Author: Fabrizio

Time for a change

Fabrizio1 Comment

You are at a party.

You have been nervous lately at the idea of coming to this party, so while you drive there you rehearse some situations in your mind. You prepare interesting stories, a couple of funny anecdotes, think about how to invite people to your own party next week, and mentally remind faces and names of the people you’ve heard are looking forward to meeting you.

As this happens in your mind, confidence builds and you enter the main room with your chin up high. You walk to the bar, and a guy standing there politely asks: “How are you?”. “Well, thanks. Actually, the most funny thing happened to me this afternoon..”, and you continue for about ten minutes telling your little story.

The nice guy disengages from you to rejoin his friends, and you notice the host a few steps away from you. You approach her and the group she is talking to, and you overhear her sharing that she’d had a problem with her car, and she’d had to walk back home for 10 kilometres, leaving the car on the side of the road. Fortunately, you know everything about cars, so what better chance? “As you describe it, it sounds like a problem with the carburator. I have a list of three things I do weekly to avoid problems with the carburator. First, …”, and you continue with your advises for a perfect carburator maintenance routine for the next five minutes. As the group slowly disperses.

Just after you’ve put something in your stomach (the food is not great, but at least you got to share with some bystanders the story of how you have overcome the challenges of combining work and study, and managed to graduate with distinction), you spot one of the people that you’ve heard wants to meet you. You rush to her with steady steps, and after a quick intro, you invite her to join the party you are giving at your place a week from now. “It’s to celebrate my recent promotion”, you explain, “I am inviting as many people as possible, so that together we can celebrate this unbelievable achievement of mine. Just think I have only been with the company for five months!”.

The party continues, and after the initial confidence, anxiety surfaces once more, as you have the feeling people are trying to avoid you. Why would that be? Did you perhaps choose the wrong stories to tell? Or the wrong words? Is your place too far away from the city center, and people will not join your party for that reason?

You are beaten, and you can’t make sense of what is going on.

Here is how most marketing feels today. Self-centered, obnoxious, bogus and irrelevant. Time for a change?

Clinging is not the answer

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Beliefs are constructs, and so two things can happen.

They can fail you. When you least expect it, when you start thinking at beliefs as reality, when you put a lot of pressure on them, the world will shift and they might not be relevant anymore.

They can change. It takes probably more time than you’d like, a lot of learning, some pain, and yet there is no reason why your beliefs should be the same for all your lifetime. When was the last time you thought Santa would deliver gifts on Christmas Eve?

As this happens, you can either cling to your failing and changing beliefs pretending they are fact (they are not), or you can challenge yourself over and over again to find uncomfortable situations, meet that person you’d never want to meet, learn something out of your field, invite somebody you don’t know very well over for dinner. Make it so this choice is deliberate.

Offer problems

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When leading people, it’s better to be careful about pushing urgencies down the line.

An urgency is always something personal. Something that is urgent for you is rarely urgent for another person, and when you leverage your position of power to get that done, two things happen.

First, the machine gets stuck. The member of your team who is working on your urgency is not being employed for what they were (hopefully) hired for. Instead, they are acting on orders. Value is not added and the organisation has just seen a bottleneck blooming.

Second, energies are drained. The effort put into doing a task one does not understand is more than the one put into a task one owns. Additional mental energy is needed to make sense of the situation, reverse-engineer the decision and figure out if this is the right time to search for a new job.

Rather than urgencies to act upon, offer people problems to solve, and let them come up with their list of actions, people to meet and documents to draft. Give them the tools and let them come up with their story. After all, nobody wants to be a secondary character in a story someone else has drafted.

Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away.

From The Trillion Dollar Coach

Strategy and tactics

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While I was writing Secret Recipes the other day, I noticed I wrote another post a while back on a similar topic and yet with an apparently contrasting message. I now want to try to make better sense of my thoughts around doing.

Secret Recipes is about approaching information in a critical way. I say that 99.9% of the people seeking information online (how-to and step-by-step guides, mainly) will not do anything about it, and that the remaining 0.1%, those who plan to actually implement the recommendations, should factor in the role of context and luck. That is to say, they should not take what they read as immediately applicable to their case.

We know what to do is about the inability to act on what we know. Our hubris often makes us not follow common knowledge because we think we are different, our situation demands it, our idea is better than the millions that have come before it. And this makes us fail even when there’s a pretty consistent agreement out there about how we should have acted.

Secret Recipes suggests to be critical with information, We know what to do seems to suggest the opposite, that is to say to follow the knowledge we gather.

Both are true, and it very much depends if we are talking about strategy or tactics.

We know what to do is about strategy. It’s about the knowledge that multiple generations have gathered around how certain things are done. It’s about rules, frameworks that people have been following before and that have worked. And so other people also followed them, and again they worked.

Of course, sometimes the rules need to be broken. Yet, rather than believing this is the time, with us, here and now, we usually end up much better off if we stick to them. For example, if we start doing marketing by investigating the market and the customer, no matter if our product is so unique everybody will go nuts about it. Or if we are pitching to Guy Kawasaki with a presentation that follows his 10/20/30 rule, no matter how important it is everything we were planning to say.

Secret Recipes, on the other hand, is about tactics. That’s what most of the content nowadays is about, because tactics are usually more nuanced and dependent on the situation. For this reason I believe that being critical is necessary, and the more we act on such tactics anchoring them to the general framework (the strategy), the better.

The role of integrity

Fabrizio1 Comment

There is no such thing a minor lapse of integrity.

Tom Peters

At some point in life, you have to become extremely clear on what you stand for.

It’s not about knowing what you will become, it’s more getting serious about the how. Will you lie? Will you look for shortcuts? Would it be ok to blame a peer for someone you know they did not do, if that would mean getting a promotion? What if tomorrow you wake up with 10,000€ in your bank account due to a favourable mistake? And say you have 10,000€ in your account after saving for 10 years, what would you do with that? If you see somebody in pain, how do you react? If you see somebody in difficulty, how do you react?

We are all capable of giving top-of-mind answers to those and other similar questions, but there are two additional difficulties.

The first is aligning actions with words. Everybody would say they would help somebody in pain, and yet would they if that would be more than an hypothesis? How would they react to actually witnessing somebody in pain?

The second is making the answers absolute. Acting maliciously to get promoted to the role you have been worked for all your life is not more acceptable than acting maliciously to get promoted to a role you do not care about. If the mistake gives you an additional 10,000€, it’s the same as if it would give you 1,000,000€.

When achieving that kind of clarity around the journey, things get a lot easier. And when you maintain clarity even when it is darker, when cheating would be easy, when nobody is watching, then you’ll understand the role of integrity in defining who you are and what your part is in the lives of others.

There is no particular age at which this gets easier, so start today if you haven’t already.