Been There — Done This?
by Miki SaxonAs I’ve said before, one of the smartest moves you can make is to sign up for the CB Insights newsletter. It’s got more going for it than just the data, although that is excellent.
If you take time to read it and actually pay attention to the construction, design, organization, and the writing itself, you will be miles ahead when it comes to your own efforts.
Assuming, that is, you consider a subscriber list of more than 485,000 to indicate success.
While several people author specific editions (health, fintech, etc.) It is one of the founders, Anand Sanwal, who originally wrote all of them and it is his intelligence, skilled writing, irreverence and quirkiness that set the tone. Amazingly, the other authors have similar writing skills.
One of the greatest pleasures, to me, are the odd bits that Anand provides, such as this one, that he calls “everyone before me was dumb.”
Sometimes a new person joins your team and immediately decides the way things are done is stupid and/or inefficient. They invent their own process without taking the time to understand why existing processes are in place.
Bobby Ghoshal and Nick Stamas designed this brilliant framework that describes this situation.
They’ve dubbed it The Prior Idiots Phenomenon.
This might be good to include in employee onboarding everywhere.
Managers love to hire people whom they believe can “hit the ground running.”
However, that doesn’t mean to hit the ground running roughshod over the culture, processes, ways and means that you know nothing about, because you have a better approach.
We’ve all been there, but hopefully not done that.
Or at least won’t do it again in the future.
Image credit: CB Insights Newsletter
