Category: K.E.E.N. skills

How the Business Model of Business Book Writers Changes

An interesting discussion on the evolution of the business book writer model is detailed in the post ‘The quiet revolution in business book publishing‘. With the increase in self-publishing, books are increasingly conceived as a part of a personal brand rather than “solid tomes by well-respected experts based on years of research and published by big name or specialist houses“.

The description of this evolution resonates with the way I envisage my books: the poste describes how for many authors “the book is not so much a product as an enhanced business card, so giving books away is their favored modus operandi, and income from retail sales is a non-essential bonus.” As a result, “The average business book is now closer to a slim 40,000 words than a substantial 80,000”

“Business authors want to get their book through production and to market in the shortest possible time to maximise the currency of their content and freshness of their offer. So for them, the business model of traditional publishing – with its focus on broad market titles, slow, intensive production cycles, and well-known authors to generate maximum sales – does not work.”

I’m quite happy to see that my approach to business books is becoming quite mainstream. In any case, this is a massive disruption for traditional publishing houses.

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How Grit Is An Essential Ingredient for Success

Angela Duckworth’s book ‘Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance‘ describes how grit is an essential ingredient for success.

“Many of the people I talked to could also recount tales of rising stars who, to everyone’s surprise, dropped out or lost interest before they could realize their potential. Apparently, it was critically important— and not at all easy— to keep going after failure: “Some people are great when things are going well, but they fall apart when things aren’t.””

I increasingly observe that what makes a difference is not so much how we respond when successful, but rather how we respond under failure. Do we show determination and flexibility, or do we just become disheartened and stop making efforts?

Responding, rather than reacting, when we face failure, and making sure we learn our lessons and bounce back – that’s probably an essential element that distinguishes successful from less successful people. How do you fare under failure?

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How Starting Something Often Takes Longer Than Doing It

In his post ‘But why does it take so long?‘, Seth Godin states that “Persuading ourselves to move forward can take even longer [than doing, coordinating, persuading, pathfinding…]”

I find this observation very much to the point: although building something takes time, for the vast majority of people, just deciding to start takes even more time (and sometimes an infinite duration as they never get to start).

It is only by trying many things that one finds what works for himself and for the world. Therefore, losing excessive time deciding to start is probably the number one issue why people don’t manage to achieve what they aspire to.

Don’t spend too much time overthinking about what you want to start. Just start it. Start it small, start it slow but start. That’s the key.

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How Goodhart’s Law Makes Us Aware of the Downside of Measurement

Goodhart’s law basically says that ‘When a measure becomes a metric, it ceases to be a good measure’. This is quite powerful, and observable on a daily basis in all sorts of settings.

This law has profound implications about target-setting in organizations and many other situations. In the very recommended post ‘Goodhart’s Law and Why Measurement is Hard‘, the author explores measurement in complex situations. And in effect, complexity ruins the interest of measurement, because of the retro-actions of measurement on the system. Goodhart’s law is thus fundamentally an observation from complex systems that evolve as a result of self-measures.

Goodhart’s law is mostly important in organizational settings: it is important to measure, but as soon as a measure is in place, it becomes a target and therefore, drives behavior – sometimes in a unfavorable manner. The only response is either, to measure but not publicize the metric; or use some version of a balanced scorecards with several balances metrics.

In any case, beware the Goodhart’s law when defining metrics in your organization!

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How Good People Don’t Wait for Opportunities, they Create Them

I like this post from Om Swami ‘Four Traits of Successful People‘. The post is mainly about the fact that you should not wait for opportunities, but create them.

“I meet brilliant people all the time who could do a lot more in their life. But, they are stuck, they feel. Life hasn’t been fair to them or they are waiting for the right opportunity, they tell me.”

Of course it may sometimes be easier to say than to do. But, “If you say, I can’t do it, you are right already. If you ask, how can I do it, at least your mind will shift from denial to a thinking mode.”

We need to shift more often to ‘how can I do it’ mode and create opportunities. Some will work, some won’t, you might get lucky or unlucky, but at the end you’ll have created your way.

When do you start?

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How Dramatic The Effect of Our Daily Physiological Rhythm Is

Following our previous post ‘How We Can Choose The Best Timing for Certain Activities‘  and the excellent book by Daniel Pink ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘, one of the issues which come out is the dramatic influence of our daily rhythm on our activities.

In particular, Daniel Pink exposes several dramatic examples of poor decision-making in the afternoon. And that many cognitive tasks should better be done in the morning. “Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days . Across many domains , the trough represents a danger zone for productivity , ethics , and health.”

“In short , all of us experience the day in three stages — a peak , a trough , and a rebound . And about three – quarters of us ( larks and third birds ) experience it in that order . But about one in four people , those whose genes or age make them night owls , experience the day in something closer to the reverse order — recovery, trough, peak .”

Of course I was aware of the effect of our circadian rhythm, but what struck me is how significant that can be: “these daily fluctuations are more extreme than we realize . The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol“. Food for thought!

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How We Can Choose The Best Timing for Certain Activities

In the excellent book ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing‘, Daniel Pink investigates the importance of Timing in what happens in our lives.

The take of the book is that “Timing , we believe , is an art. I will show that timing is really a science — an emerging body of multifaceted , multidisciplinary research that offers fresh insights into the human condition and useful guidance on working smarter and living better.”

The book covers timing issues at different time scales: day, week, month, year and even decades. It shows that certain timing issues can be predicted, linked to our physiology. Some others can be predicted thanks to our psychology (for example, “Negotiators with a deadline are far more likely to reach an agreement than those without a deadline — and that agreement comes disproportionately at the very end of the allotted time“.

I was a bit frustrated by the fact that the role of luck in timing was not sufficiently developed when it comes to the timing of single events of major importance in our lives. However the guidance given on the part of timing we can control – when best to take decisions, learn, be creative makes it a worthwhile read.

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How Life Is a Lot More Like Poker Than Like Chess

Following from previous posts ‘How Most of Our Decisions Are Bets‘ and ‘How We Constantly Underestimate the Role of Luck in Our Lives‘ I have received some reactions about the fact I was exaggerating wildly the role of luck in life.

Our education, vocabulary and most of the messages conveyed by role models would tend to demonstrate that success comes from hard work and commitment; and that success is deserved through an entitlement created by effort, rather than coming from luck – a terrible thought!

In her excellent book ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts‘ Annie Duke makes a great comparison: life is much more like poker than chess. In chess, there is no unpredictability; rules are set, and it is only a competition between minds. In poker, there is luck, psychology and unpredictability.

Of course, hard work and dedication does help. I am not saying that it is not important. But believing that one is entitled to success because of hard work and dedication goes one step too far.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the belief in success being owed to hard work, and that hard work entitles to success, is a society-stabilisation message conveyed through the previous ages.

A lot of what happens in our lives is down to luck. The bigger our decisions, the more they are bets in uncertainty. We need to concentrate on being more lucky, know how to catch opportunities, rather than believing that keeping our head down and working hard will be the only solution.

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How Most of Our Decisions Are Bets

Following on the previous post ‘How We Should Differentiate Decision and Outcome‘, Annie Duke (professional poker player turned business speaker and author) in her excellent book ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts‘ affirms that actually most decisions are bets. This was quite striking for me at first, but after some thoughts I now see the rationale.

Most of the decisions we take in life are fraught with uncertainty. We almost never have full information, and we are at the mercy of wildly unexpected events (also called ‘luck’). Of course the degree of uncertainty differs from decision to decision, but for most of our life-changing decisions, uncertainty is quite high.

“World – class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is : a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets , I discovered , helped me avoid common decision traps , learn from results in a more rational way , and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.”

“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out : the quality of our decisions and luck . Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”

Looking at business or life decisions as bets gives quite an interesting edge to the process, which I find very worthwhile.

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How We Should Differentiate Decision and Outcome

Because of the role of luck in our lives we need to be able to differentiate the quality of our decision and its outcome. That’s a key lesson I learnt from an excellent book ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts‘ by Annie Duke, a professional poker player turned business speaker and author.

We have a tendency to equate the quality of our decisions with their outcome. “Poker players have a word for this : “resulting”. When I started playing poker , more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting , cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run“.

This distinction is profound and I do fall into this trap too. Like almost everybody: “ask any group members to come […] with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year . I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions .”

I am committing to try to discern the quality of the decision versus its outcome, because I believe it is important when it comes to improving one’s decision-making ability.

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How to Accept that Low Productivity Moments Are Needed to be Productive

Following on the previous post on how to measure personal productivity, one aspect of Seth Godin’s ‘Business/busyness‘ post has retained my attention. “Our productivity varies wildly. It depends on the project, on the connections, on where we are in the process. ”

power nap
Getting ready for a productive stint

I would bring it one notch further: depending on how we measure it, our personal productivity varies greatly during a day or over any given time period, and that’s needed. The extreme example is to take a power nap (productivity zero) before a productive moment. We can’t be hyper-productive at any time – that’s an energy issue.

Even at the scale of the week or month, we might spend a lot of time researching or reading books on the subject (low productivity) before producing something that the world will greatly value (high productivity). We take leave days off to be refreshed for work. As a consultant, if client fees are used as a measurement of value created (for the client), periods of Business Development and proposal production periods would be categorised improductive, but they end up generating substantial value for a new client.

Therefore, even if our average productivity or value creation is important, we need to accept that it varies wildly during our day, week, month or year – and that low productivity moment are needed to prepare for high productivity periods. It looks like a paradox, but it is in fact complementary.

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How You Should Journal in Your Blog

Many self-development authors and speakers describe the benefits of holding a journal. It is even a trendy occupation with journal notebooks being produced specifically. I agree and disagree: journalling is good, but why not doing it in a blog?

Holding a journal is a great way to take a few minutes self-reflection on current events impacting one’s life. It is also useful – sometimes amazing and sometimes sad – to come back to a former entry weeks or months afterwards. But nobody will ever benefit from your reflections and thoughts. So why not write them in a blog? Of course, deeply personal issues can’t be shared so easily, but what about your thoughts and reflections on what happens in the wider world? Writing them in a blog – even if no-one reads it – forces to reach a certain quality of output and thought which is a good challenge. And certainly, holding a blog with a fixed publication schedule forces me to sit down and reflect from time to time, even if I am very busy.

So, why not hold a blog instead of holding a journal?

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