Hi {{first_name|friend}}! Last week I wrote about the importance of determining and communicating where to go next. This week: how do you go about figuring out where to go?
I keep coming back to this idea in Brad Jacobs’ book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars1:
You can get a lot of things wrong as long as you get the long term trend right. And if you get the long term trend wrong, you can do a thousand things right and still lose.
Said another way, success has more to do with direction than with execution.
For me there is a great deal of relief in this idea. It’s a reminder that I don’t need to figure out all the business model and tactics before moving forward with something new. Instead I am asking myself:
What is a long-term trend I want to play in for a while?
How do I imagine a specific set of potential customers will react to that trend?
Where we are coming from and what we have learned that is relevant to that reaction?
How can we be helpful to those customers in responding to that reaction?
For example:
Trend: the increasing outsourcing of work to computers
Customer reaction: faith-based organizations will be hungry to reduce their administrative overhead but will only adopt new technology if it reflects their values and highly specialized business processes
Origin: technology consulting experience
Way to be helpful: build software that incorporates those values and processes
Another:
Trend: increasing remote work
Customer reaction: distributed teams will feel like something is missing if they are just on Zoom all the time
Origin: we’ve felt that way!
Way to be helpful: make it easier to produce awesome in-person gatherings on a regular basis
One more:
Trend: increasing entrepreneurship and number of small businesses
Customer reaction: as those teams grow they will want experienced leadership in key roles - but won’t necessarily be big enough to hire someone fulltime
Origin: we’ve felt that way - and we’ve built a network of relationships in this space
Way to be helpful: make it easier to find awesome values-aligned fractional leaders for small businesses
Combining these questions gives you four different angles:
Trend: objective, logical, forward-looking
Reaction: subjective, emotional, in the present
Origin: personal, energetic, past-looking
Service: intersubjective2, empathic, responsive
Each of those levels matters, and weaving them together is where the magic happens.
But it all starts with figuring out the long-term trend - the one you want to try to wrap your head around for a long time to come.
What trend is on your mind this week?
The Builder’s Briefing will take a lil break now! This coming week I’m going to devote my writing time to prepping for our annual OpenTent Leadership Retreat happening next week on the California coast. If you’ve been following these emails then you know we have a lot to figure out together!! Then we’ll just go ahead and take a breather for two weeks after that. See you in December!
Re: Plot
Thank you Ted (who writes a great newsletter himself!) for this sharp response to last week’s post:
I'm reading a George Saunders book and it's blowing my mind. He said that good storytelling is the gradual elimination of possibilities.
For instance, if the character has brown hair, they only have brown hair. If they have brown hair, are tall, and are a widow. They can't be blonde, short, and happily married. This is the first time I've understood how specificity and detail are integral to storytelling.
My biggest challenge with writing is decisiveness. (confidence.) She will have brown hair. She must have brown hair. She can only have brown hair.
But what if that's wrong? (What if I'm wrong?) Is there another, better way?
I'm trying to lean into my voice, trust my instincts and let it rip. Because whatever we do, we must do something.
1 Jacobs is awesome and I very much recommend his book How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. He is a former jazz musician with a deep daily meditation practice who has founded EIGHT billion-dollar companies, including two of the best performing stocks in the past decade. Do you know anyone else who has STARTED EIGHT billion-dollar companies?? I do not. It’s nuts. And unlike so many of the other big wealthy CEOs in the news, Jacobs seems to be a genuinely decent person.
In his book he makes the compelling case about there being essentially one defining trend over the past two million years: finding ways to outsource work to more and more technology. From fire to wheels to factories to AI, this is the fundamental journey of our species.
Jacobs applies this to finding industries who are behind on this long term trend of increasing technology, and then he brings what has become his standard formula of assembling a team of experts in that field, rolling up several companies, and using technology and better business practices in general to double the combined earnings of those companies in 3-5 years. (This process is for sure helped by raising lots of money from banks in order to make the acquisitions. It’s easier to make a few billion dollars when you start with someone else’s few billion dollars…)
2 Yes I learned about this word for the first time while writing this newsletter.