My entrepreneurial adventures | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Good consulting or coaching is about simplifying complexity

What is actually good consulting or coaching? As a professional consultant and coach it might be time that I ponder on that question!

Zen Garden — Focus and reflection is often what people expect from external contributions

Reflecting on my most successful and satisfying moments, I can relate them to AHA moments for my clients, who were discovering an entire new perspective on things. This perspective was in fact often a way to simplify their life (or their organization’s) by providing new focus. Of course, consulting and coaching are not the same thing: consulting comes with advice and solutions; while coaching takes an open approach and lets the client come up with its personal solution. Still, again and again, the key of the intervention was to simplify real or subjective complexity. It often got realized through finding purpose, or what the actual, real, objective of the endeavor is.

Often enough most of the value is brought in when the coach or the consultant simplifies complexity, letting a clear path readily visible and less confusion as to the way forward. One consulting firm (KPMG) even has the tagline “cutting through complexity”. It can only take a few minutes – but the external eye, sounding board and independent perspective is essential in discovering that new path. I love these moments where coming with an independent, sometimes irreverent viewpoint suddenly simplifies years of artificially added complexity layers!

How did the coaches and consultants you’ve used performed in simplifying complexity?

Hat tip to Patrick Laredo, President of X-PM, a leading interim management company, for the thoughts and discussions on consulting and complexity

Focus means saying no. How often do you say no?

Here’s a famous quote from Steve Jobs about creativity:

“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 ideas that they are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.”

Again and again, in my coaching practice, when people develop plan to evolve and change their life, I encounter that one very fundamental question is:

“What are you ready to stop doing?”

It’s a tough question. It is hard – but necessary. You can’t just add up stuff to your life. Letting go of something you are doing shows commitment, prioritization, focus.

Are you as proud of the things you have stopped doing than of the stuff you’ve been recently starting?

What Makes Great Organizations and Individuals different?

According to Simon Sinek, what makes the difference for great organizations – and great leaders – is that they know their ‘Why”. It is from their purpose that they derive how they do things and what they do in detail.

All individuals and organizations know their “What”. Some organizations know their “How”, but very rarely their “Why”.

Watch Simon Sinek give a great explanation with fantastic examples related to the Wright Brothers versus the establishment, and other great examples in this TED speech (if you’re a hurry, watch from 1:20 to 5:50 – if you can stop then!):

(Here is the link if you can’t see the video)

“People don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it” – Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle (Why-How-What) is an interesting approach. It triggers important questions for ourselves and for our organizations.

Is your personal “Why” clear and compelling? Is your organization’s “Why” clear and compelling?

If not, what are you going to do about it?

A great sample of applied Fourth Revolution’s organizational culture

Lately, a deck of slides about culture from a company called Hubspot has been quite popular. And it reflects very well what the culture of Fourth Revolution’s organizations will be. There are 150 slides but they are quite worthwhile for you to take a few minutes to scroll through:

Culture Code: Creating A Lovable Company from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

“Culture happens. Whether we plan for it or not, culture will happen in an organization. Why not create a culture we love?”

This reminds me that it is our responsibility to create the culture we love in our organizations. What do you do about it?

8 Lessons from One Year into Entrepreneurship

It’s now a bit more than one year that I am really on my own as an entrepreneur and it’s time to look back and reflect.

Business Plan — Keep your business plan simple!

After starting my consulting company Project Value Delivery on my own as the single… everything (employee, director, accountant, webmaster, technical writer etc etc) we are now 3. Are a real Fourth Revolution company, we still have no office as in our consulting work we are mostly in our client’s premises. The market has been tested, and it is clearly there to sustain the company. The business model has been slightly revised but remains grossly what was anticipated at the beginning.

Here are 8 lessons learnt from this first year:

Entrepreneurship is not risky if you don’t over-develop before checking the market. The key is not to spend too much time developing a great glitzy product to find out nobody wants it. The philosophy is – do some homework to be sure you can do it but get the contract (i.e. a paying client) before you develop it!!
You need to define a niche where you are the best and only in the world – and have the discipline to stick to it! (say ‘no’ to other opportunities and to your other ideas if they are not aligned. Even if you are hungry, better say no to what is not aligned)
Don’t over-plan. Forecasts are wrong anyway. I am working with a 6 months plan that’s quite enough.
Be conservative in your finances. Keep sufficient money in the company. It will give you freedom: freedom to invest, to take time off to create, to say ‘no’ to an annoying client or because you want to stick to your niche.
Everything is in the relationship with the clients. Integrity and commitment are key to long term relationships
What prevents you from starting your activity (or asking for a client to pay the right price) is in your head, nothing else. It’s purely psychological. The lizard brain creates that fear of the unknown. Remember, today employment is possibly more risky than being on your own!
Make sure to have a permanent council of advisors you can rely on (if needed, get them interested in your business)
Once you have found a great idea that resonates with clients, the harder part is to figure out how to scale your idea (I am not yet there but working on it)

I am now looking forward working as a team with exceptional co-workers that have complementary skills, and not any more individually like we started working. Our biggest challenge for the year to come is to figure out how to scale and expand geographically. Stay tuned!

How Many Seeds Did You Plant Today?

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant” – Robert Louis Stevenson.

Our life is uncertain and unpredictable. We can’t know what will come out of our latest initiative, and possibly, it will look quite different from what we envisaged.

What we can do, though, is make sure we plant everyday enough seeds so that when they grow, we’ll have a few successes among the outright failures and those other seeds that won’t grow any useful products. Most of what you start will fail. It’s just a matter of starting enough stuff to succeed.

Ask yourself how many seeds you planted today: how many new people you met, how many initiatives you started or tested. That’s what should be your golden standard.

How will you double the number of seeds you plant daily, weekly?

Why You Should Fail More Often

Let’s come back to the financial markets as a model of complex system that can be easily measured. What are the strategies that can provide gains with limited risks and significant chance of success?

Investment is more about managing the emotions of failure than it is about being clever

Professionals will tell you that the winning strategies (provided there are winning strategies,as we now can doubt from our post on the superiority of randomness) always involve some dose of failure. The trick is to have less failures than wins, and / or smaller failures than wins. As long as you invest more on stocks that have chances of recovering, over time this strategy will provide interesting returns with a relative certainty – the larger returns being generated by the larger or more frequent number of tries.

What is interesting here is that real professionals that deal with the stock market everyday will never speak of ‘sure win’. They know they have to accept a certain amount of failure. They know there will be bad days as there will be good days – only hopefully slightly less frequently. They know they will have to deal with the emotions of failure and not let themselves be driven by them.

In our real life, that complex system, the lesson holds. We can’t succeed without a certain dose of failure. And the more often we try, the higher will be our overall success. We just need to make sure that any failure will not kill us (that we have a cut-loss soon enough) and that our successes have a bigger upside than our failures’ downside.

In complex systems, frequent failure is the key to success. So, when do you start to fail more often?

How to Take Decisions in a Complex Environment

How can you take the (right) (best) decision in a complex environment? Rely on your team. Decide on the ‘who’ and not on the ‘what’.

That’s all. That’s so much.

How can you take the right decisions in a real, complex world?

Jim Collins reminds us in his foreword to the book “Fortune: the Greatest Business Decisions of All Times“: “The greatest decisions were not “what” but “who?”, they were people decisions.”

“Fundamentally, the world is uncertain. Decisions are about the future and your place in the future when that future is uncertain. So what is the key thing you can do to prepare for that uncertainty? You can have the right people with you“.

The next time, instead of spending too much time developing spreadsheet projections over the next decades (which mean absolutely nothing), focus your energy on getting the right people in. Not just people like you, but a diverse and complementary team. Then through conflict and discussions, you’ll make your way through this complex world.

Where is your team right now? When do you start building it to thrive in this complex world?

What is Strategy really about? Analysis or Action?

“Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do”. This quote by David H Maister in “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but Not Easy” is actually a great insight. Read it again just to get it.

Fat person working out — Will you make the first step like this guy?

His view is that it is quite easy to know what you need to do; but that genius lies in effectively doing it. Like the Fat Smoker knows he needs to stop smoking and needs to go on a diet but for some reason it turns out to be too hard.

Would competitive advantage be more on the execution side than on the conceptual strategy side? As mentioned often in the field of startups, ideas by themselves have absolutely no value; what gives them value is their realization. It is the fact that you battle the world to give shape to your idea – probably pivoting and improving from time to time as you get feedback from the world.

Of course then all the usual issues about changing behavior and doing new things apply: do not set unrealistic expectations, set achievable intermediate goals and follow up on the long run, get support on your commitment from your environment, etc.

Remember that doing more theoretical analysis of your strategy is not very effective. What’s effective is to plow your way decidedly. Take action. Now.

How a Team’s Consistent Time-Orientation is Key in Team Effectiveness

Our time-orientation (future, present or past) is somewhat part of our personality. To be effective, teams might need to be constituted by people that share similar time-orientation. In fact it might be one of the most important recruitment criteria.

Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd in “The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time that Will Change Your Life“, argue that we have quite different perspectives on time and they are quite stable through time.

The Marshmallow Test — How do your recruits fare on the Marshmallow test?

Present-oriented people tend to be hedonistic, and future oriented people tend to defer gratification (like in the famous marshmallow experiment: leave a child alone with a marshmallow for a few minutes explaining that if he/she does not eat the marshmallow he/she’ll get a second one – observe the reaction).

In “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but not Easy“, David Maister argues that effective implementation of a strategy by a team can only happen if the team’s time-orientation is consistent. If the strategy is very much about making an effort or even a sacrifice to reach an improved condition, you’d better have around the table people that share the same preference for deferred gratification, i.e. that are strongly future-oriented.

I find increasingly that personal time-orientation is definitely a major criterion for hiring in particular for a startup – you want people that are ready to make the effort, forego gratification like time for themselves and with their families, to build something better in the future – you want future-oriented people.

In other occupations you might rather want present- or past-oriented people.

How do you know people’s time-orientation? Actually it is generally quite obvious from observing and listening to people. People that are present-oriented will need to spend a lot of time caring about themselves and will generally make sure they enjoy to the most their current situation. People that are future-oriented will live stoical lives and invest heavily for some distant future.

Look at your prospective hires’ time orientation to check it is fit with your preferences and what you want to achieve! I make it an ever increasing important criteria for recruiting fro my team!

Do you want to know your time orientation in a scientific way? Take Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory and compare yourself to other people!

On which Organizational Plateau is your Company?

Verne Harnish (author, consultant and entrepreneur), a specialist of small companies, has a great insight: there are relatively stable plateaus for company size, separated by steep “Valleys of Death”. Here’s what it looks like (numbers based on US statistics):

Company survival patterns by size of company — The companies’ development plateaus

The explanation goes, each plateau corresponds to a more or less stable organizational form; however to be able to transition from one plateau to the other, a significant transformation needs to happen in the way the company is run. And this transition is tough, because it will shake the organization and established areas of power; while at the same time the company still needs to run its operations and make money.

For example, from the 1-3 employees plateau to the 7-12 employee plateau you need to establish systems and cannot any more rely on people doing everything; then to jump to the 40-70 employees plateau you need to establish a management team and cannot manage everything directly any more, etc.

Your organization might be on such a plateau right now. Be aware of the looming “valley of death” that separates you from your growth target. How experienced are you with the new organizational form you want to reach? How ready are you to get through the tough re-organization it will require?

Many thanks to John Warrillow’s blog (Built to Sell) and his always very inspiring insights for the idea and the picture

When you most feel like giving up… what should you do?

There is an interesting statement by Robin Sharma:

“When you most feel like giving up is when you most need to be keeping on“. How much is that applicable?

The need to be persistent is a mantra of self-development books. And indeed, it is a very important parameters to beat the Resistance that tries to prevent us from creating anything new (re-read the “War of Art” blog post and the “The War of Art” book if you’re not sure any more about what is Resistance).

I have experienced it first hand in my entrepreneurial venture. I have decided to give it 2 years before deciding to continue or ditch it. And when I feel miserable, stressed and depressed I remember this (or my wife does remind me), which gets me back on track.

There are some instances, though, where it might be better to stop and start something new. They are rare. It is very difficult to identify these rare instances because Resistance tricks us into believing that any difficulty is candidate for stopping. To get a full review of this important issue, re-read “The Dip” by Seth Godin. From a practical perspective, here’s a useful and simple process:

define first some “breaking parameters and criteria” and write them down
Decide that you will stop if you reach those breaking parameters
Be very strict that you apply the exact parameters and criteria that you had written down a few months earlier

Be persistent. And know what are the rare instances where not to be.

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