Elevating others
Yesterday’s email took these points on Womack’s conception of leadership: Leadership equals heroic leadership. Leadership equals authority. Leadership is about convincing others. Here’s why this view can’t be sustainable. Leadership equals heroic leadership. It’s there to save the day / put the fires out. Heroes don’t scale. So at the moment there’s no more “heroic leader”, things go down south. Quickly. Leadership equals authority. They’re both independent from each other.You can have…
Seeing the future… only by humans.
Leadership is about vision and only people can have a vision of the future, not things or concepts. It makes the notion of [THING]-led business an oxymoron. Because, how could a thing decide? A couple days ago there was a question about if business could be led by —Sales, Growth, Innovation, etc. If it could be led by things. Here’s what friend of the list and Data Scientist & AI and Analytics Specialist, Genevieve Hayes (do go check her emails out) said and I couldn’t put it better [shared…
What about testimonials?
Friend of the list Genevieve Hayes came back with a question after yesterday’s email on one thing you don’t need to build your authority: a personal brand. (shared with permission) What about testimonials? I know that, ideally, it would be great to have quotes from dozens of people who love your work but that’s not always possible early on. Furthermore, I’ve always suspected some of the testimonials on some websites aren’t actually real. How important do you think testimonials are in building…
Too much leadership
Reading one of Ethan Garofolo’s daily emails, I bumped on this video by James Womack of the Lean Enterprise Institute. On it he argues that there’s too much leadership and not enough management. However, the way Womack describes leadership and management gets mixed up and take an outdated view of what leadership is. 3 points to highlight Leadership equals heroic leadership. Leadership equals authority. Leadership is about convincing others. It has nothing to do with leadership. Here’s the…
A question for you
Here’s a question for you: If leading is a choice, can things and businesses be… Product-led? Sales-led? Marketing-led? Growth-led? Innovation-led? Experience-led? I’m curious about what you think. 🙂
Future and present
“Leaders are in charge of the future, and managers are in charge of the present.” Blair Enns Friend of the list, James Turner came up with this email about Managers vs. Leaders, taking on points about how you can focus on the present and the future of your business. Under this view of future v present, you can also find out that one goes in the direction of innovation (being wasteful per definition), looking for the new; and the other, towards efficiency-seeking (the best use of resources) to…
Crushing solutions
“Don’t come to me with problems. I only want to hear solutions.” That’s part of friend-of-the-list Genevieve Hayes’ email about solving problems in isolation —and a generalized thinking framework in the business world, as the focus of this “don’t bring me problems” doesn’t let you see the forest for the trees. Here are a few thoughts on it: This kind of thinking from management has ramifications: “You bring fresh eyes, get me solutions”. If i see the problem —that you don’t consider a…
Focused, instead of led
Are you afraid of using sales/growth/product/growth-focused and so on, instead of [THING]-led? My perception is that whoever came up with this [THING]-led concept was afraid of using [THING]-focused. Because when you change that tiny word, you can see how odd that would sound. As if focusing on the thing will have a tell on what you actually do. What if we change the wordging? Product-led? Product-focused. → So we focus on the product. Growth-led? Growth-focused → We focus on the biz growth…
What you don’t need
Few things you don’t need to build authority in your space. A personal brand . . . … Yeah. That’s it. You don’t need that to build your authority or reputation.
The cost of time
Pricing can’t include the cost of time. Because time… Doesn’t have a cost. Can’t be stored. Can’t be bought. Can’t be traded. Price is the representation of your promise —and of the opportunity cost to your buyer. It gives a context to the thing you can do with that money and what other ways you could spend that money on that you say no to. Time is nothing more than a constraint. I cannot cost.