Tag: entrepreneurship

Killer

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you reject, belittle, or forget to follow up to an initiative taken by a member of your team, what happens is next time they will think twice before taking initiative.

It is that simple. And the effect compounds for additional rejecting, belittling and forgetting.

This is not to say you have to accept and follow through with every idea. You just need to communicate clearly what is important and what is not, what is “right now” and what is “maybe tomorrow”, what makes the picture and what makes the frame. This transparency is needed for people to appreciate why some things happen and other do not.

Unfortunately most hide behind busyness, that is often just an expression of ignorance (having no idea) or arrogance (thinking everyone has a clear idea).

It is a killer for motivation.

Agent or spectator

FabrizioLeave a comment

The fact with difficult conversations is that you can delay them, but you cannot delay the negative effects of the situation that made them necessary in the first place.

If a colleague is under performing and you have to pick up their slack, silence will not improve things. If your boss is not giving you what you demand, silence will not make them change. If the team you are working in has a toxic culture, silence will not make that more digestible.

Also, more likely than not, eventually the outcome you fear and that justified the delay is going to materialize no matter what. That colleague is probably going to be fired anyway, your boss is going to get rid of you, or you are going to get rid of them, the team will have to make some drastic changes one way or the other.

So, at the end of the day it is mainly a matter of being an agent of change or a spectator. The former makes you waste a lot less time, and you have no time to waste.

Tired

FabrizioLeave a comment

As a general rule, writing less rather than more is a wise decision.

And when you are tired, writing less rather than more should be an imperative. When you are tired, ideas gets fuzzy, reasoning falters, words get mixed up. Adding another sentence, another paragraph, another page will not make your argument stronger.

Of course, it is also possible to not write at all. Go get some rest, and get back to what seems the most urgent matter of the moment when it does not seem as urgent anymore (a night of sleep has this power).

Businesses would benefit immensely from this practice.

Empty house

Fabrizio1 Comment

When you are on the market to buy a house, and you start going around to see some of them, you will probably feel better about those who have furniture in it. Even when you actually plan to get rid of everything and bring your own furniture in.

An empty house is often difficult to imagine with actual life in it. It takes people a huge extra effort to visualise closets, carpets, curtains, chairs, tables, lamps, and so on.

A lot of B2B marketing nowadays feels like an empty house. Huge potential, but what am I going to put in this room? Will a bed fit in here? Will there be enough space for kids to play around, if we bring a sofa and a side table in?

Start with being specific, and it will be easier for customers to apply what they are seeing to their own unique cases. It is a shorter route.

* I owe the empty house metaphor to a customer I was chatting with a few days back. It is unbelievable what insights customers can provide.

Unsubscribe

FabrizioLeave a comment

Unsubscribing from your list should be simple: click a link, unsubscribed.

But if you really decide, for reasons that are probably not really good, to make it difficult for subscribers to unsubscribe, do you have a plan to use the additional information you are requesting? Are you going to extract insights from the answers you get? Is there a way for you to turn those into actions that will, for example, decrease the number of unsubscribes over time?

My guess is, the answer is no.

And so, why bother? Why adding additional steps to a simple process? Why leaving a bad taste in your subscribers’ mouth in the very moment they are signalling they are getting tired of you?

Nobody ever loved something more because they found it difficult to leave it.