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BE SMART

I understand the pressure you’re under. You need to make sales. You need to generate demand. You need to please your boss. You need to please the board. You need to make ends meet. I get that.

​Paul Mellor, MD of the British advertising agency Mellor&Smith, gets it, too:

“These marketers, especially those CMOs or VPs of Marketing are earning pretty good wages. They’ve got a mortgage, probably even a second mortgage on that second holiday home. They’ve got kids in private school, they’ve got a lot to lose to go against the grain. It’s much easier to sit with the crowded group where everyone is exactly the same, where no one stands out.”

Adapted from Louis Grenier, Everyone Hates Marketers ([email protected]).

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BE SMART

“I often say to my team: as an employer, it’s not about the products we make, it’s not about our brand. It’s about how are we going to motivate team members to feel good about themselves, fulfilled and passionate about their work, to contribute at their highest level of performance.” – Rosalind Brewer, CEO of Walgreens. Adapted from Time Leadership Brief 2/1/2022.

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BE SMART

“Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be”. Jeff Bizos (Amazon)

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BE SMART

The math is compelling. You’re going to lose most of the competitions you enter. How could it be any other way? With a hundred or a thousand or a billion people completing, only one wins.

This means that you’re going to be seen and measured by how you lose, not how you win.

The way to win is usually to fit in all the way, to give the judges precisely what they want, to train just like everyone else, but harder.

But the way to lose with style is to create possibility. To be creative. To do generous work that’s worth talking about.

If you’re going to lose (and you probably will), why not lose with style?

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BE SMART

Two core abilities for thriving in the new economy:

1. The ability to quickly master hard things.

2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Adapted from the book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport.

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BE SMART

Are founders allowed to lie? “Many of you reading this will reflexively shout back, no! Of course not! Being a founder does not make lying okay! But before you submit your answer, take a minute to think about it. If you are only allowed to tell the literal, complete truth, and you’re compelled to tell that truth at all times, it is very difficult to create something out of nothing. You probably don’t call it ‘lying,’ but founders have to will an unlikely future into existence. To build confidence in everyone around you – investors, customers, employees, partners – sometimes you have to paint a picture of how unstoppable you are, or how your duct tape and Mechanical Turk tech stack is scaling beautifully, or tell a few ‘pre-truths’ about your progress. Hey, it will be true, we’re almost there, let’s just say it’s done, it will be soon enough.”

  • “Not everyone does this, of course. Some founders keep on the straight and narrow, and only tell the literal truth at all times. (Good luck to them, honestly.)”
  • “Other founders bend the truth way too much, and end up as high drama like Theranos or laughingstocks like Fire Fest.”
  • “But in between, there’s a murky grey area of social contracts and soft power, and it’s where the founder-VC relationship gets really interesting.”

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According to Bill Gates, “As we look ahead, leaders will be those who empower others.” Taking a conscious approach to leadership will best meet the needs of both the shareholders and the delivery engine — the people you employ. That means being focused on creating an environment that balances autonomy with support, pressure with balance, and which pays attention to people’s fundamental human need to matter. Conscious leadership is based on these five essential factors:

Awake: Recognize that you don’t have all of the answers. But through radical listening, and through being present for the people around you, you will give people the space to express themselves, unleashing an army of people who can solve the challenges they’re facing. 

Resilient: Become conscious of the way you work. When you have more time to re-energize and seek solitude, you are more effective at your job (and you become a better person).

Together: Recognize the power of emotional connection and help people to spend more time together, and spend more time getting to know the people in your team too. Be there to offer support when people need it. Then know when to get out of the way and allow people to create their own answers and possibilities.

Growing: Believe in your people (even if you don’t always believe in yourself). Coach them to understand themselves and where to focus. And allow them to build on their strengths. That’s where all of the untapped potential, energy, and commitment are.

Purposeful: Instill radical focus through setting clear direction, allowing everyone to pay attention to what matters most. This requires you to be disciplined, stick to plans, and make conscious decisions to course-correct when things need to shift. 

When leaders see that their role is to empower and to help individuals to sustain their energy and then place it where it matters most, it provides a new focus. Leaders can’t solve all of the problems, because there are too many to solve, but they can bring much-needed meaning and growth to employees’ roles. If we’re expecting them to keep grinding, there has to be something in it for them besides a paycheck.

Adapted from an article by Natasha Wallace : Published by https://real-leaders.com/bill-gates-tomorrows-leaders-will-be-those-that-empower-others/

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Besides being a mother and a tennis champion, Serena Williams is also a businesswoman. The 23-time Grand Slam champion has her own investment fund.

On the biggest lesson she has learned, Williams says, “The biggest lesson that I’ve learned, is that no matter who you are it takes a ton of work and time. Yesterday, I was listening to my husband talk about different business things and I learned a huge lesson that I could immediately start applying but in general, I think in business it’s key to understand that sometimes you might see something and it seems like it has happened overnight but it takes a lot of hard work and restless nights.”

“It takes a lot of time and dedication and things that you see aren’t necessarily what you perceive. A lot of people go into business thinking I’m going to make it successful and it will be great overnight and very rarely does that happen.”

“When it does happen you have to think about all the millions and millions of businesses that weren’t as successful. Williams has always been a big supporter of women’s empowerment and says, “Empowerment is important in general.”

Serena goes on to add that she has always believed in making the first move for herself, right from the time she was a child when she entered a tennis tournament on her own at the age of 7.

“I always made the first move for as long as I could remember. When I was seven years old, I made the first move by entering myself in a tennis tournament. I’m not saying a seven-year-old should do that but I always had this mindset, you have to do it before someone else does it.”

“When you have an idea, there’s this saying that there are four other people with the exact same idea, so you have to act on it fast and make that first move, or someone else is.” Finally, on her venture fund, Serena says she started it because she wanted to be in the investment world after being inspired by people who invested in companies such as Apple and Facebook.

“I started Serena Ventures because I wanted to invest in different companies, I wanted to be in the investment world. I was looking at people who invested in Apple and Facebook and wondered how I would be able to do that.”

“The more I started investing, I learned that so very few female-founded companies were getting investment dollars, and that changed my mission to focus on bringing awareness on that issue. I wanted to let people know with my platform and voice, that it needed to change.”

By Haresh. Adapted from: https://www.tennisworldusa.org/tennis/news/Serena_Williams/81731/serena-williams-i-always-believe-in-making-the-first-move/

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No matter what your startup is selling or who you’re selling it to, in order to survive, you’ll need big customers and you’ll need lots of them. But how do you land million-dollar deals with limited resources and no credibility?

When you’re a startup, your customers are buying innovation. The tricky thing is, no one needs innovation. Rather, they need the derivatives of that innovation — time, simplification, throughput, security.

In order to close a big sale, in other words, the aggregation of many, many units of that usage and value, you’re going to have to consolidate that usage and find a champion of value on the customer side.

If you’re a B2B business, then your usage is probably already consolidated within the company itself, and your champion will come from the inside. Be mindful though, that in an innovation environment, your champion might not be the leader or manager of the department or team that will bear the bulk of the usage. When it comes to innovation, your champion is probably further up the corporate chain. In fact, it’s probably the CEO.

The rookie mistakes here are plentiful, from picking a poor match for consolidation because of ease of access (i.e. social networks or college campuses) to picking the wrong champion (the super-enthusiastic person with no influence over the purchasing decision).

There are three things you have to nail on your first few sales:

  1. The demo/pitch has be over the top professional and great.
  2. The pilot has to have a 100% conversion rate to full-tier customer.
  3. The product or service has to overcome a much higher bar for retention.

Executing those three things at such an early stage is always more expensive than you plan for. You’re probably going to lose money on your first few customers for at least a little while.

In fact, this is a phenomenon that hurts and even kills some growth-stage startups. You need to expect a certain percentage of your customers to be unprofitable. It doesn’t matter what your offering is, where your margins are, how long you’ve been in business, or how good you are at what you do. Between fraud and squeaky wheels and mistakes and VIPs and a host of other factors, be prepared to lose money sometimes, especially early.

Adapted from the article “How Startups Close Their First Big Sales” by Joe Procopio, first published on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/how-startups-close-their-first-big-sales/

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FINAL THOUGHTS

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Always maintain at least a token willingness to change your mind. Steve Jobs understood this concept intimately. Yes, he was legendarily relentless in his focus. Jobs once boasted about the number of products Apple had (at the time less than 30) compared to the size of the company ($30 billion), explaining, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

Adapted from: 2020 Inspiration Guide: 6 Crucial Habits That Will Accelerate Your Success. https://real-leaders.com/2020-inspiration-guide-6-crucial-habits-that-will-accelerate-your-success/

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Tell me this:

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