Hi Reader You know when someone says something to you but their body language screams that they’re bracing for a reaction? I went quiet. Just looked at him for a second. He held it. Didn't flinch, didn't qualify it. "Yeah," he said. "You heard me." We were about forty minutes into a conversation about why the sales report & pipeline looked the way it looked. They had a really good product with a decent team. And a founder who hadn't slept properly in four months. Somewhere in the middle of...
22 days ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader Last Friday at 1.15pm, a few days after Edition 100 of this newsletter was delivered, a founder I am beginning to work with sent me a voice note. Not an email. A voice note…that kinda tells you something about where he was, doesn't it? Anyways, he'd spent the morning sitting with a call recording from his best rep. Just listening. He'd blocked the time in his diary like it was a client meeting, which in his world meant other things didn't move it. "I felt like a bit of a fraud," he...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader Welcome to Edition #100 of Fine Lines! Many thanks for sticking with me and welcome to my newest subscribers. I asked a sports tech start-up founder about 9 months ago how much time she spent preparing her team to perform versus actually performing alongside them. She thought about it. For more time than I expected…and told me something in itself. Then she said: "We don't really have time for that kind of thing right now." Not confidently. Almost apologetically. Kinda like it was a...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader In 1847, a Viennese physician named Ignaz Semmelweis discovered why women were dying in his maternity ward at a rate that should have been impossible to ignore. The answer? Handwashing. Specifically, the absence of it. Doctors were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies and the data Semmelweis gathered was unambiguous; wards where handwashing was introduced saw mortality rates drop from ten percent to near zero. He had the answer & the evidence. He presented...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader On the morning of January 28th 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol had already said what needed to be said. The O-rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger would fail in cold temperatures. They had the data and had made the case. The night before the launch they had recommended, formally, that it be delayed. By morning that recommendation was gone. The data hadn't changed but pressure from above had and it didn't leave room for the answer the engineers were sitting on. So the people who...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader There is a type of commercial leader who is, genuinely, impressive with data. Fast, precise, prepared. Pull the numbers up on a Monday morning and they've already read them. Ask them what's happening in the pipeline and they'll tell you - accurately, specifically, with a clear view on what needs to happen next. They are also, in many cases, almost completely unaware of what is happening in the room. Not occasionally. Not under unusual pressure. Routinely. As if it’s a default...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader Tony, the founder, had everything in place. Clean CRM, updated pipeline, reports in on time, every time. Pull the dashboard on a Monday morning and it looked exactly like how a well-run commercial operation should look. What it didn't show was that one of his salespeople had a new baby at home. Tony didn't know. I had to tell him. That's not a small thing, is it? Actually, that's the whole thing. The data was immaculate and yet the team was quietly deciding whether they belonged...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader 3 seconds. That's how long it takes. One question without a clean answer, and the person who was leaning forward, listening, asking good questions is…..gone. What replaces him pushes back in his chair, tips his head to the ceiling, and starts talking at the room. Not to it or with it. The team doesn't react. They look down at whatever is in front of them and wait. They've seen this all before. Why your authenticity cracks under pressure....read on A thirty-year veteran coach said...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader He was standing about five feet away from me, hands on hips, gazing out the window. Using the silence to fill the air with tension. An amateur move, but I'd seen it before, so I let him have his moment. Eventually he broke it. "So what are we going to fucking do?" "Nothing," I said. "We're going to do nothing." That didn’t go down well. What followed was the full inventory…..revisit the strategy…review what the guys are saying on calls…readjust targets ....reforecast ....and, is the...
3 months ago • 4 min read