How to win in business?

I have a simple idea.  To be successful, at anything, you have to go in the same direction for a long time.  So to win in business you have to be in business for a long time.

To stay in business for a long time, you need to keep a team together for a long time too!

That's where it gets dicey.  In our culture, to stay married for a long time is only a 50/50 proposition.  This has been true within my extended family, so how in the world do you accomplish this with people who aren't even tied to one another with a commitment.

How do you have an enduring team?  How do they handle the rough spots.  The friction that occurs when people are together for a long time.  How do they deal with peoples imperfections?  After all no one's perfect, and if no one is perfect, then everyone will offend each other sometime.

I think I know one answer.  It's my answer, and its probably not the only one, but my answer has been by humility.  I think other people's answers could be a great exciting idea.  A new technology that is growing so much that opportunity abounds.  But I started a business installing toilets!  People had been installing toilets for over a hundred years when I showed up and thought, maybe I can do this better.  What arrogance on my part to think I could improve on what others had been competing to do for a hundred years.  But that is exactly what I did.

I found that a team of people is really hard to have.  But everyone else I was competing with, also had this same hard problem.  They had to use people too.  And that is where I found the opportunity.  The opportunity to have a team working together well starts with leading with humility!

So what is humility?  That's a great question.