Integrity In Entrepreneurship

Russell Watanabe hails from Hawaii and has been a successful entrepreneur working with his family business, Watanabe Floral. In this lecture, he describes his business in detail, illustrating how his unique perspectives on the services his business offers has helped to create success.

Russel Watanabe and his flower business is not in the flower business. They are in the business of people express their feelings through flowers. When they realized how to use that as motivation, people really felt understood and their business really took off. They are not in the flower business but the feelings business. How can you change your organization to be about people and not the product?

He goes on to talk about how important values are to building a company. His parents ran the business a certain way and that's what made it successful. If it's not broke, don't fix it, right? Sometimes sticking up for values can hurt you financially. He sees that as a sign of how much integrity they have.

A hard situation they had was whether or not to stay open on Sundays. As part of their values, they want to use Sunday as their day of rest. The hard part is they know that a lot of parties and weddings are held on Sundays so they'll just stay open on major flower holidays. The first year they did that, Valentine's Day was on Sunday. They lost profit. Their sales went down. But they knew that they were where they were because of the blessings from God so they wanted to recognize it by supporting their values. Why do you think sticking up for your values is good? Do you think values are just rules meant to be broken or guidelines to what you think will lead you to be happier?