A Library of Trustmaking and Fighting Fire with Fire
Two critical and growing teams in this game of an economy we are playing, aren't getting what they need: Founders and Fractionals.
I've been playing with algorithms lately...
I know, I know. This seems like at best a contradiction and at worst a total abdication to what I have very publicly named "The Artificial Society." (I have no regrets.)
But here's my problem. As much as I would love to pull all 3000 of you who read this in various different forms, into my sunroom overlooking my vegetable garden and have a lovely salon of good thinking and good doing together... we're spread out from Türkiye to Portugal to Chicago t0 Portland.
So we're stuck with the internet as our primary way of breaking bread together. And with the internet, the king of all games, comes rules. You may have noticed me playing by those rules a little more compliantly lately. Increased content production, an extra email a week, stuff to try and build better bridges between you and I. A YouTube channel. Yikes. I swore I would never.
(This swearing, as you will know, is the surest sign that you will almost definitely do the thing. Thus the reason I am writing to you from my office in my home state to which I swore I would never return.)
My team has even succumbed to posting those silly paused in mid thought screen grabs with loud text over the top because that is what the geniuses over at YouTube require. We truly serve petulant gods.
But why?
Good question. It's not just the geographic distribution of it all. It's that I'm trying to solve a problem. A big one. One that I can't solve by my history of picking up the phone when it rings and saying "Glad ABC referred you, happy to chat." Although, I continue to do that, and it's great. Thank you to all the ABCs out there, you are deeply loved.
The problem, though, remains unsolved without a shift in my tactics: two critical and growing teams in this game of an economy we are playing, aren't getting what they need: Founders and Fractionals.
Founders are being dragged into the tactical ditch with their only savior being some conglomerate buyer. Spending money they don't need to spend, Mistaking "out there" problems for "in here" problems. The villain is always in the building (Rule #6 of my forthcoming book, The Damn Rules.) You are working your ass of on your businesses, but the same types of challenges with the same types of shapes keep popping up again and again and again, because they are system problems. They are built into the game and its rules.
And you can't solve problems of the game without recognizing and rewriting a few rules. Want different outcomes? Play a different game. The existing system is a trustbreaking factory that has been built for the last 40 years and codified in the last 10. Keep playing by its rules? Keep breaking trust. It's that simple.
And fractionals... you loud raucous team of rivals, you are the new C-suite in organizations under $50M in revenue. And I love ya, but most of you don't have the business chops you need. Your offerings are unclear, you show up in the marketplace like people who are in between jobs, you need more beef to bring to the table in terms of business and financial acumen. You need to stop posting on the internet about how much you hate companies who make profits.
These are, well-intended actions, but trust-breaking. And our Founder friends need a better class of Fractionals if we're really going to redesign how we build leadership teams in this economy.
Build a Library
So I made a choice. Stop writing a newsletter. (Obviously I'm still writing a newsletter, but stop doing just that.) And start building a library.
A compendium of resources in written formats. Guides. Tooling. Action plans. Workshops. And yes... that dastardly word: content.
Put the library where people go: YouTube
Build a special section of it for people who are committed. Trust-Made Guild
And follow your own advice (Rule #7 of The Damn Rules): Love is the Strategy.
Yesterday a founder I love had this bell-ringing wake up call that put him back in the driver's seat of his growth. Freed him from chasing the tail of a flailing category, and lit him up like a mountain sunrise. I was like, "Damn. This is what I do this for."
I love it when Founders and Fractionals get free.
Here's today's latest, not that far what my founder friend yesterday needed:
Don't Wait for Things to Get Better: Recognizing contraction and what to do about it
See you in there.
Nick
Give a Damn.
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