Tag: entrepreneurship

Doing is boring

Fabrizio3 Comments

Doing is boring.

It comes after the excitement of ideation and brainstorming. It is way ahead of the sparkles and glitters of reveal and success. It is repetitive, often solitary, unsung, at times painful, mostly bland.

And that is precisely why many fail at it.

Showing up day after day to merely do is a trait one needs to train. Without that, we are jumping from one thing to the next. With that, we are setting ourselves apart from the mass.

Doing, just like life, is boring.

To achieve anything, you just have to get over this simple fact.

All the time

Fabrizio1 Comment

We will act fairly.

Once this bad period is over.

As soon as we have launched this very important new service.

When the new manager will be up to speed.

If only we would win this next bet.

The fact is, integrity does not allow conditions. You are either fair, or you are not. And actually, once you start cheating, cutting corners, taking shortcuts, there is good evidence that you are onto a slippery slope that will take you deeper down the hole. Raising up from there is not as easy as one would think.

Find your principles, set your boundaries, draft your rules. And be genuinely committed to them.

All the time.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Clayton Christenses, How will you measure your life?

P.S.: How important this is for organizations! This is why organizational culture fails so often. As culture is often built in meetings and not anchored to reality, a company can find hundreds of ways and reasons to deviate from it. When that happens, there is no sanction. And the culture drifts …

Existential threat

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When failure knocks at your door, you have to greet it, invite it in, make it feel comfortable, and eventually ask it to move in. Failure needs to be absorbed, somehow, in order for the learnings to become a part of you, to make you better, to prevent it from happening again.

If you deny failure, on the other hand, it will not simply go away. Soon enough it will spread, and your problem will become a problem for the neighbors, for the neighborhood, for the culture, for the village. It will transform into an existential threat. It will just be everywhere, always noticeable, never hidden, a memento of your own incapacity to accept.

Failure is not the end of the world. Pretending not to see it might just be it.

My people resist change

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Three ways to go about change in companies.

  1. Engage with the people affected in time. Instead of going for behind-closed-doors decisions and big reveals, make everyone part of the process. You won’t lose control, and you will win a variety of perspectives and a clear view on what the major problems will be.
  2. Meet people where they are. It is way to easy to say my door is always open. So easy, in fact, that nobody will ever come to you. Make an intentional effort, instead, to check in with people where they hang out: meetings, 1-1s, chats, kitchen tables. You won’t lose power, and you will win connections, face time, and trust.
  3. Say it. Say it again. Say it once more. The saying goes, I told you I love you when we got married, I’ll let you know if anything changes. Of course, it is a joke. Then why do you do just that when it comes to change? Build a marketing campaign around change, make the message relevant, clear, inspiring, and then repeat it in every possible occasion. You won’t waste time, and you will win commitment and alignment.

And change is so much more than this. But since none of the above ever gets done, you could try starting here before complaining that your people resist change.

Protect or build

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You can protect your name, your reputation, your prestige. Or you can build it.

Rarely you can do both at the same time.

Protecting is about public relations, networking, promising, giving speeches. It is a reactive game. It is about ensuring that what you do determines who you are, how others see you. It is trying to control the outcome, that you can’t really control.

Building is about doing. It is a proactive game. It is about ensuring that who you are determines what you do, day after day. It is fully mastering the input, that you can always control.

Choose carefully.