Tag: failure

Secret recipes

Fabrizio1 Comment

Sometimes I wonder why so many people decide to share their secret sauce online. Why should they give away what made them and their organisations successful, particularly if they are still in business? Why not keeping it all for themselves, compounding edge on competitors and alternatives?

Then I immediately realize, of course they do.

They know that 99.9% of the people that will consume their content will do absolutely nothing about it. Even when you read that to be rich there are three things you totally have to do, or that to get more leads you need to follow a four-step strategy (success guaranteed!), or that the future of work demands you to most definitely have these ten characteristics, getting to implement that requires an effort that the vast majority of people are simply not ready to put in. An Italian saying goes something like “there’s a whole sea between saying and doing”, and that is the case here. Just because you know something, even if it probably would benefit you, does not mean you are capable of applying that and make of it an habit.

The remaining 1% also do not represent a danger for those who share. The power of context, timing, luck have to be factored in the recipe, and that is something nobody can replicate. Looking back at what happened in the past and pinpoint some key success factors is easy. A lot more challenging is to be at point zero and figure out how to proceed from there towards success.

The point, I guess, is that if you have something to share, something that people might find valuable, something that might help somebody somewhere, go ahead and share away. Even your most secret ingredients are safe in plain sight.

And if you are one of the consumers of content, be mindful that things that are shared are usually a sensible starting point, but to make them work for you it’s not enough to put in the work, you’ll also have to figure out how to make them work for you.

When things stall

Fabrizio2 Comments

Sometimes you hit a winner.

It might be you have changed something in your routine, or you have worked more smartly and efficiently, or you have hired somebody for your team, or the situation around you changed. And things start to work. You achieve goals, you get praises, you march expedite towards the success you have defined for yourself and your organisation.

And then, it stops.

Just as suddenly as they have started, things stop working. The growth line is flat, goals are far off, the team starts raising questions and demanding change, you feel like you are a fraud and everything you have achieved so far is just a coincidence.

A common thread I found when this happens is the tendency to intensify work. You do more, you ask people around you to do more, you hire more, you grow your operations. And while doing that, you get the chance to do more of what brought you to the initial success: more marketing, more sales, more product development, more everything. Very soon, you (and your organisation) are in a frenzy state, you do not have time to think about what is happening because there’s a new urgency, you become like an unintelligent robot repeating things you did in the past expecting a different outcome. Needless to say, this rarely works.

What tends to work, instead, is taking a break. That does not mean going out of business and start anew. It means sitting with your team, looking at the fundamentals of what you are doing and see what changed. Is it the size? Is it the why? Is it the who? Where in the process did a critical shift happen that was not noticed? Is there anything that is still working? Of course, this is a process that requires awareness and openness, and hopefully you have established such an environment when things were going well (rarely those will spark in dire times). When you are done, you’ll have a new plan, that possibly will require you and your team not to do more, but to do better. Not to find more customers, but to find better customers. Not to hire more people, but to hire better people. Not to do more marketing, but to do better marketing. Not to add more processes and levels, but to act on better practices and experiences.

Be ready, because if you are lucky, you’ll have to go through the process very soon.

A matter of choice

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With 2.41 billion monthly active users and its stock trading at the high-end of its 52 weeks rolling average, Facebook is not going to take responsibility for the damages it does to society and democracy. Businesses tend to change when things go bad (we all do, to be honest), and despite some slaps on the wrist for its malpractices, keep your expectations low on the company making it its priority to modify what made them rich.

Regulators and politicians, on the other hand, are late in taking actions to avoid Facebook and others to keep wreaking avock in our communities. The former are chasing a change in society and business that they clearly struggle to understand, and operating at national level they are more concerned with making sure home companies are competitive than with doing what’s longly overdue. The latter, well on all sides they have embraced the platforms using all of the possible subterfuges and tricks they could learn to make themselves more visible, more likeable, more approchable, and eventually more votable.

There’s still a missing part in this picture, and it’s the 2.41 billion monthly active users. That’s us. The ones that use Facebook, the ones that create content for the platform keeping it alive, the ones that endorse their policies and business model whether we like them or not, the ones that cannot leave because, you know, “I have all my pictures there”, or “there’s that group I want to follow”. It’s once again a matter of what is fair and what is convenient. Until we keep choosing convenient, it’s pointless to storm social media channels every time something terrible happens.

Someone wants it this way

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When looking at organisations, I am often baffled by the amount of damage that gets done in the name of (supposed) harmony.

Considering the number of companies that list innovation among their core values, that should almost never be the case. You cannot be creative and innovate if all you care about is pleasing someone, making sure they feel important, executing on poor plans just for the sake of not making a fuss. Diversity and conflict should be at the core of every enterprise. And while it is important to maintain the conversation civil, by the time we enter the work environment we should all be on the same page: if somebody has a different idea they are not implying they are better than us, neither they are jeopardazing our professional worth.

“We are doing this because someone wants it this way” is a very poor way to serve your organisation.

Reporting relevance

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In July, this blog has gotten most visitors in a single month than ever, more than doubling the number from June. Views per day and per post have doubled as well. The reach was expanded to new countries, such as Ukraine, Papua New Guinea and the Netherlands, and viewership in an important country such as Germany was consolidated (visitors increased 1,000% month-over-month). The most popular hour to post is confirmed to be 8PM, as most of this blog’s audience seem to be online then.

This is all true. And of course, it is irrelevant.

With the amount of data we get exposed to nowadays, it is easy to get distracted by numbers and fake successes. We have actually developed an extended capacity to focus on the numbers that confirm what we believe is happening and boost our confidence, without talking about the ones that actually matters.

Why are you tracking what you are presenting? How does that affect the change you are trying to make? Are you closer or farther away from achieving that? Can you measure the final change? Is an history of those numbers, going back at least 12 months, available? Would people react differently if they would see natural numbers rather than percentages?

Those are important questions when preparing your next report. If you don’t know how to answer them, or if you catch yourself cheating while answering them, do everyone a favour and do not press send.