Category: K.E.E.N. skills

How Founder Compatibility Is Essential In Startups and Any Venture

This post ‘Startup Founder Compatibility is Vital‘ reminds us how essential it can be that founders go along well together, both in good and bad times. And it is not easy because often, company founder teams get together only a short time before kicking off the venture.

While the post is specifically geared towards start-ups, this is quite true for any kind of company including taking over an existing company. Differences and mis-alignments will appear in tense times, and can be quite devastating and mentally tiring (I speak by experience).

“The relationship among founders of a healthy business is like a marriage. Compatible goals, thinking, values, and decision-making styles is really important.” I can’t agree more, and like marriage it is essential to take the time to know each other well before committing into it.

“Don’t confuse compatibility with sameness. It takes a mix of different skills and backgrounds to build a business right.” On this one, I agree that different skills are needed. However I disagree when it comes to values and understanding of business ethics. On those aspects, an alignment is essential because when bad comes to the worst, founders will have to look at their values as a reference. And a misalignment there have quite dramatic consequences.

Founder compatibility is essential, and particularly in terms of shared values, ethics and benevolence. Take the time to know your partners before entering into a venture. It is like marriage.

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How We Should Worry About Who We Have Helped Become Better People

Clayton Christensen, the innovation scholar that wrote so many books about innovation, passed away recently. He wrote “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”

This quote if of course inspiring, and coming from someone with the life experience of Clayton Christensen, quite interesting too – since he had certainly reached a very high level of prominence.

This probably explains his drive to be a university professor while he could have had a very successful career in consulting and private ventures.

Still its reminds us that what people will remember is how much we helped them become better people. How can we work to achieve this better?

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How Long Term Work Motivation is Related to Alignment with Purpose

Following up from the previous post ‘How Sexy Startups Can Also Sometimes Be Toxic Workplaces‘, one important aspect is that poor alignment with purpose generally don’t make it a sustainable venture. Toxic workplace cultures can’t be sustainable. Because if we want to remain individually motivated, our work needs to align with some purpose – and not just external motivators like compensation. This is developed quite well in Steve Pavlina’s post ‘Numbers vs Alignment‘

I find the point well written “If the numbers in your work (like sales and profits) matter more than the alignment of your work (like fulfillment, purpose, and appreciation), then even if you succeed on those terms, you may end up with bigger numbers but with lower alignment, which can strangle your motivation.”

And the corollary “People so often underestimate how much motivation matters – and especially how sensitive it is to alignment. It’s so easy to make misaligned decisions that eventually drag down motivation and lead to a place of stagnation, where it’s possible to be stuck for years.”

How aligned is your work with your purpose and what fulfills you? Is your motivation thus sustainable and not just temporary?

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How the Collaborative Age Requires A New Leadership Mindset

This MIT-Sloan paper ‘Leadership Mindsets for the New Economy‘ takes the perspective that the new economy requires a shift in leadership practices.

It starts with the excellent quote by Patty McCord, former chief talent officer, Netflix: “In today’s world, everyone has to adopt a leadership mindset. We have to think of ourselves as members of a leadership community“. This means that it is recognized that in the collaborative age, leadership capabilities need to be more widely spread inside organisations.

I find the rest of the paper a bit disappointing and too MBA like, with the identification of four key traits of leaders in the modern economy – producers, investors, connectors, and explorers. It does not go back to the question of how to make everyone in the organisation a leader – and how to make sure everyone plays the part he or she is the best about among those four traits. And that’s clearly the most important.

While this issue is recognized (“building a collective leadership capability is the strongest route to competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced world“), tomorrow’s determining leadership trait is indeed to allow the growth of leaders in all levels of the collaborative organisation. I’d rather see research exploring that direction.

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How Excellence is a Moral Decision

In this Gapingvoid post ‘Creating excellence is not a job. Creating excellence is a moral act‘, the point is made that “Excellence is not a law of physics. Excellence is a moral act. You create excellence by deciding to do so, nothing more“

This means that excellence is what you do when no-one is looking, and it is a personal commitment. It can even become one way to define onself like Horst Shulze co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton Group is quoted saying “And life becomes much more valuable. It becomes much more fulfilling. It becomes something where you’re using your time to define yourself, and the first one who will see it and will be happy about it is you, yourself.”

This also means that striving for excellence can’t just be imposed from above by a manager. It is a real leadership act and requires leaders to demonstrate their commitment too in everything they do.

Excellence is not a quick recipe and a buzz word. It is a moral decision and requires strong leadership to spread.

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How We Need to Be Fully Committed to a Limited Number of Intents

In the post ‘The Heartbreaking Effects of Being Only Partly Committed to Most Things‘, Leo Babauta exposes all the negative aspects of incomplete commitment. Partial commitment is however much more common than full commitment (remember gyms make a lot of money from people taking memberships and never showing up!).

It is true that partial commitment leads to losing mental effort and investment. And it has negative consequences, including “[losing] trust in ourselves, beat ourselves up for failing again, create a negative self-image, which affects everything“, and possibly creating a negative spiral of non-achievement.

At the same time we can’t commit fully to everything, and in the portfolio of our many commitments, some will take the back seat and will have to be postponed. At any time, we anyway have only a certain limited amount of discipline and will.

I am not thus as negative as Leo Babauta on the issues of partial commitment. There are many more things we’d like to do than we can, and we also need to investigate new things. We can only be fully committed at any one time on a very limited number of projects. But it is true that we have to be fully committed to some. The issue is thus not to be partially committed to some projects, but rather if we are not fully committed to some of those.

What are the projects and intents you are fully committed to?

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How We Need to Remember that Extreme Stress Creates Diamonds

I love this quote “In times of extreme stress, just remember that pressure makes diamonds.” I’m not sure who to attribute it to, but it’s quite inspiring.

This serves to remind us that we are often mainly shaped by hard times rather than smooth times. Therefore albeit difficult in the present moment, highly stressful situations will transform us.

Hopefully, of course, this transformation will be for the better (extreme stress and pressure can also create stuff that is less nice than diamonds!).

Still it is a good reminder that we can get positively transformed by periods of intense pressure and stress. Keep it up!

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How Being Benevolent Is Not Being Naive

I tend to be rather the benevolent type in business, for example linking often people together without seeking any kind of compensation when I believe this could create value, or providing free advice based on my experience. Recently someone make the reflection that I was being naive. I thus pondered: does being benevolent make me naive in this supposedly shark-infested life?

My conclusion is that no, being benevolent is not being naive, at least up to a certain point. While it is important to protect your core and make sure there is no trespassing of certain limits, I deeply believe that being benevolent is rather positive. Of course this is all based on the consideration that we don’t live in a scarce world but rather in an abundant one. Therefore, creating value for others or supporting them in periods of difficulties is not necessary detrimental to me; and rather creates additional possibilities in the future. They may or not materialize, but at least in the short term I’ll feel good to have supported others.

Of course some limits need to be put there, and there are definitely some people that would be keen to take advantage, but I find that they are relatively easy to identify (not so easy to get rid of sometimes though!).

So, benevolent is definitely not being naive. It is even sometime being courageous; in any case, it is what we should do to create new opportunities for others – and possibly for us in the long term too.

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How Having the Right Type of Competition is Great

I like Simon Sinek’s argument ‘How having the right kind of rival can help you thrive in a changing world‘.

“By identifying a Worthy Rival and looking at their strengths and abilities, we can keep improving and innovating“.

According to Simon Sinek, to really understand this we also need to understand we live in an infinite game and not just in a finite game. In a finite game, competition for limited resources means the loser gets less. In an infinite game, there can be mutual benefits based on an expanding playground, with everyone winning.

Having a worthy rival is essential for improvement and progress. If that happens in a fair and almost cooperative manner it is the recipe for great mutual success. However I observe that too many people and corporations still view the world as finite and competition as a war where competitors should get destroyed.

I am myself trying often to get into a positive relationship with competitors, but I must admit that I’ve been often told that it was too naive.

Well I’ll continue until I find a worthy rival with an open infinite mindset which will help me – and me help him – get to greater heights.

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Why We Need to Work on Unfashionable Problems

I am getting fed up by the hype around fashionable ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Everything should be Artificially Intelligent nowadays (ref my previous post ‘How Automation Should Not Be Marketed as Intelligent‘). Thus I very much like this post of Paul Graham on ‘Fashionable Problems‘. His point is that too many people work on the latest fashionable technology or problem, and too little on other important aspects.

“Even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they’ve all worked on similar things. Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.”

On this other hand this consideration also shows that there are great opportunities in working on other things than the latest fashion (although of course it may be much more difficult to get funded). And this is what I like to consider: non-conventional people that follow their interest irrespective of the latest fashion. Paul Graham reminds us actually that “The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you’re doing. Then you’ll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it’s too marginal to matter.”

Thus, do not worry too much about the latest fashion on tech. There are so many other areas where progress would be profitable for humankind. Don’t let yourself be deterred. Find what you’re passionate about and go for it!

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How Mindfulness Requires Compassion

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy‘ and the excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘, the author underlines an essential element: the need for compassion – for oneself and for others.

I like the conclusion of the post: “Mindfulness is only part of the work. The work also requires compassion — for yourself and others. It requires vulnerability and the ability to open your heart. It requires honesty and the willingness to face things. It requires being willing to love things as they are, without needing to control things. It requires letting go of what you think things should be like, letting go of what you think you should have or shouldn’t have. The work requires you to be willing to be curious, to be open, to remain in not knowing.”

Mindfulness is a journey and to be successful, a measure of acceptance of oneself and others is needed. It is actually quite a necessary condition to progress beyond a certain point. Be more compassionate to yourselves and to others!

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How We Need to Remember that Mindfulness is Difficult and Messy

This excellent post by Leo Babauta ‘The Honest Guide to Mindfulness‘ reminds us that mindfulness – a highly trendy concept – is difficult and messy.

“If you’re new to mindfulness, it’s easy to get the wrong idea from all the marketing you’ll find online. Images of people at complete peace with the world and themselves, full of bliss, simply by sitting still and meditating for a few minutes … they are beautiful images, but they don’t tell the whole truth.”

It is hard to be mindful, and it will take substantial practice and exercise to reach a satisfactory mindfulness stage. Leo Babauta also underlines that it is very uncomfortable as it will real things you’d probably prefer to remain hidden.

This also means that probably much less people have reached a satisfactory level of mindfulness than what they advertise. Difficult is always filters out those that are really motivated and ready to put the effort. Much less people are probably truly mindful than what they say.

If you want to embrace mindfulness, be ready for quite a tough journey of introspection and seeing the world differently, which can be quite unsettling. Still it is quite a beneficial experience, just fasten your seat-belt!

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