Category: leadership

What you do

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Culture is what you do.

It is how you treat people around you, the times you say yes to a request of help, the way you say no to preserve focus, the work you deliver every day, the amount of hours you dedicate to things that nurture your cause, the decisions you make and how you make them, the people you carry with you and those that are never part of it. It is, first and foremost, the journey and not the destination.

Not only.

Culture is what you do when no one is watching.

It’s impossible to fake culture, and so you might be on the wrong track if you regret helping others the very moment you say yes, if you get distracted from new and shiny things that lead you astray, if you surround yourself with people that are like you, think like you and act like you.

And.

Culture is what you do when things are dire.

Most are good sharing when they have plenty, cheering people up when life is wonderful, leading when the cash comes in, giving freedom when there’s not much at stake, asking people to contribute when the decision has already been taken.

Think about this as you go through history and think of examples that well represent and tell your culture. It will make it stronger.

Not a choice

Fabrizio1 Comment

Somebody once told me: “If you don’t tell me you don’t like it, you are the one losing, as I will go on doing it.”

A key takeaway from this article about radical candor, is that it’s not really a choice.

You might refrain from delivering criticism because of kindness, or because you don’t like being criticized in the first place, or perhaps the timing is not right, as everybody is in a hurry, and you’ll get back to it later, when the situation is calmer.

In the meantime people develop habits, that gets consolidated and more difficult to notice and adjust. You get frustrated, nurture a negative narrative about the other person, figure out ways to live with it and postpone the confrontation.

Until it all breaks down. If only..

Time and potential are wasted by not being candid in the first place.

The people you want to change

FabrizioLeave a comment

Some problems would greatly benefit from a more customer centric approach.

One of them is cybersecurity. We all laugh at how silly it is to use “1234” or “p4ssw0rd” as credentials to access any type of service, and we all know we should not use the same password on different websites, or stick the password on our computers. And yet, most people do just that. Because keeping in mind more than a bunch of easy-to-remember passwords is taxing, because not all are aware of password managers softwares (they don’t come preinstalled in your devices), and because even when you install one you realize that the experience is not exactly easy – between syncing across devices, two-factors authentication, master password recovery, and whatnot.

If change in the world is what we seek to achieve, we need to be brutally focused on how the people we want to change go about their routines, what they care about, why they should even bother, and what we can do to actually enhance their lives while change makes it course. Resistance and indifference is the other side of the coin, and in some cases it might mean a whole lot worse consequences than the failure of a business.

People is our most important asset

FabrizioLeave a comment

For founders and start-ups managers, here is a list of things that’s beyond what you should expect of your employees.

Being loyal to your cause.

Being as excited about your cause as you are.

Doing extra work without being paid.

Doing basic work without being paid (fairly).

Being self-motivated.

Doing work without recognition.

Doing work that is beyond the job description you’ve hired them for, or the title you have given them.

Putting up with your lack of vision, planning, communication, transparency.

Participating in every after-work activity for team building.

Interpreting uncertainty and change as a free pass for mean managerial behaviour.

Agreeing to the fact that your busyness is more important than their busyness.

Finding answers to questions you don’t even ask.

Carving their way into career development.

Learning by themselves.

Accept that somebody with more experience will come in at some point and start telling them what to do.

If people is really your most important asset, you could start by having a honest look at this list. Leave your excuses on the side for a moment, and mark the items on which you are failing your employees. Ask how you can do better. And then do it.

Just a story

Fabrizio1 Comment

Somehow we’ve all bought into the story that marketing is about tactics, hacks, posts, optimisation and measurement.

It’s an interesting story, one that somehow feeds both our need to stay ahead of the curve and our tendency to aimlessly complain when things don’t work.

The genius of Google and Facebook as platforms is that they are impossible to master. Can anybody name a company that has developed long term sustainable advantage from the mastery of Google and Facebook? … They have not become tools, they have become taxes that every one needs to pay.

Scott Galloway, PIVOT podcast ep. 188

It’s an interesting story, yet a story nonetheless.

The reality is very different: it’s made of mistakes in the very same metrics we have become accustomed to measure our marketing success by, it’s made of businesses that make money inflating those metrics with no top or bottom line benefit for the advertisers, it’s made of pointless efforts to optimise the unoptimisable while the platform owner brings the whole thing in a totally different direction.

What’s next for marketing is hopefully a reckoning that it’s not the platform, or the channel, or the single tactic, or the brand new hack that builds a meaningful, long-term connection. What’s next is hopefully a return to the lost fundamentals, and an increased awareness that there’s not a single way to reach that person that matters so much. Always start from them and you will win.