Missing deadlines

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

There are two things that happen when you miss deadlines, the first obvious, the second insidious.

The direct impact is that you don’t ship your product.  Revenues come in later.  Business partners are disappointed.  Your team is let down.

The insidious part is that – drip, drip, drip – what you mean by “deadline” starts to erode.  “Deadline” becomes “what we’re shooting for if nothing goes wrong.”  But of course something always goes wrong, so the first sign of trouble becomes a chance to negotiate (with your team , with your business partners, and with your procrastinating self), a chance to argue that something’s got to give.

When hitting deadlines becomes non-negotiable, you and your team put that whole negotiation aside and just get to work.  It’s amazing to discover what you can produce when you expect yourself to deliver every time.

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(If you’re curious: it turns out that the source of the word is a “dead line” for American Civil War prisoners who were kept inside a stockade.  A railing placed inside the stockade marked the line prisoners were not allowed to pass – and guards were told to shoot any prisoner who crossed the line, because they were deemed to be trying to escape.)

If investing = sexy…

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

If investing = sexy, and if sexy = better = innovative = how we’re going to solve all the world’s problems…well then, Houston, we have a problem.

There’s huge momentum around using investing capital to solve social problems.  The question isn’t whether this is a good thing (it is!); the question is, how do we do this in a way that doesn’t devalue grant funding, that doesn’t inexorably end up at the conclusion that if you’re getting your money back (and then some), you win, and if you’re the grantmaker, you’re doing something that’s not as important/innovative/worthwhile.

What a shame that would be.

What happens when we build large-scale enterprises that serve tens of millions of people, but the service still remains out of reach for many?  Is the grant funder who provides capital to makes the service more affordable doing anything less noble, less valuable, less impactful than the equity investor?  What about the person who put up the first $500,000 with no expectation of ANY return so that the whole thing could get off the ground?

The thing that’s in scarce supply isn’t investing capital – heck, there are trillions of dollars fleeing the European fixed income market and looking for a place to alight.  What’s scarce is risk capital that will take a bet on a person or an idea and help it scale; and high-impact capital, which will take a powerful, existing infrastructure and make it accessible to those who can’t afford it…all in a way that doesn’t distort the market.

In the US, there’s no notion that the person who puts up $15M to fund cancer care for the poor is somehow doing something less important or less impactful than the bondholders who financed the initial construction of the hospital itself.  If anything, the donor is MORE celebrated.  Different tranches of capital are all playing their roles in an attempt (not completely successful nor a complete failure) to provide high-quality heathcare.

We’re obsessed with “building the market” for investing in enterprises that solve large-scale social problems.  That’s good.  But let’s not confuse that with making the world safe for investors to get their money back.

We’ll know the market is functioning not by measuring how much money is swirling around, how many funds there are, and their total capital under management.  We’ll know it’s functioning by measuring how many new blueprints for social change we’ve created; how many people’s incomes have increased; how many people no longer need a permanent handout.

 

Potshotters

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

POTSHOTTER  noun \pot-ˈsho-tər\

1 : someone who primarily or exclusively provides criticism

2:  a person who critiques, tears down, weakens

 

What could be easier than sitting back and describing how something could be better?

“If I were in charge, I’d…”

“This thing is a mess, I can’t believe they let this happen…”

What could be harder than leaning forward and making it better?

Leaning forward, putting yourself on the line, coming up with your own ideas that might be right and might be wrong, getting into the messy thick of things….that’s the hard part, the real part, the valuable part, the part that scares the pants off of most everyone.

Free Kindle book – save your meetings

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A few years ago, I started a depressing Excel spreadsheet to track how many hours a day I was spending in meetings.  It was sobering.  Four, five, sometimes six hours a day.  When was I supposed to do real work?

It seems like an impossible problem to solve, but there may be a way.  Al Pittampalli has a new manifesto on how to save your company by rescuing it from death-by-a-thousand-meetings.  It’s called “Read this before our next meeting: The Modern Meeting Standard.”  You can read it in less than an hour, and it just might turn your company around.

Even better, it’s free for the next five days on Kindle, no strings attached.

Download here.

The first paragraph of the book:

Someone asked me the other day what I do for a living.  I found myself hard-pressed for an answer.  If he wanted to know my job title, or what industry I worked in, then all I had to do was recite what’s on my business card.  But he seemed sincere.  He honestly wanted to know what I do most of the day, so I was honest, too: What I do for a living is attend meetings.  Bad meetings.

Sound familiar?  Download the book for free.

Benevolent dictator?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Another gem of an exchange with my son, whose recently-acquired ability to read (my open laptop) has opened up a whole new set of conversations.

Him: “Daddy, is Generosity Day like a new national holiday?”

Me: “Sure, I guess it is.”

Him: “So will people celebrate it just in the United States or everywhere in world?”

Me: “Well, I hope everywhere, but probably it will be more in the United States because Valentine’s Day is such a big holiday here.”

Him: “And will everyone celebrate it?”

Me: “I don’t think everyone will.  But we’re going to try to get as many people as possible to celebrate it.”

Him: “Yeah, it can’t be everyone…(pause).  It couldn’t be like that unless you were Emperor or King of the World or something like that.”

*                             *                             *                             *                             *                             *

In the old days, if you wanted a zillion people to do something new and different and exciting, you had to be King of the World, or some close approximation thereof.  Now you need a great idea, an audience, and a bunch of allies.   That’s it.

It is indeed a brave new world, if you’re willing to take that leap.

Now if only I were Emperor…..

Mentors and allies

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Mentor should always be spelled with a capital “M.”

At most of my big corporate jobs, I, along with all my peers, was inevitably set up with a mentor (lower-case ‘m’), meaning someone more senior in the firm who was supposed to talk to me a couple of times a year.  Sometimes these relationships were worthwhile, sometimes they weren’t, but they were always arranged marriages.

The long-term damage was the notion that mentorship could be a check-the-box exercise, as in, “make sure every junior employee has a more senior mentor.”

Mentorship in the true sense of the word is a very rare thing.  A Mentor is someone who, over a number of years, is a guiding light in your life, a person who transcends a given role or job and provides perspective on the distant horizons – and helps you figure out if you want to get there, and, if yes, how to do it.

It’s pretty hard to look for mentors, though we all should – with the knowledge that they’re few and far between….maybe you’ll have a handful of them over the course of your life.

The step between here and there are allies (thought partners, co-conspirators, smart friends…call them what you will).  These are active, two-way relationships where everyone is creating value for each other.  They can run hot and cold given what you’re both up to, and they can and should be nourishing to everyone involved.  They are dynamic, and often informal.

What ends up happening is that, carrying around a perverse notion of mentorship, we think the people who can give us the best “advice” (loosely defined) are supposed to be older and more senior and powerful and accomplished than we are, so we look in all the wrong places, and underinvest in finding the real allies we need, today.

The emotional chasm

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

“Fundraising is all about relationships,” we say.

Sure.

And then we churn through lists and count the level of activity for members of our team (how many calls, how many meetings, etc.), because actually measuring relationships and whether they’re being created is really, really hard.

Of course you must churn through the list.  You must reach out more.  It’s non-negotiable.  You don’t get to hide behind “I’m a relationship-builder so I don’t do proactive outreach” because the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

But you’ll be churning through lists forever, with the same disappointing effort-to-outcome ratio, if you don’t get more of your relationships to cross the emotional chasm.

You know it when it happens – those people with whom you made a genuine connection, those people who touched you as much as you touched them.  You know it because you understand these people in a different way – and they understand you in a different way – because you have shared something genuine about who you are, deep down in your soul.

I know.  It’s uncomfortable to actually say that kind of thing out loud.

But we’re in this because we actually want to make the world a better place, right?  There’s nothing more real, honest and vulnerable than that.  That’s why this job is so hard when you’re trying to protect yourself and keep things at arm’s length, and why it becomes natural when you allow real human connection to happen, even if just for an instant.

Why the web is a curious place

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Because when you first see something you’ve written posted somewhere else, with the words big and your name small, the first reaction is to say, “HEY, WAIT A MINUTE….!”

And then you remind yourself…that’s the whole point.  To spread ideas.

In that spirit, here’s a blog post of mine from March, as re-envisioned by Marta Vilkancaite of Green Orange Advertising Creative.  Thanks, Marta!

(p.s. the next time someone emails me asking me to write a post about something they’re doing, I’ll send them this post.  So much better to offer up value first, rather than start by asking for a favor.)


 

Your (brand) essence is not an inert element

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

For many years, as is typical in more junior roles in most big companies, I spent most of my time inside the organization.  Working hard, doing client or customer work, but really on the inside.  From there I had a view of what my company was and what it represented in the world, but that view was mostly informed by whatever the company wanted to tell its employees.

But then I got into the real world: I interacted with customers, funders, competitors; I gave talks on my company’s behalf and saw the reaction people had (good and bad) during and after my remarks; I was required, day in and day out, to understand and distill who we were and what we represented in the world; and then I heard back, just as frequently, whether and how what I was saying resonated with people.  If I listened hard, new truths emerged.

In the words, reactions, challenges, and excitement you hear back, you learn a lot.  You discover surprising things that you knew and that were dormant.  You connect dots in unexpected ways.  You see yourself through other people’s eyes, and have the chance to bring that energy back into the organization.

By spending time right at the edge of your organization, you react to the outside world, and in that process of reaction, your brand and its positioning change, evolve, and sharpen.  Your brand has an active reaction every time it has one of these interactions.

I used to think that CEO’s like Jeff Immelt spent a lot of time with customers just to hear the truth about what GE did and didn’t deliver on in the customers’ eyes.  I’ve begun to understand that it’s only through spending time looking outside that Jeff, or any of us, can figure out who we really are, what our company or organization represents, and what it can become.

 

We can’t argue about pinball any more

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

It was my first summer internship at my first real job.  One day at lunch I had a mock-heated discussion with a colleague about whether pinball was a game of skill or luck.  I argued for “skill” and as evidence offered up the fact that pinball tournaments exist in the world, which wouldn’t make sense for a game that’s pure luck.

My colleague didn’t believe me.  He claimed that there was no such thing as a pinball tournament.

And so a bet was struck: I needed to prove, irrefutably and by the end of the workday, that pinball tournaments existed.

This involved rushing back to my desk, finding a Yellow Pages, searching for pinball dealers in the Washington, DC area, and, from there, cobbling together a list of contacts until someone would send me a faxed entry form for an upcoming pinball tournament.

Of course this story is quaint today because we can no longer argue for more than a few seconds about this sort of thing.   If this were happening today, the argument would be resolved between sandwich bites by typing “pinball tournaments” into someone’s smartphone.

Less romantic, more efficient.

The fact is that nothing factual is out of reach these days.  While it wasn’t out of reach 20 years ago when I made this bet, the friction has been reduced to zero.  So if you want to know the difference between a Roth IRA and a regular IRA; if you want to know what “suited connectors” are in Texas Hold ‘Em and when to play them; if you want to learn how to knit or sharpen a knife or which mortgage is right for you or even what this whole debt ceiling debate is really about….well all of these answers are literally a click away.

So our ignorance about any topic is, in the most literal sense, willful in a way it never was before.  This is great news for people willing to make two (just two!) decisions:

  1. To be the kind of person who seeks answers, even when it’s scary
  2. To choose where to deepen your knowledge and to act on that decision by spending your time accordingly

That’s it.

No more pinball arguments, but so much more freedom for those willing to take that first step.