Tag: entrepreneurship

Growing managers

Fabrizio1 Comment

There’s a fairly common practice in growing start-ups.

When the headcount ramps up and a more complicated structure is needed, the natural tendency is to promote founders or early stage employees into managerial roles. This happens only marginally because people making or vetting the decision believe those employees are the best for the job. Most of the time, the promotion is seen as a reward: after all, the person has been with the company when things were getting started, typically a difficult moment to be in.

There’s a problem with that, though. The skills needed to do your job are considerably different from the skills needed to have others do their jobs.

In this [new] capacity you have plenty of work to do yourself: setting strategy, hiring and firing, coaching and development, obtaining necessary resources, making certain decisions while delegating others, and embodying the culture you wish to foster.

Ed Batista

Most growing companies ignore this problem, and end up in a situation in which a hiatus develops between managers and employees. Managers are not willing to find the time to do what they are supposed to do, employees are left alone and in the blind. Eventually, one of two things will happen: growth will flatline, as managers factually act as bottlenecks; or value will be destroyed, as negative working culture spreads (think Uber).

Founders and early stage employees can (and should) still be rewarded, but if it is decided to promote them into managerial roles, the company should at least make sure they understand their new responsibilities and get appropriate training and mentoring to deliver on the expectations of their newly formed teams.

Feeling in charge

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I have done some of my best job under pressure and deadlines. Thing is, that pressure, those deadlines, they were not imposed from the outside. They were consequences of me feeling responsible for a project, a document, a team, a deliverable.

If you impose pressure and deadlines, particularly when you do not share clear reasoning (as in “we do this because it helps us this way”), people might still do the job. Great job, though, needs internalization.

You are building future

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Always do things with the long-term in mind.

What type of person do you want to be?
What companies do you want to build?
What community do you want to live in?

If you keep your focus on the long-term, and appreciate that choices you make every day are the building blocks of what long term will look like, it will be a whole lot easier to avoid the allure of shortcuts and of short term gains.

This is Marketing

Fabrizio4 Comments

What I wrote yesterday about the commoditization of marketing is deeply inspired by the work of Seth Godin.

This year, I have read his most recent book, This is Marketing, and despite having followed his blog for years now, and being familiar with most of his ideas, I felt it was the missing piece in my approach to marketing. A way to translate things that are already profoundly rooted in my practice into easy and plain words that everybody can understand.

You can’t be seen until you learn to see is the subtitle of the book, and that is a common thread througout the pages. The focus on empathy and on the necessity to deeply understand who you are serving is one of Seth’s mantras. There’s a metaphor he uses this time around, that is not only great at describing this approach, but also in differentiating it from the other side of marketing, the commoditized side.

It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.

Seth Godin

Marketing is about building a relationship, this should be nothing new to anyone who has read Kotler and his principles. And despite this being one of the oldest precepts of the field, we keep forgetting it, because other ways are more alluring and promise shorcuts to achieve results.

For Seth, it all starts by understanding what is the change you seek to make. Because every marketer is in the business of “making change happen” (and everyone who wants to make a change is a marketer). Then, understanding that changing everyone, seeking the mass, is not only unrealistic, it also sets us for mediocrity and disappointment. The only real possibility is identifying our “smallest viable audience“, the smallest market we (or our company) can survive on. And do our best work and responsibly bringing it to them.

This is Marketing is about a way to do marketing that considers affiliation more important than dominion.

Modern society, urban society, the society of the internet, the arts, and innovation are all built primarily on affiliation, not dominion. This type of status is not “I’m better.” It’s “I’m connected. I’m family.” And in an economy based on connection, not manufacturing, being a trusted member of the family is priceless.

Seth Godin

Affiliation, though, does not happen when you talk about how perfect your features are, or when you bombard people with flashy and catchy ads. It is a slow and long process, one that requires patience and consistency, and one that cannot be measured. And that’s where most marketers fail nowadays: they use the prime tool for affiliation (content marketing) and pretend to dress it for dominion (us, us, US!).

Eventually, if the marketer is successful, they will have served people that will spread the word (“the best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves”, about their taste, about what is important to them) and that will speak up if they are missing (permission marketing).

This is Marketing is a beautiful read about mindset and change, one that is not for marketers only. Actually, it is for marketers only, but we all are marketers nowadays.

For a long time, during the days when marketing and advertising were the same thing, marketing was reserved for vice presidents with a budget. And now it’s for you.

Seth Godin

 

Inputs and outputs

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Admitting that luck has a huge part in most of our achievements and successes does not mean diminishing them. Nor does it mean diminishing our skills and capacities.

It’s more about understanding that there are a set of things we have under our control and a set of things (usually bigger) that we have absolutely no power over. When we understand this fundamental difference, than it is a whole lot easier to practice accordingly and let go of worries, preoccupations and anxieties that are linked to the latter group. And usually strongly limit and hinder our performance in the former one.

You can decide to show up for work every day, you cannot control the path your career will take five or ten years down the road.

You have power over how you will use your time today, you have none over whether people will like what you did or will agree with your decision.

You can set out to begin a project that can potentially touch the life of many people, you cannot decide whether people will actually be touched by it, or change their mind if they are not.

It is up to you to say yes or no to that request, you have very limited grasp on what will happen next.

When we look back at the successes we’ve had, we should praise the role of the work we’ve done, of the efforts we’ve put in, and also be very mindful of the fact that under very similar circumstances the outcome could have been completely different. You can call it luck, randomness, environment, chance, context. It does not matter. As scary as it sounds, you control the inputs, never the outputs.