25 November 2015

Being Not Overwhelmed

If you work in Strategy, or are an Entrepreneur, or are dealing with complicated and compounding challenges (with high risks associated) I have a little mental model for you.

It's been helpful for me. It might prove to be helpful for you.
  1. Never assume something is either possible or impossible without real evaluation and analysis.
  2. The more you want something to be possible the more skeptical your analysis must be.
  3. Don't waste energy working on or regretting the impossible.
As always, this is not a menu. You don't get to pick and choose. It's all or nothing or it doesn't work.

I find that people who are not actually strategists fail on both #1 and #2 more than 90% of the time.
And I find that strategists who have bad leadership fail at #3 nearly 100% of the time.

One final little trick... I find that turning the evaluation into written output reduces the challenges of #3 dramatically.


17 November 2015

What I do

From the responses to my "So... What's next?" post, it's clear that my audience (as tiny as it may be) breaks out into a few different cohorts of a sort. For some of you, the blog post was clear and what I was asking for was understood. And there were, I admit, some of you who clearly decided I'd gone off the reservation entirely. But there were some who made it obvious to me that they didn't understand both the blog post and (perhaps as a result) what I was asking for. For some of you, it's clear that I need to answer the question "What I do" at the very least. And you'd prefer if I also answer "What do I want to do" (and ideally "for what kind of company") as well.

So I'll answer the "What I do" question quickly.

  1. What I do is the result of what I've done and learned. My LinkedIn profile is up to date.
  2. I've written a bunch on this blog over the years about what I do. Here are some examples: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
  3. "I do Corporate Development, Business Development and Strategy" 
Of the three, I'd argue #3 is the least useful but the closest to what people are asking for. So I've tried to make it more useful... I like to work in the circle in the image below.



I hope this clears things up!