Which kind of email person are you?

Email – love it or hate it?  It’s very useful and I need it, but more and more I am coming to dislike it.  Marketers have ruined it – filling up my inbox with time-wasting junk.  I can’t seem to get spam filters to work well enough.

Enough of my rant…I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people.  Lightnings and Laggards.

“Lightnings” are those that have desk jobs and can see emails and respond to them fast.  I email some of them and it’s like texting them – they respond right away.  Of course, not everyone with a desk job is that fast. Some are engrossed in other work, but they still tend to respond quickly.  Junk emails are eliminated in real-time with a simple click.  You see them in the cafeteria when you are getting coffee and they can converse with you about an email you sent to them four minutes ago.

Then there is another group, the one I fall into – the Laggards.  Don’t let the name fool you – these people may be incredibly productive, just not via fast email exchanges.  These people work in the field, or away from their desks (maybe they don’t have a desk) and are doing projects with atoms and not so much electrons.  Maybe they are in sales or production or service and/or are driving a lot.  They don’t have their inbox open all day ready to pounce on the next message. (Yes, they have smartphones – haha). Junk emails fill up their inbox, mixing in with and obscuring the important emails with their multitude of distractions.  Laggards get buried.  And when they finally do sit down and open their inbox to try to catch up, (which could be at 9pm on Sunday) they get discouraged about how many emails are there waiting for them.

People in this group get asked “Did you get my email?”, then Laggards ask “When did you send it?”, and a response may be “this morning”.  Laggards are thinking “No, I didn’t see it, I’ve been working!”

Anybody understand what I’m saying?

Understand which group your recipient is in – what their work is like.  If you want to be sure to communicate quickly with Laggards, maybe a text or phone call will be faster.

Growth thrives in conducive environments

Growth can’t happen so well if the leader –

Needs to be the source of all ideas

Needs to approve every action

Doesn’t hire people smarter than them and empower them

Doesn’t want to grow

Doesn’t provide the resources to grow

Doesn’t want to get out of their comfort zone

Is your environment conducive to growth?

Private Equity "buyout" firms

In the past I have invested in private equity funds.  Here’s how it works – they raise large sums of money from investors.  They buy companies from their founders or owners.  They try to improve them or join them with other businesses they buy, then flip them in 1-5 years to another private equity company or a big corporation for a profit.  Sounds good.  And sometimes it is good for everyone.

But I have learned a lot since.  The guys at the top walk away with all the money, but they don’t really care long term for the customers or the employees.  I have seen the spirit gutted out of companies when it’s all about making the numbers.  Often the “improvement” the investment company does is to the P&L and Balance sheet.  They know little about the business and have no innovation to bring to the table.  

There are some positive exceptions.  Sometimes the founder wants to retire or has met his limit and sometimes the investment firm cares about customers and employees for the long term.  Most times they don’t and have learned use non-compete agreements to keep people and to bribe the key employees to stay as long as they do with noble propaganda and promises of a piece of the action. But make no mistake, financial engineering is their game.  This is often not entrepreneurship.  This is too often harvesting and exploitation and leads to the eventual destruction of the company, or at least it being a good place to work.

For the record – I don’t play that.  I care about people and create value – and in the long run, I (we, my team) will be here, and we will win.

What is your business doing to you?

Who are you becoming as a result?

Do you like it?  Where will this lead you?  Is it good?

If not, you need to rethink what you are doing, how you are doing it, and why?

Your Reputation

Behold the opportunity of entrepreneurship.

Beware the dangers of entrepreneurship.

To influence many, you have to build an incredible reputation. 

That reputation will be your legacy.  

Real Education – Paid in Full

Learn as much as you can from THE RIGHT VOICES, yes.  We call that education.   But we aren’t done yet.  We aren’t prepared to go out and do significant things and get it right.

Try it and fail.  That pain.  That’s your education.  That’s how you get smarter.   

Now that you are smarter, keep going.  You’re more prepared.  Keep trying.

There are more things to learn, to be smarter still…

You are the good guy!

In 2016 I was in the black desert night on a dirk bike near El Rosario in Baja. I was pre-running the Baja 1000 course and with my son.  But I lost him.  He was behind me a few minutes ago, and now I can’t find him.  I shut my engine down and take off my helmet to listen for him on a high plateau.  Nothing.  No lights.  Black, cold wind.  My body temperature was dropping and I knew his was too.  We were dressed for daytime.

It’s a long story I have told before, but I finally found him.  His headlight had failed.  We rode side by side to finally get to a road.  We followed it.  Eventually, we found Mama Espinoza’s.  It was a small hotel with a restaurant that would open in the morning.  We checked in, shivering and tired.  If we had to ride 200 miles back to Ensenada, we would have been in serious trouble.

Mama Espinoza had started the place about 50 years earlier when there was really nothing here.  She was 95 years old now.  She catered to travelers, and no doubt they were grateful she had set up her business there.

Businesspeople and entrepreneurs are responsible for solving problems and creating a higher standard of living for everyone.  

Hold your head up, and be proud for the work you do for others today.

Are we running out of resources?

“In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Stanford University biologist Paul Erlich warned that overpopulation and overconsumption would result in the exhaustion of resources and global catastrophe.  To understand whether that is likely to happen it is important to recognize that resources are not finite like a slice of pizza is finite.  That’s because the totality of our resources is neither known nor fixed.

In a competitive economy, humanity’s knowledge about the value and availability of something tends to be reflected in its price.  If prices fall, resources can be deemed to have become more abundant relative to demand.  Higher prices also create incentives for innovation, including discoveries of new deposits, greater efficiency of use, and the development of substitutes.

Recently we looked at prices for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals.  The data were collected by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund between 1980 and 2017.  The paper found that the nominal prices of 9 commodities fell, whereas the nominal prices of 41 commodities increased. The average price of 50 commodities increased 62.7 percent.  Adjusted for inflation, however, 43 of 50 commodities declined in price.  On average the real price of commodities fell by 36.3%.

Between 1980 and 2017, the inflation-adjusted global hourly income grew by 80.1%.  Therefore for the amount of work a person had to do to buy commodities became 64.7 percent less.  Put differently, commodities that 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980 took only 21 minutes of work to buy in 2017.  All in all, resources were not being depleted in the way that Erlich feared they would – as witnessed by the fact that humanity has not yet run out of a single supposedly non-renewable resource.  In fact, resources tend to become more abundant over time relative to the demand for them.”

The business will never outgrow the leader

“As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him.” – Mahatma Gandhi

If you are the leader of an organization or a part of it, self-development is part of the job. 

Learn from others who are better than you.  Stay open to changing your mind, methods and attitude. Change how you show up and what you do each day based on what you learn.  

An improved leader means an improved organization.

It’s on you.

What is a "Free Market"?

Ironically, we don’t talk enough about the things that are most valuable and precious.  By not talking about it, we take it for granted and fail to protect it.  We may even support ideas that erode what is far more precious.

Freedom is one of those things.  There is so much to be said about freedom, but today I’ll talk about free markets.  I am by no means the most eloquent speaker on the subject, but I have lots of experience running dozens of companies for decades, and observing hundreds more close up.

When markets are free for anyone to compete in, entrepreneurs start companies to provide products and services that people freely trade their hard-earned money for.  They are saying “my life will be better if I buy your product or service for the price you are charging”, so they buy it.  

Businesses have to compete with each other.  They are all trying to be the best choice for the consumer (that’s you and me) so they can sell their stuff.  The consumer is the judge over who wins and who loses.  If the consumer loves one company, likes another and does not like a third, the results for the respective companies will show accordingly.  The losing company may go out of business, which is good for the consumer.  Or they may innovate – providing a better product or a cheaper one, which is good for the consumer.  Competition means the consumer wins.

This is why we have a greater standard of living today.  No government made this happen.  It was the action of millions of businesses freely competing with each other, with many providing better products and service to other businesses so they could give greater value to the consumer and/or a cheaper price.  Today, you can get incredible things for a weeks worth of wages – far more than you could in the past.

Now let’s see how we can mess it up – how we make a free market less free.  Let’s say we tax a service – the price of it goes up.  That’s less free.

Let’s say an industry lobbies for licensing to protect others from coming into the business, because they do NOT want competition.  This makes prices go up, not only because of the licensing fees but more so because the license (test, filing, apprenticeship, approvals, red tape, etc.) causes an artificial shortage of competitors.  So the ones that are there can raise their prices because their market is not free, but partially protected.

Let’s say the contractor you have hired to do work on your home has to pull a building permit for work they do on your house, but the town building department makes him jump through all kinds of hoops and red tape and they sit on the application for 8 weeks.  This is another example of a market that is constricted – the consumer (you, me) will suffer and costs will go up.

Let’s say a job is put out to bid by a government and they say it can only go to a union company.  This is not free.  Costs will go up and consumers will suffer.

Let’s say there are rules that you have to buy (or cannot buy) parts from a given place or company – this is not free and costs will go up.

Let’s say there are all kinds of unnecessary rules and regulations to follow – this is not free and consumers will suffer.

We see this stuff in business all day every day.  Sure we need some rules, but bureaucrats and administrators who care little for the costs and distortions they create, often go too far, and slowly, month by month, we lose our freedom and ability to operate in free markets – the exact thing that got us here in the first place.

The evidence is clear.  Every country in the world where you go where there is excessive control of markets, is one where the people do not do well.

Will you be a voice to protect freedom in commerce and elsewhere?