On October 22, around the world, I’m helping to organize hundreds of in-person get togethers.
A chance to share your work and have a conversation about your strategy with others. Mutual support and peer connection.
All the details are on this page.
It’s free. A chance to connect and make an impact.
Looking forward, together.
Your next project might feel like a calling, but it’s a choice. A choice that will have an impact on each day you spend on it.
There are no right answers here, but before you fall in love with a business or an organization, it may pay to think about these and other options that are built in:
Pick your customers, pick your future.
PS Joel recommended this post from fourteen years ago.
Isaac Newton didn’t invent gravity. It was there all along. He simply named and explained it.
The same is true for planets, continents and obscure species. They’re discovered, not invented.
Michelangelo talked about removing all the parts of the marble that weren’t the statue on his way to creating great art. Discovery is like that.
Often, we put ourselves on the hook to invent something, when it might be simpler and more direct to act like we’re exploring on our way to discovering something instead.
Emotional enrollment is at the heart of performance, learning and connection.
A coach can quickly tell when someone is committed to changing their approach in order to change the outcome–it’s easy to tell this person apart from someone who simply wants what they’re already doing to be more effective.
“I want to become someone who’s shift is over,” is very different from, “I want to become someone who knows how to write copy that earns a sale.”
Bonnie Raitt partnered with producer Don Was to make her 10th album. If she had insisted that it simply be the tenth album, another shot at being discovered, it wouldn’t have become the album of the year. Instead, she and Was worked together to bring a new approach to the studio. After the album hit, she was still Bonnie Raitt, of course, but she was also a different sort of performer.
Being validated for who we are today is great. But it’s more likely that we can achieve our goals by choosing to become someone who can solve problems that the people we serve need solved.
Residents leave a town because of a lack of services, which cuts the tax base, which leads to more services lost, which leads to more residents leaving…
A hip new brand attracts a few opinion leaders, who flash the logo, which attracts more hipsters, who then establish a status standard, which attracts more customers…
The key variable in both spirals is time.
The rise or fall happens day by day, not all at once, and normal interventions rarely make a difference. Instead, it’s the apparently irrational overinvestment in the moment that can change the dynamic going forward.
…are still consequences.
We’re all participants in the systems around us, and complicit in their consequences even if we didn’t intend them. First, we need to see the systems, and then we have the opportunity to work to change them.
Once an organization figures out a successful model, it begins to grow.
And when it grows, it needs more staff. And they often hire for specific tasks and the skills that go with them.
They need a person who will reliably and obediently deliver what they need right now.
And that’s the foundation for stuckness.
When the world changes, and it always does, the organization is filled with people who signed up for (and were hired for) a specific competency.
What would happen if instead, we hired problem solvers and resilient improv artists who were willing to do today’s job because it needed to be done, but were prepared (and eager) for tomorrow’s challenge as well?
There is always room for someone who really knows their way around an industry, a technology or a problem.
That’s what agents, agencies and organizers do.
The hard part isn’t in finding people who will value true on-the-ground expertise.
The hard part is actually earning it and maintaining it.
As long as there are folks who are lost, we will need guides.
PS If you’re around Washington DC, consider joining Bina Venkataraman and me for a conversation on strategy on October 28th. Tickets and details are here. Some tickets include a signed book, and you can get virtual tix for folks from out of town. I hope to see you there.
It might only cost $2 in the vending machine, but that can of soda is a complicated battery.
It stores the energy of the machines that were used to mine the bauxite, the ship that brought the ore to Iceland, the astonishing temperatures used to create the aluminum, then more shipping, more processing, more handling, the lights in the store and the power to the vending machine.
But what about that book you just read? Not simply the energy to print it and ship it, or even the energy to grow the trees…
What about the energy of a life well lived by the author? The edits and rewrites and dead ends?
Everything feels different once we realize that something happened for it to become what it is now.
A poignant definition of civilization is all the conveniences, courtesies, standards, insulation and tools that we hardly notice now but that we would miss if they were gone.
