We have an ongoing joke about the unwavering commitment some of our team members at be radical have toward their physical exercise regime and the intensity thereof (including yours truly’s rowing workout schedule). We call it “#BEASTMODE” — and it allows us to make lighthearted fun of ourselves.

But hidden beneath all of this banter is a deeper truth: That if you want something you have to hunker down and do the work. That there are no shortcuts. And that you have to make the time and space.

Which brings me to the reason why I am telling you this story in the first place.

Regularly I sit down with entrepreneurs and executives alike who tell me a familiar story: That they can’t get anything done as they are being pulled into so many different directions. That they work all hours and yet make little progress on the most important things. That there is always something which requires their immediate attention.

Years ago I sat down with a friend of mine who had just published his third book in rapid succession — all while running a successful company and maintaining a somewhat sane life. I asked him how he managed to write his book whilst all the other stuff in his life didn’t pause. He lifted his hand and made the victory sign — two fingers form a V-shape. “Two hours, every day, no excuse.” was what he said. He spent every day two hours solely focussed on what he deemed being most important at the time — write his book. The remaining time he acknowledged to be your typical mess, but two hours were dedicated to writing the book. “You won’t believe how much progress you make with anything if you just dedicate two hours of your day to it consistently” were his parting words at the end of our conversation.

Now ask yourself: What is worth dedicating two hours a day to in your life? And then — do it and get into your own version of #BEASTMODE.

⇢ Listen to the Podcast 🎧

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

#BEASTMODE was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Another one of those amazing German idioms — and one which seemingly exist in every language. The concept, of course, is simple and as old as humanities’ obsession with productivity: Slow and steady wins the race — An insight which flies straight into the face of our obsession with speed and the immediacy of todays world.

Every time I am reminded of this idiom, I can’t help but summarize it as “Stuff takes time.” And I think this is the important lesson we all ought to remind ourselves of regularly: You can’t create something meaningful with a lack of time — and thus patiences, perseverance and endurance.

Companies are built over a decade. Movements rise over the span of years and years of slow, steady progress. Careers are forged over a lifetime.

All of which means that we would be well served to establish a practice of figuring out if we are really committed before we get into something — as stuff takes time. And — at the same time — be deliberate about rapidly prototyping our own lives. Trying things out, learning, iterating — quickly and focussed with the aim to find the things we do want to dig our teeth in for the long haul.

What is your next experiment? And what are you committing to for the long term?

🎧 Listen to the Podcast

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Eile mit Weile was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You have heard the old story of Henry Ford stating that “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The adage is usually uttered when someone wants to make the point that customers don’t know what they want; that we — the product people — are superior, and that only we — the product people — know what is good for the customer. And when Henry Ford doesn’t cut it, we add a healthy dose of Steve Jobs to the mix…

Now, I believe Steve Jobs, and possibly Henry Ford, had indeed an intuitive understanding of where technology is headed, and how to best pour it into products customers want and love. But that doesn’t make the above quote true. At least not when you ask the right question.

Here is the thing: If Henry Ford (who very most likely never actually said the above statement) would have asked people just broadly enough, without preconceived notions and frames, they wouldn’t have responded with “faster horses” but rather “to get from A to B in the least amount of time and the maximum amount of comfort”. A response which opens up a whole new world for anyone wanting to solve this customer need: Yes, you can breed faster horses. But you can also invent and mass market the automobile, or an airplane, or invest heavily in teleportation devices.

Your whole world opens up if you just allow yourself to ask broad and wide enough questions. A good starting point is the famous 5 Whys or our Question Generation Workshop (free PDF Field Guide here).

Go out there and don’t be afraid of asking questions of your customers. They might not know what they want — but they do know what their problems are.

🎧 Listen to the Podcast

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

The Power of Asking The (Right) Question was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A conversation during today’s session of be radical’s FutureFWD program reminded me of the (in)famous Dunning-Kruger effect. The short version of the Dunning-Kruger effect states that “people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.”

Something, I am sure, we all have observed in our respective lives: Someone commenting on the rise of the machines once AI becomes sentient (hint: the person watched too many re-runs of The Terminator). Or someone else lamenting the millions of unemployed truck drivers which we soon will see due to fully autonomous vehicles taking over (hint: we are quite some ways off from fully autonomous vehicles and even when we get there, it is much more complex than people simply being unemployed). I am sure you have plenty of your own examples…

The Dunning-Kruger effect happens to the best of us — once we know a little bit about a topic, we have a tendency to become overly confident in our true grasp of the subject and ignorant of the level of expertise needed to gain mastery. And it hits you two ways: One is you and your understanding of a particular subject matter. The other is the people around you and their grasp of things versus of how they present it and themselves. Which makes hiring in areas you are no expert in so hard — how do you know if someone is truly a master at their chosen art or simply deep in Dunning-Kruger land?

We ought to constantly remind ourselves of David Dunning and Justin Kruger’s work and keep asking ourself: Do we truly know or do we believe we know?

🎧 Listen to this Dispatch

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Beware the Dunning-Kruger Effect was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sidebar and a little trip down memory lane: Jane and I were at eBay when we acquired PayPal and Skype. The PayPal acquisition made complete sense — having a seamless, fluid way for buyers and sellers to transact is a no-brainer. The Skype transaction though made pretty much everyone at eBay scratch their heads. eBay had a significant problem with buyers and sellers transacting outside of the eBay platform after initiating contact on our platform to skirt our fees. Adding a Skype button on a listing would have just accelerated this. Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO at the time, dressed this acquisition up in the slogan “The Power of Three”. Sounds great, is totally meaningless, and a lesson in corporate BS. Flip through the investor deck if you want to see a prime example of “we have no clue why we just did what we did, but let’s make it sound cool.”

But that is not the Power of Three I want to talk about.

The one I think actually makes a ton of sense is one I learned from famed blogger Mark Frauenfelder. It is a triptych to suss out if something is worth doing. Ever since I got introduced to this, it is my go-to heuristic I apply whenever I think about a new opportunity.

Without much further ado — whenever you encounter an opportunity, something vying for your precious attention, something asking you to spend time, energy and resources on it, consider the following three dimensions. And only if it ticks at least two of these boxes, pursue it.

1. KNOWLEDGE: Will I learn something?
2. FUN: Is it fun?
3. MONEY: Is it financially worthwhile?

As The Heretic likely won’t make you any money (at least not directly), I sincerely hope you learn something from time to time and have fun reading/listening to it. 😅

🎧 Listen to the Podcast

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

The Power of Three was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently I rediscovered a gem of speech from the 1940s. Albert E. N. Gray delivered a keynote at the annual conference of the National Association of Life Underwriters where he laid out his findings on “what makes you successful”.

I remember reading the transcript of his speech many years ago when I was in college; after watching the iconic movie Glengarry Glen Ross and talking about it with my college friends.

Gray’s speech is easy to summarize: Do the things that others don’t like to do. Or in Gray’s own words:

The common denominator of success — secret of success of every individual who has ever been successful — lies in the fact that he or she formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.

He goes on to point out that the reason successful people form the habit of doing this, whereas “failures” (his words) don’t, is that successful people have purpose and the desire for pleasing results as opposed to the desire for pleasing methods.

While re-reading Gray’s words, delivered some 80 years ago, I couldn’t help but relate this to not only personal but also business success. I strongly believe that successful businesses are built on the habit of solving the hard problems for your customers. The ones most others don’t want to touch as they are too hard, too unpleasant, too frustrating to deal with for most. But of course, once you do, you solve real customer pain points for which your customers gladly will compensate you.

Too many companies are solving the easy problem. The one which is fun, pleasant and simple to solve. To solve the hard ones we need conviction, perseverance, patience. And a belief into something which is bigger than ourselves — our purpose — to pull us forward.

Success comes from doing the things which others don’t like to do.

🎧 Listen to the Podcast

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

The Common Denominator of Success was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two hundred years ago German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi said (or so the world is told): “Man muss immer umkehren.” — “Invert, always invert.” Devising the solution to a mathematical problem, Carl applied the method of inversion to the challenge at hand.

Inversion is a handy concept which has implications far beyond the world of mathematical theorems and numbers: When thinking about a problem, taking the inverse (opposite) perspective regularly unlocks new approaches, strategies and solutions.

Want to eat healthier? One approach is to put more vegetables on your plate. Apply inversion to the problem and you end up reducing the amount of unhealthy things you might eat. Same goal, different approach. Combining both will yield better results.

Investing money with a goal to make more money? Of course. But the inverse is something good money managers also take into account: Invest money from a perspective of not losing money. A good portfolio approach takes and applies both perspectives.

The next time you think about innovation (or, gasp!, disruption) I suggest you apply a healthy dose of Carl’s wisdom and invert the problem you are working on: In addition to only looking at the new-new, ask yourself what can be made better of the old.

Inverting regularly yields surprising insights, and at the very least will give you a much more holistic view of the challenge at hand.

Invert, always invert.

🎧 Listen to the Audio Version of this dispatch.

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Invert, Always Invert was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a saying in German which finds its roots in cooking: “Es wird nichts so heiß gegessen, wie es gekocht wird.” — Nothing gets eaten as hot as it has been cooked.

Commonly used as an expression to signify that we often tend to expect things to be worse than they really are, it equally applies to the world we operate in. One where many of us chase the latest and greatest, always trying to be ahead of the curve, capitalizing on the weakest of signals before they become mainstream.

Alas, that is not how things typically work. As discussed in our post on Explorers, Pioneers and Settlers, it regularly doesn’t pay to be the first (or even early) but rather to have the good fortitude to wait until we are getting closer to the point where we are truly ready to cross the chasm and therefore build for scale.

Reality is one which is build on perseverance and being at the right place at the right time. It is as easy to be too early than it is to be too late. (*)

Next time you hear someone breathlessly usher the latest trend dribble — NFTs anyone? — consider that there are nearly never any overnight successes. That stuff takes time. That there is a chasm between early adopters and early majority. That it takes 10,000 hours of practice or 10,000 failed light bulbs to be successful.

It takes time.

(*) Of course, there is always someone making money while the water is still boiling (to stay in the metaphor). But it is incredibly hard to get this right and often sheer luck if you do… Maybe not the most sustainable nor repeatable position…

🎧 Listen to the Audio Version of this Dispatch

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Learnings From Cooking (And German Sayings) was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dani Grant and Nick Grossman at Union Square Ventures made an interesting observation a few years ago: Nowadays things tend to start their life as an app. Be it on the web or natively on your mobile — new ideas manifest themselves as an app, which sometimes becomes viral. Take Clubhouse, an app on your phone, initially (and somewhat to this day) highly exclusive by being invite-only and taking a public broadcast approach to audio, allowing everyone to become their own radio show host, complete with listener participation.

After Clubhouse exploded in publicity and usage, we see two adjacent things happening: (1) An ecosystem of providers around Clubhouse emerges, providing anything from tools for Clubhouse hosts to “Clubhouse Bio Generators” (check out all the Clubhouse related stuff on ProductHunt). And (2) the ideas and concepts behind Clubhouse are turning into infrastructure. Heretic reader Thomas Schranz for example turned Clubhouse into an open source platform, allowing everyone to build their own Clubhouse with Jam Systems.

Once an app has turned into infrastructure, entrepreneurs then take this infrastructure and build new apps on top of it. I am sure we will see many, many variations of the core Clubhouse idea, tailored to specific niches and use cases, mashed and mixed with other ideas (Clubhouse meets Tic Toc, operating like it is Dispo anyone?) all running on infrastructure such as Jam Systems.

Once you see this pattern, you can see it everywhere. Which begs an interesting question: Where in the cycle do you want to play and where are the real opportunities?

🎧 Listen to the Podcast Version

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Apps Become Infrastructure Become Apps was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most common mistakes I see founders do, is to assume everything is under their control — or to simply ignore the things which aren’t. It’s a decent coping strategy in a world full of uncertainty. And as my friend and colleague Jeffrey Rogers likes to point out, it’s important to differentiate between the things you actually can not know (irreducible uncertainties) and the things you could know, but don’t (reducible uncertainties).

All too often we tend to ignore the crucial, alas non-controllable factors which surround our product or service. The things which can accelerate or prohibit our solution from being successful in the market. I like to call these factors “Gestalt”.

Gestalt is one of those weirdly beautiful (and surpassingly short) German words which only exist, as a concept, in the German language (other examples include Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude). The definition of Gestalt (or Holism) is “the idea that natural systems and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as loose collections of parts.”

Applied to the world of products, services and business-at-large, you have to look, and take into consideration, all the factors, not just the core of your offering. The futurist community has a great acronym for those factors: STEEPS — Scientific, Technological, Environmental, Economical, Political, Social. Ask yourself which of those factors (the Gestalt) need to be in place and/or removed for you to be successful. And remember: Regularly these are outside of your control.

Want to create a Bitcoin-Trading platform in Ecuador? You might have the chops and the time might be right, but sadly the Ecuadorian government will throw you into jail for doing so. (Political) Get people to wear Augmented Reality Glasses with a built-in camera? It might be socially not only awkward but outright unacceptable — so much so that people wearing your glasses might be denied entrance into many public spaces (as has happened with Google Glass). (Social) Developed the worlds-best movie streaming service in the late 90s? Visionary and good on you — but as long as there isn’t high enough broadband penetration in the households, you won’t have any customers being able to make use of your service. (Technological)

Next time you ponder your next big thing, not only examine the maturity and product-market fit of your core invention but also all the other factors which might be outside of your control, but are crucial for your success: The Gestalt.

🎧 Listen to this dispatch as a Podcast

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. ⇢ https://theheretic.org

Do Not Forget The Gestalt was originally published in The Heretic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.