Does great work really matters?
The common advice is that, if you do “great work”, you’ll close more deals or that this “great work” will make you stand out —which will automatically bring you clients that value what you do. However, the only ones who can tell good enough on the outside from “great work” are your peers. On the other hand, the ones who can tell work that delivers and brings results on what your clients expect, are your clients. And they fund your mission. While “great work” is a nice way to say what you do…
Great work is not what makes people hire you.
Really. You’ve seen this: “We do great work.” Have you ever seen anyone coming and saying: “We do shit work. Hire us. We’ll make you fail.”? Of course not. It’ll be ridiculous. Of course you want to do great work. Who would not? (taking you actually care about your customers and business). And good-fits for you are customers who actually don’t (really) care about how great work you do, but how great is the transformation you help them go through. Just think about this: If “great work” is what…
So, you show how great work you do and…
What to say when you’ve been ghosted. You made your proposal, sent it and… are still waiting for a reply —that might or might never arrive. Here’s what Blair Enns has to say about this and I’ve found right on point. You might wanna give it a shot. What it does It labels the situation as neutral and takes off the guilt of the other parties to say No. It asks for a detached answer, to a simple fact. It gets you out of the desperation reek when trying to get a reply. You come out as gracious…
Yes, you are
To yesterday’s email on “What’s the most important” in your business, there were interesting replies: Sustainability Profit Revenue Consistent income Me Freedom to choose Customers And so on… And, while all of them are important, ME, is the most important. Because when you’re not at your best, your work can’t be at its top. You can’t take care of your customers at your best. You can’t take care of making the best decisions to build sustainability into your business. You can’t innovate. You…
The less you know…
The more knowledge and more imagination, more originality. How do you get to know more? By knowing less. And then diving deeper. Deepening your expertise. Specializing. Seeing the patterns. With that, you know “What is” and all you have to do after that is ask yourself “What could be?” Start with this: what if?
All hands on deck
When going into a strategy session, retreat or next-year planning, one thing that often happens is this: Everyone goes to work and figure the ways to make things work… by just jumping in and “brainstorming”, coming up with solutions, deciding on 500 steps ahead. It all would be good, if this pattern didn’t repeat over and over: no reflection nor pause to define what’s THE big thing. Everyone gets behind their own interpretations of the ideas and at the end of the day/session, it’s just…
Feeling like an impostor?
Mike Julian and Adam Grant seem to have opposite takes re: impostor syndrome. Mike’s take: I think the tech industry has many failings and shortcomings, but one that’s been annoying me lately is the pervasive belief that everyone has impostor syndrome.There are people that worked their asses off to become great and they know it. We shouldn’t be minimizing that. And the other take, from Adam: The only people who never feel like impostors are narcissists.Being 100% sure of yourself at all times…
Relying heavily on AI
If you rely heavily on AI (or LLMs), here’s something worth checking. Is it being trained on biased datasets? If you want to explore the whole pod, you can follow it here.
What’s the most important?
Pop quiz: What’s the most important for your business?
Tennis or golf?
It doesn’t matter. Business (or innovation or disruption) is not a “winning” game. Unlike golf or tennis, where you know when you win (because the game finished), innovating/disrupting doesn’t have a fixed timeframe. It’s like saying that if someone didn’t stand out or reached a set of metrics in X timeframe, they lost. Even when setting yearly goals. ie X revenue in a year. If the goal was not achieved, it doesn’t mean it’s lost (in most cases). Could it be because of lack of resources? Lack…