As I was reading Good to Great by Jim Collins, I internalized something he said about the first step in running a business … figure out who’s going to be on your team first … who’s on the bus and who’s off the bus. Then, determine the goals, strategy, direction, or what have you. This way, if you have the right people upfront, everyone will be further motivated by who’s on the bus and not so dependent on where the bus is going. Some people might not even care where the bus is going because the people on the bus so worth being with! He mentioned that some CEOs (like the Wells Fargo one) just hired outstanding people whenever and wherever they found them, often without any specific job in mind.
1) the right people 
2) the right direction 
This made me think of the recurring CPT group vision, to run some sort of restaurant or business with friends. Or sometimes we aspire to buy houses all on the same block, haha. Every so often, someone will say, okay all we have to do is think of an idea. So this is when I recognized that, maybe we need to step back and figure out … who’s going on the bus, first. Or at least who’s going to be in the first batch of people to board? Who’s really interested in something like this?
But does it have to be in this order? What if we get the idea first? If that happened, I could see it working out fine. In the non-ideal case, the idea could force choosing the wrong people because we’d naturally ask … who do we need to make this idea successful? We may forget to balance that with the question who do we want on the bus? So worst case, you’d have a low energy group who’s just waiting to get to the destination … and not enjoying the journey together.
so figure out the who before the what.
