Archives / 173 post/s found
The grass is greener where you water it
The grass may *look* greener on the other side, but the truth is it’s greener where you water it. And that’s the difference between the peddlers of vision, and those that show you the vision AND the work you need to do to make it real.
The best leaders on your team may be ignoring your KPIs
When you’re evaluating leadership potential in your team, remember that all the metrics you have are proxy metrics. You can’t easily evaluate such a complex concept as leadership. If you’ve assigned them metrics, or SMART (spare me) objectives, again you’re measuring proxy. The best leaders go beyond them and do the bigger right thing. You can measure the quality of a developer’s code. The robustness of a builder’s wall. The speed of an F1 driver’s lap.…
“Employees First” isn’t the path to a successful business
Business Half-Truth #2: Look after your employees first. I’ve seen too many turn this into making customers a distant second (or third). Yes, team is important. And if you treat your team as an investment, rather than a cost, then your business should reap rewards. But “employees first” works well ONLY IF you have a culture that’s obsessive about creating value for your customers (and in my books, the community as well), or if there’s a unifying vision or purpose about creating…
Succeeding at school may be harming your entrepreneurial career
There’s a reason that many successful business starters didn’t have sparkling academic careers, and why a lot of people who shone at school failed at startups. If you’re an academic success at school, you become conditioned to prize being right and fear being wrong. And being right is definitely a good thing. But over time, being right is better than being wrong ONLY if it doesn’t reduce your desire to continue learning and to risk being wrong. Or to put it another way, if…
Your business can’t be about you
Entrepreneurship and business become noble when you’re doing it to improve the lot of those around you, not just yourself. I love this from Nassim Taleb. “Some people take risks and some people labor in the fields. You have the option of doing either one or the other. But my point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risks for the sake of others, period.” The best business owners I’ve known are those that get this intimately. They may…
Authenticity can hurt your business
Authenticity is today’s buzzword. And like most buzzwords, although it can make sense in many contexts, it is now overused, inappropriately applied, and often plain wrong. Everyone tells leaders to “be authentic”. But what if you’re a prize arsehole? A sociopath? A bigot? A despot? Will you still take the advice of every coach out there and be authentic? Good luck with retaining a team and creating anything but a toxic culture. What are your options? Well, you could fake…
Purpose AND Profit
There is still a face-off between Purpose and Profit in much of the business press these days. This is counterproductive. If we’re looking at businesses (not charities), then they need profit to achieve their purpose. Having a more than bucketload of purpose and less than a thimbleful of profit is a guaranteed way to ensure your purpose is either denied, or short-lived. Businesses (and capitalism) shouldn’t be driven by profit maximisation. Profit is a means to an end, not the ends itself.…
Focus on culture when your cash flow sucks is like focusing on dancing when you can’t breath
I’m all about the team and the culture. That, to me, is what differentiates businesses, what makes some great, others mediocre, and yet others appalling. But that greatness doesn’t happen without sales, without revenue, without cash and without profit. Sales, profit, revenue and cash are like oxygen. Oxygen doesn’t make us special – what makes us who we are is our interests, our values, our experiences. But without oxygen, all of those would be irrelevant – we wouldn’t even…
Knowledge can destroy your business
Knowledge is power. I still hear this all the time. Sure there’s truth in it, but it’s also simplistic and dangerous. Knowledge hoarders are often bottlenecks. Sometimes intentionally so, knowing that being the only people who can do certain things can make them indispensable. For a while at least. Those of us in technology all know the contractor who protects his turf by building monolithic and impenetrable code. Being the only guy (and it’s always a guy) who can keep it working…
Don’t park your humour outside the office
I’m always astonished by how many people decide to park their sense of humour outside the office. Work is a serious business. Or rather, work delivers serious results. But we don’t have to be over-serious in the process of getting there. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of work scenarios that wouldn’t be better if humour was injected into them. And probably the fingers of a chicken at that.