Tag: change

Dispersing energy

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How much energy do we spend trying to come out on top?

Being the best in our class, in our team, in our company; walking faster than others to try to get a best spot in the queue; paying for something we don’t need with money we don’t have; winning that argument that is draining the energy of our peers; speeding up as the traffic light gets yellow to pass just in time; refreshing the page to buy the tickets first, or to comment on the video first. Is there satisfaction in this? And if so, how long does it last?

How much energy to we spend giving external factors the keys to us being on top?

Wishing our partner would be more loving, our boss more caring, our colleagues more helpful. If only that thing would work out this way. If we could only win one more customer. If only the weather could be good tomorrow. I wish I had 10,000€ more to afford that car. Or some more time to spend with my family. My team won, and I am happy!

I choose to be responsible for my experience. In other words, the weather does not upset me. I upset myself because I am attached to beliefs about the weather. I believe it should be sunny and not cloudy. I am the source of my beliefs, and I am attached to being right about my beliefs, and when the world does not cooperate, I upset myself.

Jim Dethmer, Leading Above the Line

Coming out on top and letting external factors determine what the top looks like are incredibly tiring activities. Most of us live in a constant fight, one in which we have no power (we don’t get to change the weather) and the prize for which is not really something we are looking forward to.

There’s value in coming out second, third, fourth or ninehundredninetyninth. It’s for us to decide.

When things stall

Fabrizio2 Comments

Sometimes you hit a winner.

It might be you have changed something in your routine, or you have worked more smartly and efficiently, or you have hired somebody for your team, or the situation around you changed. And things start to work. You achieve goals, you get praises, you march expedite towards the success you have defined for yourself and your organisation.

And then, it stops.

Just as suddenly as they have started, things stop working. The growth line is flat, goals are far off, the team starts raising questions and demanding change, you feel like you are a fraud and everything you have achieved so far is just a coincidence.

A common thread I found when this happens is the tendency to intensify work. You do more, you ask people around you to do more, you hire more, you grow your operations. And while doing that, you get the chance to do more of what brought you to the initial success: more marketing, more sales, more product development, more everything. Very soon, you (and your organisation) are in a frenzy state, you do not have time to think about what is happening because there’s a new urgency, you become like an unintelligent robot repeating things you did in the past expecting a different outcome. Needless to say, this rarely works.

What tends to work, instead, is taking a break. That does not mean going out of business and start anew. It means sitting with your team, looking at the fundamentals of what you are doing and see what changed. Is it the size? Is it the why? Is it the who? Where in the process did a critical shift happen that was not noticed? Is there anything that is still working? Of course, this is a process that requires awareness and openness, and hopefully you have established such an environment when things were going well (rarely those will spark in dire times). When you are done, you’ll have a new plan, that possibly will require you and your team not to do more, but to do better. Not to find more customers, but to find better customers. Not to hire more people, but to hire better people. Not to do more marketing, but to do better marketing. Not to add more processes and levels, but to act on better practices and experiences.

Be ready, because if you are lucky, you’ll have to go through the process very soon.

A matter of choice

FabrizioLeave a comment

With 2.41 billion monthly active users and its stock trading at the high-end of its 52 weeks rolling average, Facebook is not going to take responsibility for the damages it does to society and democracy. Businesses tend to change when things go bad (we all do, to be honest), and despite some slaps on the wrist for its malpractices, keep your expectations low on the company making it its priority to modify what made them rich.

Regulators and politicians, on the other hand, are late in taking actions to avoid Facebook and others to keep wreaking avock in our communities. The former are chasing a change in society and business that they clearly struggle to understand, and operating at national level they are more concerned with making sure home companies are competitive than with doing what’s longly overdue. The latter, well on all sides they have embraced the platforms using all of the possible subterfuges and tricks they could learn to make themselves more visible, more likeable, more approchable, and eventually more votable.

There’s still a missing part in this picture, and it’s the 2.41 billion monthly active users. That’s us. The ones that use Facebook, the ones that create content for the platform keeping it alive, the ones that endorse their policies and business model whether we like them or not, the ones that cannot leave because, you know, “I have all my pictures there”, or “there’s that group I want to follow”. It’s once again a matter of what is fair and what is convenient. Until we keep choosing convenient, it’s pointless to storm social media channels every time something terrible happens.

A better marketing culture

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If you’ve worked in marketing, you have certainly experienced assembly line marketing.

That feeling all you are doing is repetition, with no real purpose or strategy, focusing on finding new ways to say old things that lost their effect long ago. Nobody really asking how you would go about solving the problem, and when finally somebody does, they also make it very clear that the urgency of the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year does not allow for any approach but the known, trite one.

It is a sad feeling, it’s the reason why marketers have a bad reputation, it is the place where product-focused marketing blooms. Because of course, what else should you talk about when that’s all you know and the next campaign is launching tomorrow among unrealistic expectations?

But in addition to what most of that article suggests, assembly line marketing often starts within the marketing department itself. It might still be due to external pressures, and yet assembly line marketing is a way for marketing heads and leads to keep their people busy, to avoid answering important questions, to give the impression that everyone is working hard, and eventually to keep their job.

There is a huge need for a better marketing culture, for a deeper understanding of what marketing is and can achieve. Real marketing touches hearts and builds relationships, but it takes time to plan, execute and grow. Yet, once it’s established, it cannot be unlearned or abandoned, because it’s the difference between aimless growth and change.

Someone wants it this way

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When looking at organisations, I am often baffled by the amount of damage that gets done in the name of (supposed) harmony.

Considering the number of companies that list innovation among their core values, that should almost never be the case. You cannot be creative and innovate if all you care about is pleasing someone, making sure they feel important, executing on poor plans just for the sake of not making a fuss. Diversity and conflict should be at the core of every enterprise. And while it is important to maintain the conversation civil, by the time we enter the work environment we should all be on the same page: if somebody has a different idea they are not implying they are better than us, neither they are jeopardazing our professional worth.

“We are doing this because someone wants it this way” is a very poor way to serve your organisation.