"Notable accomplishments are rarely achieved by people who work 40 hr per week or less. World-class performers work on average 60 to 80 hr per week with commitment and passion."
@RobertMSterling One of the smartest CPOs I’ve ever reported to said “They say people don’t like change and that’s not true. People don’t like change when it doesn’t make sense.” She made major org changes in ensuing months but explained them all and took ownership. Makes all the difference.
@tomfgoodwin More time with Gen Z+Gen A will quickly change your tune. "Polished" ads like the Mad Men, Ogilvy aspirational navel-gazing clever-by-half perfection turns them off as inauthentic and manipulative. Something raw, personal, and peer-driven is more trustworthy.
Natural charisma is a myth. Connecting with anyone is just a skill.
@cduhigg studied "Super Communicators" and found one pattern: they ask 10-20x more questions than average people.
But not just any questions. Deep questions.
The difference:
Shallow: "What hospital do you work at?"
Deep: "What made you decide to go to medical school?"
The deep question makes them tell you who they are. Their sick dad, their desire to heal, their childhood dream.
Now you're not networking. You're connecting.
The strategy: stop asking what people do. Ask why they do it. The "what" is a resume. The "why" is a connection.
@thesamparr
Step 1b: Founder's ego is fed by being the critical bottleneck. This is the biggest danger to scalability, heck sustainability, of a small founder-led business.
I say it often, but blogs, news sites, articles, case studies, almost all the time focus on the exceptional.
That means our perception of best practice or likely results, is essentially survivorship bias.
It's not to say the people who do amazing things are lucky, but it's also not true that what they did is a replicable playbook.
It doesn't make every successful company "a great idea"
It's just if 10,000 companies set out to make DTC Jeans, 2 brands will get famous.
If 25,000 people set out to reimagine Yoga clothes, 1-4 will get famous.
Quite often I think we may be worshipping companies that did things no better than anyone else, but won the lottery, because stats say if enough people buy tickets, someone will win.
There is also the role of reputation, connections, wealth.
& Quite often the winners seem somewhat unremarkable
I'm far far more inspired by not especially successful companies that do really amazing stuff, that challenges conventions, pushes boundaries, and feels original.
We should find a way to celebrate these.
Than the 23rd company that used Gin Lane style branding to shift reimagined shampoo , and whose Mum was a board member at Target.
I wonder what testable aspects of candidates' backgrounds they AREN'T testing? What simple attributes correlate with great future performance...but are ignored?
Every day an underperforming leader stays in their seat, you're sending a message to everyone beneath them.
Good is good enough.
That message costs you more than their salary.
Am I just dumb or why is the assertion software didn’t eat the world accurate?
It materially changed how many industries work or conduct operations across all sectors including the ones he listed.
Met with a leading EPC/engineering firm yesterday that builds all of the physical infrastructure and his math models rooted in deterministic software were his biggest competitive advantage.
Software is a humongous market and software solutions are deployed widely in all those industries. This makes no sense to me.
Whenever upset or anxious, ask “why” at least three times and put the answers down on paper. Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact twofold.
First, it’s often the ambiguous nature of self-doubt that hurts most. Defining and exploring it in writing demands clarity of thought, after which most concerns are found to be baseless.
Second, recording these concerns seems to somehow remove them from your head.
Winners say no to 99 things to focus on ONE.
Focus creates dominance. Dilution creates mediocrity.
Find which product gets the biggest results for your customers.
Which one do they rave about?
Which one do they renew?
Which one gets referrals?
That's your winner.
Writing a book is wild, but seeing the official cover? That’s when it hits you that the years of quiet solo work is going to actually connect with the real world. 🤯
We wrote The New Science of Hiring because we were tired of seeing great managers fail just because they couldn't find the right people. This book is the scientific playbook to eliminate the guesswork.
Coming soon!
Quite often, not being able to prove something, doesn’t make it less true
And also , being able to prove something doesn’t make it true.
But good luck with saying this in the board room.