Coal to Diamond
How inside-out transformation is a must for an outer glory. What are successful startups doing to build 'A teams'? And the strange world of ant geopolitics.
Growth Mindset Ideas
Unlocking the Paradox: Inside-out transformation for outer glory
Change the inside and the outside falls into place
Feelings trigger decisions. Marketing gurus keep repeating this mantra to all their clients. Its true. Recollect all the advertisements, slogans you liked and made you check out the product.
Emotions fuel our choices, shaping the path we take everyday. Making self-talk default positive leads to lot of positive emotions and therefore better decisions.
Telling yourself to go to gym everyday or exercise everyday not because you want the picture perfect body but to get healthier may lead to better physical health.
Learning new things/skills for your own development may eventually lead to career advancement.
Mindset shift to treat each challenge as an opportunity to learn may lead you becoming a better problem solver.
Changing the perception about people, being kind to them in difficult situations lead you to get better at relationships.
Internal work in terms of self-talk, mindset shift, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence leads to a transformative outer brilliance.
Change the inside and the outside falls into place. You've got this!
Life lessons that you can’t afford to ignore
The A teams: What makes them? and how to build one?
At the heart of every successful startup, you either find a strong process or luck. Luck eventually runs out, but dynamically adjusted processes acts as growth levers.
Last week one of my coaching clients conversation was their teams performance. As it happens with any coaching conversation, peeling off process landed my client in thinking about desired behaviors.
We discussed, What is happening now? And what needs to happen to reach to our next growth milestone?
Summarizing here top ideas that came up to uplift the team performance,
Internal drivers
Best lever for growth for a startup is the speed. Speed at which ideas get tested and executed. Speed at which team learns new things and generate more ideas to try.
Brand Vs Value. Large corporates spend, both time and money on branding because their positioning allows them sustained customer value delivery. Startups need outsized customer value delivery to build loyalty.
80/20 rule. 80% of success comes from 20% of efforts/tasks. Processes, teams need to be organized to amplify this rule.
What's working for you? This is one of my go to questions for individuals or leaders to understand what's their success metric? and process to achieve it. If you don't have answer to this question. You haven't found it yet. And its worth to experiment and get the answer to this question.
Ideas and execution. Most successful startups excel at generating new ideas, testing them fast, and implement it. If your team is not coming up with the new ideas, they aren't learning. If your team has ideas but not implementing them or is slow at implementing, they are afraid to fail. Instill Not Yet mindset in them.
External drivers
Scaling customer base. Every YC founds repeats this idea. Talk to as many customers as possible in early stages of growth. Learning the journey that led to the product discovery and placing yourself in that journey is how you scale.
What's the bottleneck? This may not apply to all. But introspecting tasks, teams to find out the activities that slows the team and removing them can lead to speed. Sometimes, removing things get better results.
Best reads from the internet
Smart learning is learning from the best around you. Curated shares from the smartest on the internet. Ideas that aligned or challenged my thinking. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
The strange world of ant geopolitics.
AI in sales: Microsoft extending Copilot to sales transformation
A banana revolution: Fruit of the future
Rich Tales reader’s recommendation: Hypnosis for clearing subconscious negativity
Muse
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
~ Frederick Douglass
What should we be worried about?