Category: K.E.E.N. skills

How You Should Embrace Backlash

In the Quartz post ‘The most successful activists don’t fight backlash, they embrace it‘, the author explains how activists of such causes as gay, immigration climate change etc do in fact embrace resistance to progress their cause.

Of course when there is change, there is resistance: “Where there are revolutions, protests, and massive legislative changes, there is always backlash. Sometimes this backlash is more powerful and influential than the initial change itself. Even simple acts of persuasion are readily met with a counterargument. Whether the interactions are big or small, humans are conditioned to fight back.”

However, “this doesn’t mean that progress is unattainable. Accepting backlash as inevitable can be a powerful way of conducting advocacy because it allows you to take control of the narrative and steer it towards your goals. There are two ways to embrace backlash and leverage it for change. Stoke it, or repurpose it.”. Stoking backlash means heightening the opposition getting your group united in opposing the resistance; re-purposing the backlash means playing with its expression form to create an opposite result.

It is good to meet resistance: it means we are actually achieving to move something. And embracing backlash and resistance is the way to progress, instead of opposing straight up. Would you find situations where the force should come from your opponent?

Share

How Persuading Ourselves to Do Something Might Take the Longest

Seth Godin in his blog post ‘But why does it take so long?‘ makes the point that the time-frame to achieve various objectives can be very different. And that physical factors are not the limit when it comes to creative work: it is coordinating, persuading, pathfinding. Moreover, that what may take the longest of all is persuading ourselves to go for it.

I find this statement quite to the point: it is true that what often takes the longest in all projects is the decision to go for it. Self-persuasion is a major hindrance. Even more so when we have to persuade ourselves against the opinion of our environment.

The total time to achieve a project is thus too often driven by the time we need to persuade ourselves to go for it. Isn’t that a major issue in a world where projects need to be developed always quicker before they become obsolete? There is a pressure and a benefit to those that can persuade themselves quicker that it is worth trying the project.

This statement gives quite a useful insight on some critical success factors in today’s world. Let’s take less time to persuade ourselves before we go for it. Maybe experiment more at small scale before going for it at a large scale.. which beings us back to the lean startup and other considerations that aim at lowering the barrier for action.

Share

How Startup Founders Should Not Work for Free

In his post ‘Pervasive Startup Myth: Don’t Work for Free’, Tim Berry explains why investors are generally not impressed by start-up founders working for free: “Investors want people committed to working their startups, and that usually takes getting them paid“.

From my perspective and experience, there are lots of good reasons for not working for free and a few caveats:

  • working for free or cheap will not demonstrate if your business model really works at the normal price it should command, and the market price of the contributors,
  • working for free or cheap does not favorably reflect on the value you provide to the client,
  • entrepreneurs still have to provide for their family, and even if their significant other can compensate for a while, it is not a sustainable proposition.

There are a few caveats from my experience and practice though:

  • In my companies we do account for what the founders or partners should get paid but we may postpone payment of part of it to protect cash flow, which is what really counts in startups growing rapidly (fixed salary would be typically be quite low, and ‘bonuses’ paid when cash flow is good),
  • There are instances where working cheap to establish oneself in a new market might be a conscious choice. It comes with the difficulty of raising prices later, so should rather be presented as a special discount against a normal price rather than a low price,
  • Sometimes working for a low price but being compensated on knowledge and exposure might be a good deal, but it needs to be strictly limited in time.

So, stop working for free when you deliver value to your clients: stop devaluating yourselves!

Share

How to Find Peacefulness in the Midst of Chaos Without Escaping

In his post ‘A Life of Peacefulness‘, Leo Babauta makes an extremely interesting point: when faced with chaos and stress, our first reaction may be some kind of escapism (I am myself guilty of it, sometimes). What we should do though is to learn how to remain peaceful in this environment.

I quite like the list all the different types of escapism he mentions, like:

  • “Try to get our world in order, trying to control everything
  • Hide from all the things we do, try not to think about it all
  • Complain about it, about the burden of it all
  • etc.“

And I could certainly add more to the list. Whether real escape and flight, or only in our mind, it is true that we tend to escape difficult situation in one way or the other.

The revolutionary approach he mentions of instead trying to be internally peaceful in the midst of the storm is an interesting one, although certainly quite tough to achieve. He proposes 3 steps:

  • Face the difficulty
  • Open & Relax
  • Take the next step, in peace

How about trying to apply this framework to your current chaos?

Share

How To Do Your Best and then Let Go

Robin Sharma writes “Do your best then let go—and let life do the rest“. This strikes a chord with me as I have notoriously difficulties to let go after I have done my best.

I struggle mainly on two issues.

First, there is always this difficulty of knowing how much doing your best is really doing your best. There is always the risk of stopping too early, and not really doing anything remarkable; and there is the risk of spending too much time and effort to optimise the last bit, which is not really effective. Where should we stop ‘making our best’?

Second, I have difficulties being patient and letting go, waiting for the world to notice and to respond. Generally the response is good, but how much effort should be made in broadcasting our work, showing how we have made our best?

For the first aspect – where should we stop- it is probably a question of experience and knowing what the average person delivers in this context. On the second aspect – how to let go, well, I have to learn to be patient and reap better what the world returns.

What about you? How good are you at deciding when you have done your best and then letting go?

Share

How Life Replies to the Quality of Your Character

Robin Sharma writes “Life replies to the quality of your character. As you rise, everything ascends with you“.

I like this quote because it reminds us that what happens to us in great part depends on us and how we can elevate our character.

It also reminds us how important it is to improve the quality of our character as we advance through life. This happens through lessons learnt and sheet contemplation of our human condition.

It might be important to concentrate more on elevating our character, focusing on how we could have responded differently to certain situations. In any case that’s something I am striving to achieve.

Share

Why You Need to Keep Flexible Time in Your Calendar

In large organisations I often find people who have an overflowing, busy schedule. It’s not possible to get any slot in the next 3 months. How can that be? In his post ‘managerial anorexia‘ (in French) Robert Branche explains how that is madness, and even more in our increasingly complex world.

In this situation, what happens when there is a delay, and unexpected event, a new priority to be implemented? How can new ways of working and innovation develop when there is no unassigned time available ?

When can people take quality time to think, develop strategies, respond instead of reacting?

Adaptability and responsiveness when facing the unknown requires availability and flexible time. It requires energy reserves.

Bottom line: I need to get better at preserving free slots in my calendar, as do many people I know in particular in high stakes positions in large organisations. And that really means booking free time from now on! When do you start as well?

Share

How to Get Respect is to Give Respect

Robin Sharma writes “The finest way to get respect is to give respect“.

In my view, respect is an essential component of relationship and I find it necessary to maintain as much as possible respect for people we relate to, irrespective of the circumstance. It is not easy all the time and I do not succeed all the time, but that’s the objective.

Being respected in another issue. It can’t be an objective in all cases because some people are too happy abusing you. Definitely however, to get respect most of the time, the best is to be respectful of others all the time.

How much respect do you give to everyone you relate to, irrespective of their “level”?

Share

How Emotional Labor Unfortunately Became a Gender-Orientated Concept

I am personally using the term ’emotional labor’ to designate part of my activity when it comes to dealing with other people emotions, in coaching or consulting or private life. I was struck to find that at least in the US it appears that this expression has now taken a gender inequality meaning.

This Quartz post ‘The men’s guide to understanding emotional labor‘ explains this approach and the evolution of the meaning of this term over the years.

I do not understand why emotional labor is gender orientated. It means working on one own’s emotions to deal with other’s emotions. As a man, I am doing some of this work and I can identify those moments where I do this work. I do recognise that it is an essential part of my professional work even in consulting. People are more or less good at emotional labor irrespective of gender. Emotional labor is available to all of us.

In the future I will continue to use the term ’emotional labor’ as a gender-neutral concept to designate an essential skill of professional and KEENs.

Share

How People Constantly Take Decisions Based on Opinions

In my consulting work I am permanently astonished how much people tend to take decisions based on opinions without even taking a few hours to establish some quick facts about the situation.

Of course we all know that at the end we tend to take decisions based on our feelings, and that over-analysis is not good. However in the professional field it is astonishing to see how many substantial decisions impacting many people are taken with limited analysis or basic fact checking about orders of magnitude. A common example in my speciality is project scheduling, and scheduling forecast. It is quite easy to establish the current slippage of a schedule and the current productivity level compared to the expectations. Decision-makers do not even take a few minutes to establish those facts.

As a consultant a substantial part of my job is to establish some of those facts to question the worldview of decision-makers. And by doing that I am often disturbing because I often invalidate well established opinions. Up to the point that I often need backing by top management for those exercises.

Please take a few minutes to gather some basic facts and orders of magnitude before taking decisions. It would so greatly improve a number of situations. It is astonishing how many bad decisions are taken without basic fact-checking.

Share

How the Hard Part is Falling Out of Love with the Old Idea

I love this Seth Godin post ‘Falling Out‘: “The hard part isn’t coming up with a new idea. The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea”

In my life as an entrepreneur I encounter or devise more ideas than I can execute. This is often the case in private life as well. The key issue is when one decides to develop some new idea, how to let older activities fall?

I am quite guilty of adding up new ideas and activities without removing older ones, leading to situations of excess work. I then have to do a pruning exercise to concentrate on what is the most important at the time.

I thus fully agree that the hardest is often to stop doing older ideas and objectives, and dropping former objectives. And I also need to improve on this!

Share

How the Problem of Success is that the World Conspires to Stop you Doing the Thing that You Do

I encourage you to read the writer Neil Gaiman‘s 2012 graduation keynote address. It offers invaluable advice on dealing with failure, and on being successful, in creative fields. Although it is primarily addressed at artists, I believe it is quite applicable to entrepreneurs, who are another type of creators.

The piece of advice that struck me is related to success, after the usual initial failure phase. (“The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.”)

“The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.” And that is of course the issue for all successful entrepreneurs; working on the company is taking lots of effort and we are doing less of what we wanted to develop when we created the organisation.

There is a lot of advice about how to deal with failure. Not so much on how to deal with success, be it whole or limited. However it can also make people miserable. Make sure your reflect on what you get drawn in when you start being successful, and decide what you really want to do.

Share