Do not ignore AI

AI is here.

It is not going away.

It will change many things.

Pay attention.  Start using it.

Download the Chat GPT app or the Claude app and start asking questions.

Tell it all about your business and what problems you have and ask for solutions and ideas.  Probe further. 

You can say “Talk to me like I am a 12-year-old.”  “What would Steve Jobs do with my business?”  “How can I grow 10X in 3 years?”  “How do I do ____________?”   Ask and keep asking.  Give it context.  Load your financials.  Ask questions.

There is a setting you can make so it does not use whatever you load in to learn with and provide that information to others.  

You can do amazing things.  You can do things you could not do before.  You can save hundreds or thousands of hours.  

If you have not done it yet, start playing.  Give it your most urgent problems to assist you in solving.

Everyone is getting on board.  

Don’t be left behind.

It’s more than numbers

Business is about making the world a better place for people.

It’s about learning and growing for a leader to achieve it.

It’s about what it makes of you and others.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – A. Einstein

What really matters…

Happiness.

Yours, your family’s, and other people’s. 

Short term.  Long term.

Don’t forget.

Make decisions, and use your business to make people happy, or at least not make them unhappy.

It won’t be perfect.  Trying to make other people happy is a recipe for failure.

But it is a paradox worth paying attention to.

Is your business doing right by people?

This message will be short.

Yesterday I wrote a long post.  To reward you for not quitting, today I will write a short one.

Question – What is the number ONE project/task that is on your list/radar that will MOVE THE NEEDLE the MOST tomorrow and into the future?

Why would you work on anything else until that is done well and complete?

Why is this person trying to discredit me?

Being a leader with networks of people around me, I have seen a lot.

One thing I used to struggle with is a situation when someone’s behavior doesn’t make sense.  They are not responding to you positively, seemingly for no reason. They try to discredit you.  No matter what you do, they refuse to be happy.  One day, their mouth cannot contain what they really feel, and they expose how they really feel.  As I have learned, this is a big “tell”.  When it happens with an employee, then you could conclude that they just are not happy here and send them to find happiness elsewhere.  Besides, their attitude is toxic and contagious and it is not helping the team.

But it could be another leader.  Someone who is supposed to be on your team or on your side.  It could be someone you have helped.  Maybe someone in your inner circle.  These could be people who are capable leaders and have some credibility with certain groups themselves.  They take small mistakes on your part and blow them up to demonstrate how you are incompetent, or have bad intentions, or sinister evil, or selfish motives.  They talk behind your back.  They may be passive at first.  They may seed the crowd with gossip about you and try to hide the fact that it was them. It doesn’t make sense. You are good, (not what they are painting you as) and you ask yourself what you did wrong.  

Has anyone else experienced this?

Here is what I have learned in the fullness of time.  They have an agenda, and it is different from your agenda.  You may be in their way.  These people want to leave your company and want to justify it, even though it may be hard to justify.  They may be jealous.  They may want to compete with you.  They may want to take your customers.  

That is fine.  It’s a free country.  And what I learned is that you should let these people go.  You don’t need that in your days.  Not everyone wants to be on your team.  Ok.  Cool.  Bye.  No hard feelings. 

If you are capable, have good character, are a good thinker, treat people well, and are a leader worth following (a rare commodity even), there are plenty of people who would like to be on your team.  

If you are not those things, then you need to work on that.  You need to be careful not to take all the credit and believe in your own legend.  That alone can trigger jealousy and a bad reaction from other Alphas.

I recall Lee Iacocca’s autobiography.  He was an auto industry executive who saved Chrysler from bankruptcy after he was fired from a top position at Ford.  When he was fired he asked the CEO why he was being fired. The CEO replied, “Sometimes, you just don’t like a guy”.  So there you are.  No matter how good you are, some guys aren’t going to like you.  They may like you if you worked in the warehouse, but once you are a leader, maybe you are making them look bad or something.  I have worked to be sure to be really good, and not easy to hate.  Some leaders do not have this self-awareness of how they are landing on other leaders.  Still, people are complex, and you’ll never make fans of everyone.

(Are you guilty of being the hater?  The jealous one?  The guy who just doesn’t like another guy – maybe because he is so good?  Maybe because he brags?)

Holding things together for many years takes a lot of work on yourself, and you have to understand other people and what they want.  You need other leaders, and you have to make space for their egos.  Some however, you can never make enough space for and you have to part with them.  Once identified, sooner is better than later. 

Subbing out someone who does not want to be here for someone who does is high-value work.

If they are a leader, one with years of experience, one who knows everyone, you may think you can’t live without them.  Hey – give me a break.  You can live without ANYONE.  If they are not a happy person, or will never be happy here, or with you, they gotta go. You will figure it out.  The sun will rise tomorrow, and it will be beautiful.  If you keep them around, your days will be tense and frustrating.

Once they go their merry way, you can find someone else who wants to be here.  Life is too short to do otherwise.

Unfortunately, giving people a (multi-year) try and finding out who is true for the long-term and who is not may be part of the process, especially if you are a big company and need lots of leaders as I do.  But it’s ok.  It has made me better.  

Does this make sense?

Build value, grow the market, and breakout.

In your business, are you competing for scarce money?

Don’t race to the bottom.  There are no winners in that game.

Innovate, elevate, deviate, and wow your customer.

Build value you can charge for that customers would pay for. 

What would your customers LOVE (even if they don’t know it exists yet)?

Real Wealth

Real wealth isn’t about buying and owning more stuff.  

That is an immature view of wealth.

In fact, you can become a slave to your stuff.  (Though some stuff is stuff you truly love or stuff that enables experiences, but one should not get carried away with the stuff.)

Real wealth is about buying your freedom.

I work because I want to work, not because I have to.  I love what I do, and I know it is good for my brain and spirit.

I am free.

Success has many fathers

When things are going well, there is no shortage of people claiming the credit.  The marketers say they generated the leads to take the company to new heights.  The sales department says they sold so much and are so good.  The production department will say they produced so much and ramped up to handle it.  Managers will say all this growth happened at their wise and guiding hand. 

And maybe all this is true.  But when there were down years, nobody claims it was their doing.  

Growing a company to record sales takes the input of a lot of people doing a lot of things right.  It takes a good leader to put that team in place at that time.  And it takes the right product/service in the right market with the right external conditions.

Yes, success has many fathers.  Chief among them the leader.

Still, give away the credit, and take the blame. 

It’s the best way to set your organization up to do it again.

Good leadership requires long-term thinking.

I’ve heard many definitions of leadership.

Leadership is getting a team to produce a positive result that would not have happened had you not been there.

But here is my favorite one  –

Leadership is accomplishing the goals of the organization by BRINGING OUT THE BEST in other people and IMPROVING THE CHANCES of DOING EVEN BETTER tomorrow.

Let’s look at it a little closer.  

Accomplishing the goals of the organization.  First, you have to know what they are.  Clarity.  Then you have to get the team to accomplish them using the available resources.

“By bringing out the best in other people”.  To me, exploiting your employees is not an option.  If a leader makes his people do things that make them miserable, and keeps them doing those things by threat, “force”, or coercion, they will not be happy campers.  And that is a failure of leadership.  Of course, people may be unhappy for other reasons.  They may be spoiled, soft, entitled, or something else – but that is a failure of long-term leadership.  A good leader brings out the best in spirit, attitude, and effort from the people on their team as a result of how they are treated and communicated to.

“And improve the chances of doing even better tomorrow”.  This means that the leader didn’t burn employees, customers, reputation, or key resources to win, and hurt the chances of winning tomorrow.  If I keep my people who are now more experienced and work well together, we are set up to do well tomorrow.  If I am not in unreasonable debt, it will be easier tomorrow.  

Good leadership, in most cases, requires long-term thinking.

Delegate your job

If you want to grow your business, it can’t be dependent on you.

If you have to approve everything, look at all the sales, or all the mail, or all the bills, or all the paychecks, and be involved in everything.

You are just going to drive yourself nuts and be the bottleneck, which is, after all, at the top of the bottle.

You don’t scale.  You can only have 24 hours in a day.  

While you do not scale, you can leverage yourself through other people.

Cut off chunks of what you do each day and empower others to take that job.  Try to make yourself obsolete.

Don’t worry, it will never happen (unless you really want it to), but try.

One day recently I had “nothing to do” on my calendar – or at least “not much to do”.  Well,  I worked diligently as always, and I did not get it all done!

Here’s the key.  A leader should not have a job to do in operations, sales, etc.  Okay, when you are starting out and very small, the job of “visionary” is not a position; it’s something you do while you are doing a job in your four-person organization.  The leader’s activities change as the company grows. And you can say that the company grows BECAUSE the leadership job changes.

But a leader cannot be fully scheduled all the time with meetings, duties, and to-dos.  You need whitespace to be most effective.

If you are always putting important projects and thinking off because you “don’t have time today”, or this week, then you can’t take the time to understand, discern, and solve key issues in your business that will move it forward.  You are in the fishbowl, and you can’t see it correctly.

Make whitespace – so you can fill it with projects that matter even more.