ADAPTABILITY
- My career in brief:
- Engineer | Consultant | Senior Manager | Director | VP | MD | CEO | CMO
- 🌱 → 🌳 → 🌴🌴🌴 → 🏙
- 🇧🇷🇺🇸🇨🇳🇬🇧🇨🇦🇯🇵🇮🇱🇳🇬🇰🇪🇩🇪🇮🇳🇲🇽🇦🇪🇿🇦
- Here's what you need to figure out for a successful transition to a new space:
- What success looks like…in that context
- Incentives to get what you what want ..in that context
- Being a shape shifter is hard, but not shifting shape is harder
SELF-AWARENESS IS YOUR PROTECTION
- To be a great operator, you have to:
- Raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with
- Bring up important topics without drawing importance to yourself
- You are in charge of getting the decisions made but not making all the decisions
- Master Yourself, (it is even better to) understand others
- If you don't know your MBTI, find out ASAP
OWN YOUR POINT OF VIEW
- Know your POV/approach to operating, so you can repeat it, repetition allows you to hone your skill and build credibility - rinse and repeat
- What is your Ikigai?
- I found mine - it took a lot of personal reflection, conversations, and looking at my past work - I design, (re)build and scale two-sided/tech platform businesses
- This means I tend to frequently work on:
- partnership
- mobile technology
- access to millions to consumers
- monetization / revenue growth
"WHAT IF" and "THEN WHAT"
- The difference between a good operator and great one is second-order thinking
- Always ask….'what if' and 'then what'
- First-order thinking is quick and straightforward. Second-order thinking, on the other hand, is more future-facing, intentional, and multi-dimensional.
- It's about finding balance between thinking and doing
- ….Even ordering lunch can be harder in a different environment….
- The difference between success and failure lies, actually, in the compound effect of decisions made by your team
TALENT
- You're one conversation away from great talent
- Don't wait till you need talent to start looking
- Great potential operators stand out - you can see this anywhere e.g. :
- Bias for action
- Clarity of thought
- Initiative
- I hired the Migo team from the best of the last 10 years of great conversations in random places - they continue to work and play together
SHOW, DON'T TELL
- Sometimes, your audience can be hostile to you / your POV
- Skeptics, Haters, Risk-Avoiders, Those that don't 'Get It', The Biased
- To be a great Operator, you have to push past all that resistance without overtly persuading or instructing
- Use data, where your word is not enough so that people figure out the implications for themselves
