Tag: entrepreneurship

Who are they serving?

FabrizioLeave a comment

Is your team serving a bigger purpose – the organisation and its values, the customer and their ambitions, the broader community and its needs?

Or is your team serving you?

Some questions to find out.

How often do you get pushback on your ideas?

What happens in meetings when you start talking?

How different do the solutions that get to you look like?

When is the last time you heard about a dissatisfaction?

If you don’t have time to review, are things delivered nonetheless?

Honest answers to these questions have the potential to make a huge difference.

Bans and productivity

FabrizioLeave a comment

Is the workplace the best place to discuss societal and political issues? No.

Should societal and political discussions be banned from the workplace? Also, no.

The problem with a ban is that it rarely hits where it aims. You might want to curb animated discussions on your internal tools and you end up making your people feel less comfortable expressing themselves.

We do live in challenging times. Most issues are polarized. Most fail to see the greys. Most feel the only possibility is to be fully in or fully out. And if your people want to talk about a delicate issue, your role as a leader is not to direct the conversation towards the appropriate forums, but rather to sit down with them and provide a safe forum for the discussion to happen.

Even if that means a loss in productivity.

Apple

FabrizioLeave a comment

The fact that Apple goes against Facebook (and others) on privacy matters should not come as a surprise.

Apple is the company of the 1984 commercial. It is the company of Think Different. It is the casual and relaxed guy opposed to the formal and uptight adult of the Get a Mac campaign. It is the solitary teenager who makes us cry in Misunderstood.

Few companies have managed to maintain such a consistent brand over decades.

Apple is the company against the establishment and the common way of thinking.

And now that they are part of the establishment, they still find ways to be consistent with their brand.

They have won already.

Farther away

FabrizioLeave a comment

When a system is broken, there is no patch, no tool, no framework, no novelty that can fix it. All of that can make it work for a while longer, and a little more, but in the end the system will still be broken.

So, if you are serious about making it work, the only way is to take a step back and have a look at the system itself.

It is painful, because it means that what you have done so far might have taken you somewhere you were not supposed to be. Yet, the alternative is to end up even farther away.

Your choice.

In search of meaning

FabrizioLeave a comment

I talk about this a lot, and for as much as it is a difficult practice, it is one I am committed to.

You can have an impact today. You can give others what you want others to give you. You can show a different way. You don’t have to fall into despair if the world around you is not the way you’d like it to be. You can be present, here and now, learn, grow, and take others with you along the way.

[…] people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “What is the secret of success?” when they should be asking, “What prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth takes place. To walk around asking, “Am I a success or a failure?” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to an answer is to say that everyone is both a success and a failure.

One way to renew an obsessive preoccupation with success is to alter the idea that the present is a means and the future is an end. The problem with this way of thinking is that, when the future comes, then it too becomes just another present that is yet another means to yet another future.

Karl Weick, How Projects Lose Meaning: The Dynamics of Renewal

P.S.: thanks to Ed Batista for this fantastic article about the topic.