The Indiefield Blog

Not all disasters can be avoided. Not all disasters are fatal. If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change.

If you build a disaster-tolerant company you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won't hide from things. The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst possible outcome.

And once you do that, the upside is more likely to occur. That outcome you were so afraid of isn't so bad, and once you realise you can tolerate it, it's (amazingly, perversely and ironically) less likely to happen.

Being ignored is the same as failure. So you need to not be ignored.

Most people, most of the time, don't buy things if there's a free substitute available. Millions will walk by a painting in a museum, but very few have the prints in their homes. Seeing something for free aids its discovery. It will attract attention, spread and then, lead to some portion of the masses actually buying something. What's easy to overlook is that a leap is necessary for the last step to occur. As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid.

Taylor Swift's music is basically free. It's the concerts and films that cost money. McKinsey & Company's consulting philosophy is free, it's the bespoke work that costs money. Watching a movie on Netflix is free - once you pay to belong. Playing golf at the local public course is pretty cheap, it's membership in the fancy club that costs money. The free culture is here and it's getting more pervasive.

The brutal economics of discovery combined with no marginal cost create a relentless path toward free, which deepens the gap. Going forward, many things that can be free, will be.

You don't know what to do.

You don't know how to do it.

You don't have the authority or the resources to do it.

You're afraid.

Once you figure out what needs to be fixed, it's far easier to find the solution (or decide to work on a different problem). Stuck is a state of mind, and it's fixable.

How much are you paying for the privilege of having someone else tell you what to do? So many of us happily give up our freedom and our income potential in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next. How much are you giving up?

Clients and staff make irrational requests all the time. That doesn't make them unreasonable. If satisfying their request moves things forward, it's not always worth the effort to teach someone a lesson. Sometimes, it's more effective to just embrace their irrationality. Being right doesn't always have to be the goal.

Scientists make predictions, and predicting the future is far more valuable than explaining the past. Ask a physicist what will happen if you fire a projectile like this in that direction, and they'll know. Ask Walter White how to make the meth blue and you'll get the right answer.

Analysts who come up with plausible explanations for what just happened don't help us as much, because it's not always easy to turn those explanations into useful action.

The practice, then, is to start making predictions. In writing. You don't have to share them in public, but the habit will push you to understand your instincts and to sharpen your ability to see what works (and what doesn't) without the easy out of having to explain what already happened.

I predict that the more you practice your predictions, the better you'll get at discerning where the science is.

...work hard. That way, you'll have something to show for it. The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work. Stop gossiping and playing stupid games at work with your colleagues. Instead do something to advance your career and the company. In the same amount of time you can expend twice the effort and get far more in exchange.

Companies should never try to change the worldview of the audience they're selling to. The term worldview in this context is the set of expectations and biases that colour the way each of us see the world. The worldview of a 50 year old luxury wine-loving investment banker is very different from that of a 21 year old graduate. One might see a £1,000 bottle of Château Pétrus as both a bargain and a must-have, while the other might see the very same bottle of wine as a tasteless and insane waste of money. Worldview changes three things: attention, bias and vernacular. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we've decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate with people differently based on their worldview. It's extremely expensive, time consuming and difficult to change someone's worldview. Sell nuts to squirrels, don't try to persuade dolphins that nuts are delicious.

On social media people talk endlessly about all the things the typical person can't possibly afford. Mansions, cars, jets, jewels, dinners with Gwyneth Paltrow. At the same time, you get negative feedback when you talk about things people have chosen not to have. If you promote a great product that only works on an iPhone, all the people who have chosen Android get angry, that special kind of angry that belongs to the people who made a decision. The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know what would happen. Turns out there is a big difference between "don't tell me what I can't have" and "don't tell me what I've chosen not to be able to have". So dreaming of winning the lottery is fine but experiencing regret over a decision is not.

If you're not eager to share your perspective, don't bother sharing it. The audience wants to hear what you have to say, and if the question isn't right on point, reframe it, and answer that question instead. If your answers aren't interesting, exciting or engaging, that's on you.

"I did the reading."

No one said the preparation part was fun, but yes, it's important. I wonder why we believe we can skip it and still be so extremely smart.

Philosophers and lawyers talk about agency: the responsibility that comes with the capacity to act in the world. If you can decide, if you can act, you have agency. Life without agency would be a nightmare. Trapped in a box, unable to do anything by choice, nothing but a puppet. It always makes me wonder why then, do both companies and people struggle so intently to avoid the responsibility that comes with agency? "It's not my job, my boss won't let me, there's an ISO rule, we're prohibited, it's our supplier, that's our policy...". It's not something you can turn on or off. Either you have the capacity to act in the world. Or you don't.

The news tells us about the world economy or the national economy, or even the economy in a specific region. This is easy to talk about, statistically driven and apparently important to everyone. But in reality this has absolutely nothing to do with your day, your job and your approach to life. If the unemployment rate in market research doesn't match the national numbers, the national numbers don't matter so much. Economics used to be stuck in geography. Now, as markets and industries transcend location, useful economic stats describe the state of the people you're working with and selling to.

Some people work hard to lower the bar at work. These are the people who not only do the minimum amount permitted, they actually work hard to do just a little bit less than that. Most people seek to meet the bar. They figure out what's expected, and do that. A few people, very few, work to relentlessly raise the bar. They are the ones who overdeliver on projects, show up ahead of schedule, instigate, suggest and push. Raising the bar is exhausting, no doubt about it. I'm not sure the people who engage in this apparently reckless behaviour would have it any other way, though. They get to experience a fundamentally different day, a different journey and a different reputation to everyone else.

No company cares about you. Companies are simply not capable of this. Your bank, certainly, does not care. Neither does your pension provider or even that online retailer that you purchase so much from. It's amazing to me that people are surprised to discover this fact. People, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of caring. It's part of being a human. If you want to build a caring company, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When you free your people to act like people (as opposed to cogs in a profit-maximising efficient company machine) then the caring will obviously happen.

There is often an initial warning sign that a project is in trouble. Sometimes it even begins before the project does. Our subconscious starts looking around for an excuse, deniability and something to blame. It gives us confidence and peace of mind - it's far easier to be calm when the police appear at your door if you have an excuse handy. Sometimes we even start looking for the excuse before we accept the project. We say to ourselves (and our clients), "this is best efforts ..." Then, as the project moves along (or not), we continually add to and refine our excuse, reminding ourselves of all the factors that were out of our control. Some people who have a built-in all-purpose excuse (middle child syndrome, wrong astrology sign, some slight at the hands of their upbringing or the system from long ago) and they often end up failing. They have an excuse ready to go, so it's easier to back off when the going is tough. Here's an alternative to the excuse-driven life: what happens if you actively avoid looking for excuses at all? Instead of making excuses, the successful project is filled with people who are obsessed with avoiding excuses.

A shop owner has to make bets. To buy inventory, to choose this over that, to make decisions in advance about what's going to sell. The owner might need to make these decisions months in advance, with no chance to re-order if there's a hit and nothing but discounted sales (losses) for what doesn't sell. The relentless physics of the situation means that shops need the ability to not just pick hits, but to make them. It's so different in the digital world. Amazon Prime says: "We're going to sell everything, and a lot of it. We don't care which thing, because it's all the same to us. Just put everything in the store and the market will sort it out". As a result, they have far less promotional power. Amazon doesn't make a hit, it contains hits - they have it all and the longer the tail, the better.

What do you do with legacy products and services? Things you started that never really caught on, or died out slowly over time? That's a very easy way to judge the posture and speed of a company. If there's a one-way track - stuff gets added, but it never gets taken away - then the ship is going to get slower and heavier and become much harder to handle and it will eventually sink. Either you're focused on maintaining the legacy features or you're focused on figuring out how to replace them with the future. Your clients want the future, not the past.

There is a lot of fear associated with 'overstretched'. Too much financial risk and you'll end up stressed, bankrupt and overstretched. But what about the more prevalent, more subtle and ultimately more damaging notion of being under stretched? The old school factory-mindset encourages every employee to protect their time and their effort. Don't go the extra mile because no-one will ever thank you. Don't push harder because you'll only damage yourself. Don't let them make you do more because that will be the new normal and you'll have to work harder forever. It's true: in most businesses productivity only increases as the result of more effort, and that effort is rarely compensated in an immediately obvious way. Here's the thing: modern work is different. In fact, the exhaustion from overstretching yourself in a modern working environment is some of the best exhaustion you will ever feel. So yes, we need to figure out how to push ourselves until we're overstretched.

On paper it is quite easy. Sell a story that some people want to believe. In fact, sell a story they already believe. The story has to be integrated into your product and services. The iPad, for example, wasn't something that people were clamouring for... but the story of it, the magic tablet, the universal book, the ticket to the fashion-geek tribe - suddenly there was huge queue out the door for it. The same way that every year, we see a new film sensation, a new fashion superstar, a new hit record, a new online phenomenon. It's not an accident. That story is just waiting for someone to hear it. They key point here is "some people". Not everyone will understand your story, and that's okay too.