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Foodie fans of fine French cuisine from all over have been known to schedule trips to the Bay Area just to get a table at Berkeley's Chez Panisse . Alice Waters , the celbrated owner of Chez Panisse, started the business back in 1971. She has been honored with the prestigious James Beard Award, a Bon Apetit lifetime achievement award, and most recently accolades from the French Legion of Honor, for her contributions to cuisine . Getting the food right was one challenge. But the bigger challenge was learning how to run a business. Waters shares her Startup Story at CNNMoney , and she says the beginning, as with most startups, was rocky: "In no time I had 50 employees, and I didn't know how to manage any of them," Waters says. "We were open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was too much. We were hemorrhaging money. I had to lay off half of my staff, and we stopped serving breakfast and closed on Sundays." She turned things around, and the business started to make a profit...after eight years. Read How Chez Panisse Began here .

As newspapers continue to struggle to keep afloat, news managers are desperate for ways to respond to a shifting business climate. Mark Briggs advises them to ditch the "command and control" management style, and adopt the mentality of a startup business. Briggs wrote Journalism 2.0 --covering the opportunities for the news media in the digital age--and he blogs at a site of the same name. Inspired by some of Internet entrepreneur Scott Porad 's ( FailBlog.org and I Can Has Cheezburger? ) writing, Briggs came up with with some core ideas for bringing the startup culture into the newsroom. 1. Divide and conquer: Pick 2-3 small teams and give them decision-making authority. In other words, allow them to launch anything the whole team agrees is worth trying. But pick the right people. Remember, there are certain types of people who prefer planning to progress. That’s not who you want. 2. We report, you decide: Use the weekly or monthly meetings that normally serve to seek clearance on new projects as a progress update. So instead of “we’d like your blessing to try this new approach,” the message would be “we are trying this new approach and this is what we’ve seen so far.” 3. Don’t let money stop you: If it’s a service that costs money, don’t waste time traveling up the chain of command to get approval. Either ask the vendor for a free trial (good service providers will be flexible, especially in this climate), or if it’s an online technology, look for an open source solution or find another news organization that will share some code. Read Briggs's full post here .