by Leonard Mlodinow

“For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like those fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well, they work and they work and they work on it. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go. And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of ordinary. It doesn?t mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they’re trying to find the greatest potentiality of human being?s activity in a certain direction.” Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize Winner

From “Bold Women, Big Ideas: Learning to Play the High-Risk Entrepreneurial Game” by Kay Koplovitz, Peter Israel

“There was one point that December when I thought we were sunk and I wasn’t going to be able to pay the people I owed back salary to. That was the only time I cried. But I never really thought of quitting. I did think we might have to close up shop temporarily and get consulting contracts to support us through. I was afraid we’d lose a lot of steam, though, given the likelihood that our initial team of four would have had to break up to find food money. But I never quite ran out of ideas on how to tackle the latest emergency requirement. Whom to call, another angle to pursue, et cetera. There is a mind-set that’s probably pretty common among entrepreneurs, a flexibility: If you hit a wall, back up and adjust your direction. I guess if you run out of adjustments, then you give up. But the dynamics of keeping alive through adaptations gives us an evolutionary advantage. But then hasn’t it always in human history.” Jill Card, Founder and CEO IBEX

Excerpts from Robert Fritz’s Interview that he graciously agreed to do with me.

Deepa: Could you share with the readers the work you have been doing at Blue Shields, where you have enabled a well motivated change and helped change the underlying structures?

Robert Fritz: We?ve been working with Blue Shields for last four years. First of all, Blue Shield has an amazing visionary as CEO in Bruce Bodaken. He is one of the best CEOs I have ever seen. Funnily enough his background is philosophy but he is a very hard nosed business guy too. He has a good combination of really good common sense and philosophical nature. When I first went to work with Blue Shields, Bruce had just become CEO and at that time it was a 3 billion dollar company, still pretty much a legacy company. A bureaucratic company, where people had been there for years and years and were hard to move. Four years later, at 7 billion dollars, it is the fastest growing health care provider in California. It is a model company of the kind of underlying change that we were talking about, it is outcome oriented rather than problem solving oriented. It trains all of its senior managers. In fact, Bruce Bodaken himself attends training as a student and will sometimes co-lead training. HR is very important in that company. They have a very strong HR leader named Marianne Jackson. We have instituted a number of programmes around training and leadership that have completely turned that company from a very bureaucratic, legacy company to a very flexible, professional and accomplished organization.

To read the entire interview, go
here

• Deepa