The Weekly Minute - Feb. 3, 2023

What I’ve Read This Week

• Curating Meeting Experiences (via Roger Martin)

  • As Roger Martin states, the heightened skill you must build is the capability to curate meeting experiences that cause your talent to want to be there; to be upset if they are left out of your meetings.

  • Here are four requirements in today’s world for meetings:

    • Every meeting must have a clear purpose that is understood and that justifies an in-person gathering.

    • Every person at the meeting must have a fulfilling and interesting role.

    • Make sure the role is actually realized — not left to chance.

    • Make the meeting engaging.

  • Roger also says to look at your calendar and aim for a 50% reduction in meetings. Repurpose the time you would have spent in low-value meetings to make the other half tremendously valuable.
    

• 7 Ways Managers Can Help Their Team Focus (via Harvard Business Review)

• Employee engagement has become harder to come by in the modern company. Levels of engagement are low and disengagement high. People feel lost in their increasingly gigantic organizations, with the median Fortune 500 company having grown 11.5X in real size over the past 60 years.

• HBR drops seven ideas for helping your people focus:

  • Inventory tasks and projects.

  • Clarify and curate communication channels.

  • Normalize saying no.

  • Make meetings meaningful.

  • Enable purposeful productivity.

  • Formalize focus.

  • Respect boundaries.
    

• The Anatomy of Determination (via Paul Graham)

  • Paul argues here that there are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing. In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

  • The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. When you want something, you must have it, no matter what.

  • There's one other major component of determination: ambition. If willfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination, ambition is how you choose it.
    

One Quote

• “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” - Ben Franklin
  

Question For You

• What does success look like? 

Framework

POP / Purpose - Outcomes - Plan

• Staying in line with the article I shared above on curating ideal meeting experiences, here’s a great framework to help your gatherings succeed.

• To make the best use of a team’s collective time, going through this simple framework can produce a focused and simple outcome.

• P - Purpose

  • Why are we doing this?

• O - Outcomes

  • What will we accomplish?

• P - Plan / Process

  • How do we get there?
    

Enjoy this tool!

One Thought on Marketing

Purchasing decisions (yes, even B2B ones) are made by humans; humans make decisions based on logic and feelings; and feelings are formed by our experiences.