Tag: failure

People is our most important asset

FabrizioLeave a comment

For founders and start-ups managers, here is a list of things that’s beyond what you should expect of your employees.

Being loyal to your cause.

Being as excited about your cause as you are.

Doing extra work without being paid.

Doing basic work without being paid (fairly).

Being self-motivated.

Doing work without recognition.

Doing work that is beyond the job description you’ve hired them for, or the title you have given them.

Putting up with your lack of vision, planning, communication, transparency.

Participating in every after-work activity for team building.

Interpreting uncertainty and change as a free pass for mean managerial behaviour.

Agreeing to the fact that your busyness is more important than their busyness.

Finding answers to questions you don’t even ask.

Carving their way into career development.

Learning by themselves.

Accept that somebody with more experience will come in at some point and start telling them what to do.

If people is really your most important asset, you could start by having a honest look at this list. Leave your excuses on the side for a moment, and mark the items on which you are failing your employees. Ask how you can do better. And then do it.

Stumbling on the funnel

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Not everyone is interested in what you have to sell. Not all those who are going to enter your shop will end up paying for something. Not all those who click on a banner are manifesting an interest in buying. Not all those who ask a question, or many questions, have their wallets open, waiting for the correct answer.

We all take actions without a reason, or at least without a clear enough reason, and so we should not punish those who stumble upon our pipeline or enter the funnel only to dream a bit bigger (or a bit smaller) for once.

Understanding your customers also means identifying those who are going to buy and those who are not. Too often we believe that the latter have just misunderstood, or have received not good enough service, or were misguided by the wrong button in the wrong banner in the wrong place.

It might be, sure, and yet it’s much more likely that they simply don’t want to buy.

And we should let them go.

Just a story

Fabrizio1 Comment

Somehow we’ve all bought into the story that marketing is about tactics, hacks, posts, optimisation and measurement.

It’s an interesting story, one that somehow feeds both our need to stay ahead of the curve and our tendency to aimlessly complain when things don’t work.

The genius of Google and Facebook as platforms is that they are impossible to master. Can anybody name a company that has developed long term sustainable advantage from the mastery of Google and Facebook? … They have not become tools, they have become taxes that every one needs to pay.

Scott Galloway, PIVOT podcast ep. 188

It’s an interesting story, yet a story nonetheless.

The reality is very different: it’s made of mistakes in the very same metrics we have become accustomed to measure our marketing success by, it’s made of businesses that make money inflating those metrics with no top or bottom line benefit for the advertisers, it’s made of pointless efforts to optimise the unoptimisable while the platform owner brings the whole thing in a totally different direction.

What’s next for marketing is hopefully a reckoning that it’s not the platform, or the channel, or the single tactic, or the brand new hack that builds a meaningful, long-term connection. What’s next is hopefully a return to the lost fundamentals, and an increased awareness that there’s not a single way to reach that person that matters so much. Always start from them and you will win.

Not all the roads

FabrizioLeave a comment

Annie Duke: We have this trade-off. We can kind of feel the pain in the moment, but the pain is going to be better in the long run, if we use it well, because we are going to be better decision makers in the long run, because we are experiencing the pain.

But the pain in the moment is pain. It doesn’t feel good. We have these competing problems: what’s best for me now, in terms of the way that I feel, versus what’s best for future me, in terms of how my life turns out. I think we can agree that the better my decisions, the more likely my life is going to turn out in a way that is good.

Shane Parris: It’s almost like the hindsight of your future-self becoming the foresight of your today-self.

Annie Duke: It’s getting the future version of you to get involved in the decisions of the present version of you.

From The Knowledge Project Podcast, ep. #37

When you make decisions in the moment, continuosly distracted by what is shinier, within reach, effortless, you often avoid negative feelings. And yet, you lose a little bit of who, deep down, you want to become.

What would your future-self say about what your today-self is doing?

Get that clear sooner rather than later, and accept the fact that not all the roads are going to take you where you aim. It will make it easier to accept defeats, say no, and be kind to yourself when some things will inevitably not pan out.

Balancing act

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are two key challenges to the work of leaders. Two extremes you’ll constantly have to struggle balancing.

On one side, you have the difficult task of letting go, delegating, leaving space to others. On the other, you have the need to maintain a level of involvement and commitment, showing you care and you are actively thinking on how to empower others to drive things forward.

It is a common misunderstanding of those promoting hands-off leadership that leaders should be quiet and almost invisible. If that’s the case, the next question they’d have to answer would be: “do you even care?”.