The Weekly Minute - July 28, 2023
What I Read
Confident Companies Do Less (via Roger Martin)
In Roger’s wealth of strategic experience, he has learned that doing more things is almost always a sign of lack of confidence. In this article, he provides many examples (good and bad), but I’ll highlight two good examples here.
“The Vanguard Group. It does two things. It sells index mutual funds and index exchange traded funds. And it sells $7.2 trillion of them — more than any other fund company. Vanguard doesn’t try to do everything. Far from it. It does almost nothing — selling two forms of the same thing. Why be so very narrow? It is because Vanguard is supremely confident. It believes in the thing that it is doing.”
“Or take Southwest Airlines. It does one thing — fly short-haul, point-to-point flights featuring one class of service, flown on one type of aircraft, the Boeing 737. It used its confidence in that model to grow from a tiny, irrelevant Texas carrier to #1 in passenger-seat-miles in America. All of its now-smaller competitors do many more things than does Southwest.”
How to Sell Yourself — Without being Salesy (via Just Welsh)
Justin published this post on the backs of Robert Cialdini and his book, “Influence,” which shares inishgts about the art of persuasion. Within that book, Cialdini highlights his “6 Principles of Persuasion”. If you're struggling to sell, stop thinking about money and focus on the principles instead:
Reciprocity
Commitment & Consistency
Establish Social Proof
Build Authority
Affection
Scarcity
What I Listened To
Success 2.0: The Psychology of Self-Doubt (via Hidden Brain)
We all have times when we feel like a fraud. Psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the corrosive effects of self-doubt, and how we can turn that negative voice in our heads into an ally.
Three Thoughts
On SKILLS:
Besides 1 or 2 superpowers, you are mediocre at most things. So, what does that mean?
1st - focus on those superpowers.
2nd - hire all-stars for everything else.
On TEAMS:
Forget credit. Do the work.
On PERFECTION:
Here’s a lesson I was reminded this summer while working with some incredible interns. Perfection is the enemy of good.
For students in today’s education system, they are wired to turn in projects of perfection. Turn in a paper, or a test, or a project and you get graded on that particular product. Usually, you don’t get a chance to garner feedback and keep working at it.
That’s not how it should be in the real world. We want to create an atmosphere of iterating, where employees riff off each and keep producing work in order to make it the best product, in the end.
