Reading Time: 2 minSimon Sinek’s excellent book “The Infinite Game” breaks down two types of companies. Those playing a finite game try to win right now at all costs. These are companies that make questionable moves in order to satisfy their investors. To quote King Louis XV of France in 1757, “After me comes the flood” — I’ll […]
Business
Give or take?
Reading Time: 2 minAfter my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you […]
Set them free to do their thing
Reading Time: 2 minWhen building websites, or really any kind of marketing deliverable, we have to strike an interesting balance. On the one hand, we have a tight scope of work and a clear directive on what needs to happen. On the other hand, we’re not always sure exactly what that looks like. If someone needs a new […]
Personalization versus personal
Reading Time: < 1 minI’ve shared before my dislike for most forms of automation, and personalization is often closely related. Both of those are marginally acceptable for huge companies, but it’s shaky at best. It’s cute that Verizon sends emails that actually start with my name, but as Seth Godin has said, “A mail merge makes nobody happy“. Personalization […]
Contractors are part of your team
Reading Time: 2 minAt GreenMellen, our team is almost entirely full-time employees, as that type of structure works well for us. However, also pull in some contractors from time to time to help with additional work, as that can be a huge benefit. From our perspective, those are a different kind of employee (W9 vs 1099, not in […]
Success is a lousy teacher
Reading Time: < 1 minIf you become successful, whether in business or athletics or somewhere else, you undoubtedly had some luck along the way, which is easy to forget about. Bill Gates and Kent Evans are great examples of that. Kent Evans? When he was 17, he was best friends with Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, but […]
At least there will be peace in my time
Reading Time: 2 minA recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast was talking about promotions and management, and the type of people that should be promoted to manager. It was a great episode (go check it out here), and David made an excellent point about something that we might overlook. He tried to reference a passage from the Bible […]
That never happens (usually)
Reading Time: < 1 minMuch of what happens every day is brand new. Google sees over a billion search queries every day for phases that have never been searched before (8B searches/day, roughly 15% are brand new). Or like I shared earlier this year, people keep beating insane odds to win the Powerball, and a freshly sorted deck of […]
Keep your issues in the open
Reading Time: < 1 minSimilar to the idea of “bring me problems” that I shared last year, having a culture where problems are welcomed can be a great thing. It reminds me of a story I heard about Alan Mulally and his work to turn Ford around in the 2010’s. One big thing that he did was encourage problems […]
Great communication is built on trust
Reading Time: 2 minIn his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things“, author Ben Horowitz shares simple yet powerful way to speed up communication: trust. Ben simply says: “In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.” The more you trust someone, the easier the communication. If you know their […]