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Team Zero & the Chief-Example-Officer
Lately, I found myself talking with founders a lot about a concept I call “Team Zero”. It is an extremely simple concept to grasp and yet one of the hardest to apply. “Team Zero” means that you, as founders, accept that your company is your creation and that everything you see in it, whether you love…
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What’s your Person Market Fit?
Many of the founders I coach come from product or engineering backgrounds. I found that product/dev analogies work really well when it comes to working to their personal growth and goals. The question that works best of all, and gets them to identify their gaps and pinpoint where they want to grow was: Imagine you…
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Igniting a vision
There is a rare moment I live for. It is the birth of a vision in a person’s mind. It is the second when, for the first time they see, actually see, the picture of the future they are about to create. I found the secret to converting that vague sense of future you have…
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Speed vs. Velocity
When I saw this screen capture by the man who ran a full marathon in his balcony during COVID-19 I was reminded about how easy it is for us humans to confuse movement with progress. It made me think about the times, during the past 20 years as an entrepreneur and product person when I found myself…
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The incredible story of Jo Van Gogh Bonger
Look at this face. This incredible lady singlehandedly and against all odds created the brand of who is today the most recognized artist in the world. I was browsing Google photos trying to find a photo of van Gogh (the painter himself not his work) in order to paint his portrait when my eyes landed…
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When there’s a will there’s a way
The other day as I was taking one of my “let’s keep our sanity while in quarantine” walks I happened to bump into this incredible tree. And it seemed to capture in one frame what it really takes to reinvent yourself in times of unbelievable difficulty. I’m not sure what happened in this tree’s but…
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What’s your before & after vision?
COVID-19 is the mother of all triggers. You want to react and being proactive is realllllllly hard. Your team looks up to you with one question in their minds “What should we do now?” But asking “what to do?” is a question that is reactive by nature and in times like these, we should do…
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Ducks in the water
There is a segment in the book Reboot, where Jerry Colonna tells about a simple question that quite regularly makes the entrepreneurs he works with start crying. He writes: My radical, surprising, unprecedented question that always does the trick is quite simple; I ask, “How are you?” But then I follow it up with, “No.…
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Accountability 2.0
In the past year I found myself thinking a lot about accountability. As I was caching founders and teams I noticed that whenever we mentioned the term “accountability” or asked “Who is accountable?” people usually moved uncomfortably in their chairs. Accountability felt like a hot potato no one wanted to hold, and so I kept…
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The ultimate job to be done
Clayton M. Christensen passed away this week… He left behind him an incredible body of work and books that helped countless companies and individuals find the balance between the short term business pressures and the longer-term, survival, need to always innovate. I don’t think there is a single concept that impacted me, in my 20 years as…
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Your team needs a destination not just a goal
You can say your goal for this year is 20m ARR Or you can say… We transformed into a scalable, global, enterprise-grade, solution that became the default workflow of our users, resulting in 5 case studies that shrank our sales cycle to 6 months and grew our average client value to >500k resulting in 20m ARR.…
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Leadership requires bite-sized courage
When we think about courage and leadership we imagine big life events and dramatic decisions. But working with founders and their teams I constantly see that there is a different type of courage that leaders are required to display every day, in their tiniest choices and actions. The bite-sized courage. It’s the courage that is…
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Vision is a verb
If you want to know why so many visions end up as empty words printed on a poster, hanging from corporate walls, Google “define:Vision”. You will see a long definition of the noun VISION… But if you scroll and look carefully you will see single word definition for the verb vision: Vision (verb): Imagine If…
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I do!
“I do” might be the most powerful combination of words in the English language. What is incredible in these 3 letters is that they marry commitment and action in a way that no other words do. These 3 letters come with everything you need to accomplish anything you dream of. But if you want them…
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Why an orange is an orange even when it’s a lemon (and the secret power of the words “I think”)
2 years ago we built a garden on our roof. From that day on, I woke up every morning, took a deep breath of garden scents, and went to talk to my trees (I do that 😊). Each morning, I thanked my trees for making my day and for bringing the bees and the hummingbirds…
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The power of a simple undeniable truth
The first time I heard Johan Cruyff’s quote it blew my mind in its simplicity: There is only one ball, so you need to have it. Johan Cruyff discovered Total Football (the real football 😏) playing for the amazing Netherlands national team and Ajax during the 70s, and with it came the simple realization: if your team is…
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Seriously, a saber-tooth attack at 2 a.m. (again)?
It’s 2 a.m. and you’re lying in bed. Everything around is quiet and calm yet here you are awake staring at the ceiling. Your heart is beating fast, your mouth feels dry, your pupils are so dilated you can literally see in the dark, your skin feels cool and a bit sweaty and your body…
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You’re not a two-legged camel you’re just different
When the press tried to describe Dick Fosbury’s high jump technique they couldn’t find the right words. No one before him has ever tried to clear the high jump bar facing backward. So in an article, titled Being Backward Gets Results, Sports Illustrated wrote: “Fosbury charges up from slightly to the left of center with a…