How to Deal With an Evolving Circle of Friends and Acquaintances

Following up on our post ‘How to Decide When It is Time to Know New People‘, the associated question with looking for some new acquaintances to help us grow is, because we have only limited time in our lives, that it means stopping, or seeing less some people. That is often the most difficult part of having our circle of relationships evolve.

It may be more obvious or easier to stop seing someone that is exceedingly negative and continuously speaks about impending doom, or involves us in a toxic relationship. It is far less easy to spend less time with some people that just don’t grow at the same rate than us, because it is so subjective. And we may have such common emotional baggage and history that it is just difficult to spend less time together.

Let’s take this statement positively: it is good to try to meet new people that will accompany our growth, and at least get to know a few every year. It is also good to help people we are with grow together with us. It may be that we evolve in such a way that some relationships may get less close, but let’s never forget where we come from, and let’s keep in touch. Eventually we may become some day the person they will need to grow themselves.

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How to Decide When It is Time to Know New People

Robin Sharma writes “If you’re the smartest person you know, it’s time to know new people“. As we evolve and grow, we realize from time to time that we need to know new people that are in a position to help us grow.

It is well known that “you are the average of the 5 people you are the most with“. As we evolve and grow, the people we stick with may not evolve and grow at the same pace. This calls for renewing acquaintances and looking for people that can support us in our continuous development.

We should probably have a rule to try to identify every year a pair of new acquaintances we feel we need to make to support our growth objectives and direction.

Have you identified some new people you feel would support your growth? Go for it!

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How Valuable Personal Data Is: Get Coffee for Free Against Your Data

In this post ‘No Cash Needed At This Cafe. Students Pay The Tab With Their Personal Data‘, an example is developed where a privately-run university coffee is providing free coffee in exchange for personal data and the acceptance of receiving communications and promotional material.

Free coffee against your personal data

I find this example interesting as it gives a practical value to personal data: in effect, the coffee’s business model is based on targeted advertising to its patrons.

It is unclear if the model will be a success as it seems to be only at experimental stage and not fully operational yet.

Also, the value of personal data will necessarily decrease if more and more outlets collect it: it will become public knowledge and data mining existing databases such as LinkedIn or Facebook will already provide lots of information.

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How Poor Management is a Hurdle to the Automation of Repetitive Work Tasks

In this excellent Atlantic piece ‘The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job‘, the dilemma facing employees that manage to automatize their work tasks is described in detail: what should you do if you manage to automatize your 8 hours’ task and then have nothing more to do?

Some fake it and try to look like they’re hard working – until they are caught. Some others transparently declare the situation – management is generally surprised (but not necessarily awed), and often takes too much time to reorganize the work. The central question is “Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?”

In my view, this article just shows poor management quality that is unable to imagine that job tasks can be automated, or respond positively to employee initiatives. This is the reflect of an unhealthy corporate culture, which is unfortunately too widespread.

It seems to me that we should celebrate people who manage to automatise their tasks, give them a raise and see if they can contribute further. There is no fun performing repetitive tasks all day long if they can be easily automatized. And it is definitely not future-looking. It is much more fun to devise and code creatively and shift the value elsewhere.

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How Mediocrity Is About Giving Up When You Don’t Have To

I like this quote I noted in a post from Hugh McLeod from Gapingvoid in this post ‘How You Strive for Excellence‘: “[Mediocrity is] ‘People who Gave Up, When They Didn’t Have To“.

This statement is powerful and puts an interesting different view on mediocrity. Of course when it comes to giving up, the question is always when. Sometime it does not make sense to pursue something further, but too often people give up too early, not showing enough perseverance or grit.

When looking at mediocrity as giving up too early when people did not have to, reference is made to the fact that irrespective of the objective and the reality, and whether they could have been successful or no, those people gave up much too early, even when investment or suffering was much too low to justify it. And when I think about some examples I know, I find that this statement is right on target.

So, make sure you don’t give up when you don’t have to!

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How Proactive Career Moves Are Better Than Defensive Ones

Following up on my previous post ‘How Most Executives’ Should Plan For a Second Career after Age 45‘, I would like to share my experience and view on how a proactive career move at that stage is better than a defensive move – and thus, why it is so important to anticipate the ceiling of corporate career.

When placed in a defensive situation, i.e. having been terminated forcefully from an existing position, the executive often has some benefits in the form of termination premium which can sometimes be sizable. However, it is often not sufficient for the following reasons:

  • the executive’s personal finances are not adapted to the new career path with a high running expenditure flow, and often he does not have sufficient reserves to experiment with a new career keeping calm about the time it takes to build something new
  • if not anticipated, the time to change one’s mindset can be very long, in particular if it only happens if the executive spends too much time trying to find an equivalent corporate position and only considers a new career after a long time. This strains the cash situation

Therefore it is essential that executives take a proactive career change approach as soon as they identify that their corporate career seems to approach a potential ceiling. Proactive planning can even involve taking active action in parallel to the executive role, and even negotiate a mutually beneficial severance package with the corporate employer, leveraging on possible social benefits.

I can only recommend executives to consider proactively their second career early enough. Once awareness sets in, their dynamism will do the rest – still it takes time for awareness to set in and mindsets to change.

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How Most Executives’ Should Plan For a Second Career after Age 45

I read in an article written by a leading executive headhunter how the reality of most executives and senior executives’ career, with few exceptions, is that it growths and will reach a ceiling around age 40-45: seats in the executive management committee are few and far between. Therefore, for executives, it is important to realize and understand this fact, and plan accordingly for a second career.

This issue is becoming particularly acute nowadays because organizations will not any more keep deserving executives in their payroll for past services rendered, if they don’t have an operational role. I meet too many executives that for a reason or another have been made redundant and are struggling with their identity and career prospects between 45 and 55.

It is really amazing how this issue is not part of the collective consciousness. The reason is probably because the corporate world first and foremost presents as role models those exceptions that continuously rise throughout their careers.

There are plenty of interesting and exciting second careers open to executives that have reached the ceiling of their corporate career: founding or taking over a smaller business, investor, interim management roles, independent professional, leading a para-public organization, being elected into political roles etc.

But too few are planning ahead for this second career and life, as they are too committed to trying to be successful in their corporate life. Statistics don’t lie – most will have to change. This is why I am now recommending executives I meet that ponder this issue to figure out something of interest, and start building this new second career in a proactive way, which is always much better than doing it in a defensive manner.

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How “Entreprenants” are different from ‘Entrepreneurs’

Following up on our post ‘How The Definition of Entrepreneurship and Start-Up Can be Confusing‘, I stumbled upon a new concept in France developed by the Ecole de Paris management school, differentiating between “entrepreneur” and “entreprenant” (enterprising). And there is actually a manifesto, ‘le manifeste de l’entreprenant‘, and even a website Le jardin des Entreprenants – the Enterprising’s garden) showing various stories (all in French only).

The idea is a bit similar to the one developed in my original post. “Entreprenants” combine the invention of solutions and unexpected activities with a commitment to create meaning, thus reinventing the world in a powerful way.

In the manifesto, several recognition traits of those new actors are given, some of which are really differentiating with regard to the standard concept of entrepreneur:

  • “Entreprenants” are not necessarily entrepreneurs, and their initiatives can grow outside incorporated entities
  • An entrepreneur can be an “entreprenant” if he/she has a social vision of this initiative
  • the “entreprenant” is a gardener and not a builder: he grows plants accounting for environmental conditions and stress

I conclude from this that there is a growing awareness that the traditional concept of ‘entrepreneur’, at least as it is being implemented nowadays, is limiting and that alternate concepts should co-exist.

 

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How We Move From Avoiding Climate Change to Adapting to It

In this interesting Bloomberg article ‘New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World‘ we can measure how the debate has shifted from avoiding climate change to adapting to it, because it appears to be inevitable.

As mentioned in the Fourth Revolution book, I expect there might still be another step which is how to engineer climate, but that’s probably still far away. Anyway, the interesting part here is that we are now to the point where adapting is becoming the mainstream approach – and avoiding social collapse at the same occasion: “Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption?”

The question is now whether climate change will be sudden and disruptive, or sufficiently progressive to allow for adaptation of current infrastructure. The question is open for the scientists, but it is quite possible, as is the case in natural phenomena, that the extreme events will drive any adaptation.

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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 Startup Founders’ Age Influences Success

In this interesting summary of an interview of Paul Graham, Y Combinator founder: ‘Paul Graham on why he doesn’t like seeing college-age and younger founders‘, the point is made why founders should not be too young – and not too old as well.

The point is made on the basis of the relatively wide sample of start-ups that have been accelerated by Y Combinator, and their final outcome. It is important  to mention that reference is made here specifically to ‘startups with a potentially exponential development‘ as usual in this kind of post (ref our post ‘How The Definition of Entrepreneurship and Start-Up Can be Confusing’).

Paul Graham considers too young founders (i.e. still in high school) often do not consider a sufficient range of options because of their lack of experience, which leads to less success, and that it is not a good thing to encourage them to dive into a founder’s life too early.

On the other hand, he sees people that have too long an experience in a corporate structure – typically more than 20 years – not well suited either to the founder role, probably because of the work habits they will have developed.

The interesting part is that he sees determination and intelligence to be two highly required skills, with determination coming first. It takes a lot of energy to be a founder, and that is another reasons why founders in their 20’s and 30’s are preferred by Y Combinator. Again, this applies to a certain kind of start-ups and does not preclude people of other age-ranges to be a founder – and there are always exceptions to the rules!

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How Entrepreneurs Should Care About Their Contributors

Now that we have clarified what should be the objective mix of an entrepreneur, I would like to focus on one objective that I believe is too often forgotten: providing opportunities and livelihood to employees and other contributors involved.

It is amazing how this objective is so often forgotten when it is central to the creation of a healthy organization. Only by having contributors involved, committed and excited by the intent of the organization can it deliver exceptional service or products to clients.

And actually there are some situations where I find that this objective can be an essential guiding objective, in particular when the boat rocks and the economic situation of the company is not that great, or when there is a question about its future for example when shareholders don’t agree. My guiding principle is that people should not suffer from the inadequacy of shareholders or directors. They should be considered in the equation.

And while I know about being realistic when there is definitely a need to downsize because the economic equation does not work, this can be done as humanly possible.

Some fellow entrepreneurs might find that position too mellow but I truly believe that on the long term it is the only sustainable position, because the world is small and reputation is quickly earned one way or the other.

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