Tag: change

How are you going to know?

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you cut with a knife, more often than not, you are not risking anything as long as you are cutting something that is familiar and that does not require a particular effort.

Most problems start when you hit a spot that you cannot cut with your normal moves. You turn the knife up and down, apply more pressure, your motion loses fluidity, you get more tired as the difficult spots increase.

That’s when the risk of getting cut is higher, and that’s when you most need to be present and alert.

The same is valid for our lives, both personal and professional. You need to have routines you can relax in, in order to be ready when it’s needed.

If you dedicate your attention to everything and everybody in the same measure, if you consider all the opportunities equally appealing and worth your time, if that particular feeling you feel when something is important is there all the time.

How are you going to know?

Give and receive

FabrizioLeave a comment

It’s easy for most of us to complain about what other people do, the way they treat us, the things they say, sometimes even the thoughts they might have as they interact with us.

But are we as ready to say “thank you!” whenever they do something we actually like?

We shape the behaviour of those around us, and if complaints and criticism is all we give, whether we do that explicitly or not, why should we expect anything different in return?

Futile

FabrizioLeave a comment

You know a person that advocates for recycling, and while driving she uses her phone.

One of your friends works for a non-profit organization, and every time she goes grocery shopping she is happy to pay €0,20 for a plastic bag.

Your boss is a great coach and mentor, and never misses an occasion to express her support for military intervention in the latest geopolitical confrontation.

A colleague of your partner always cracks hilarious jokes when she is over for dinner, and without fail she ends up getting drunk and forgetting huge chunks of the evening.

The CEO of that company that is creating a lot of jobs and who’s paying its fair share of taxes is only motivated by being on the first page of the newspaper and buying the latest model of sportscar.

As we are more and more prone to separate the world into “good” and “bad”, we are forced to pick one slice of someone’s life and let it creep all over their behaviour, motives, reputation, and identity.

“Good” and “Bad” are convenient, but living is much more than that.

If we are not exposed to all the aspects of someone’s life, then putting people into boxes is just a futile activity. And we are never exposed to all the aspects of someone’s life.

Identity

FabrizioLeave a comment

There will always be two ways to build an identity.

The first one is founded on differences and contrasts.

We are different (from them).
Our team is the best performing in the company.
They do not care as much as we do.
When I see them, it makes me want to give my best to beat them.

The second one is founded on unity and commonalities.

We all work to have long lasting impact.
Our teams share the values of transparency and hard work.
We are in this together.
Our organisation wants to be a place in which people of different background can express their best work.

Which one you pick is an active choice, one that needs to be reaffirmed over time, one that you need to be aware of in the first place. So often we slip onto the first option simply because it is the easiest to put into practice. Be intentional.

Valuating

FabrizioLeave a comment

Buzz is a misleading distraction.

More than 9 out of 10 venture capitalists think that unicorns (startups worth more than $1bn in the private market) are overvalued, no matter if they have one in their portfolio or not. Lyft‘s and Uber‘s stocks have lost respectively 43% and 28% of their value since they went public last spring. WeWork (and its investors) thought the company was three or four times more valuable than the higher point public investors would consider for its stock.

Buzz is misleading, because it generally focuses on one single thing. You always get what you reward, and so if all investors care about is valuation, the company can get to a high valuation (at least in the private market). And it is distracting, because it takes focus away from things that are more important when building an organisation that impacts millions of lives. Things such as the company culture, the business fundamentals, the effect of the product or service on society at large.

Companies can be built without raising money, without a pitch deck, and without a title in the front page of the financial newspaper.

It all depends on what you want to achieve in the long term.