#56 - What do you really know about your business? (probably not as much as you think)
An ode to being a "learn-it-all" and not a "know-it-all"
Here is a link to Exonomist #1 if you weren’t a subscriber back then when I started this thing. It’s a good pre-read before this essay, as you’ll get reminded about what makes Exonomist — raw, quick, minimally or just not edited.
“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
- Voltaire
tl;dr — be a “learn-it-all” not a “know-it-all”
Voltaire is alleged to have made this statement. But he’s not the only one who has uttered this idea. Aristotle, Einstein, Hawking all uttered, essentially, the same idea at one point or another. I won’t go so far as to say we don’t know anything, but I think there’s wisdom in embracing the notion of our lack of deep knowledge about many things.
I’ve been pondering this idea for the last few weeks. It’s easy to read the title of this essay as a negative thing (please imagine my voice reading it out loud in a suspicious, dark tone), but I mean it to be an overwhelmingly positive thing. Bear with me, I’ll get to why. These are free-write essay, so the journey might not be neat :). Let’s see.
It’s the very reality of not knowing something that might lead you to try to find the answer. And, in a way, we’re all trying to find an answer to some set of questions. Questions like:
How can I get into better shape?
How can I be a better parent?
How can I achieve financial comfort?
Or on a more business-oriented level, questions like:
How do I land more customers?
How can we retain our people?
How can I gain support for this new product that I think we should build?
How is XYZ function doing?
There’s always someone out there who is trying to sell you the way to Knowing something, and the stone-cold truth is that most people have little-to-no business giving advice. But this means that some people do have the …trust / brand-permission / experience / track-record / etc. to help you Know more about a topic
The counters to this are legion (hyperbole here). My Dad used to say something similar to me whenever he would comment on people (non-founders) giving him advice on his business. I would always remind him that, “Some of the best ideas come from people who know nothing about your business, and may have very different life experiences.”
We would then debate in a rather focused manner for an hour on this exact topic, and I would try to prove that one shouldn’t close their ears to perspective. But my Dad wasn’t totally wrong here, and I wasn’t totally right.
So where does this take us, then? I think the implication of all this is:
There is so much information around us, to help inform decisions. But not all pieces of information should be weighted equally, and where, who, and when it comes from are deeply relevant factors
You should always seek to enhance / validate your POV with a variety of datapoints, to be as informed as possible around a decision
Yes, there are times when you need to just “go with your gut” …which may mean going against the grain of what everyone around you is consulting you to do or not do
When it comes to business, you should always assume there is something you do not know or something you have under-appreciated. You should also assume that your competitors have figured out things you haven’t, at all times.
Because what do you really know? Do you know that your marketing organization is doing well? How do you know that? Oh, because the CMO showed you their OKRs and it’s mostly green and you’ve gotten good feedback? OK, all great things, but is that knowing? I don’t think so. I think that’s having evidence to suspect something. Through the reporting out of your results, you can help people to suspect or believe that something is going a certain way, but the only way to know is to have extreme depth across dimensions. For example (and to continue building upon the marketing example):
How are the Marketing org’s people doing? (by layer)
How are the vendor relationships?
How are the key results / key metrics looking?
How do the people closest to this capability really feel about its prospects going forward?
Are the people here getting what they need?
What existential threats exist to this team’s progress?
OK, take all of this, and now go imagine you had a panel of 10 of the world’s very best marketing leaders (with expertise at each major stage of the growth journey), and pretend they got to hear the answers to each of these questions. I am fairly certain you would get at least 2 diverging opinions, and in those opinions might be nuggets of wisdom that you should get curious about → → → unlocking an insight or datapoint you may not have previously discovered.
I think this process whereby you accept that you don’t really know as much as you think you do is a beautiful thing. And I think it’s even more powerful for organizations who have mountainous layers of orthodoxy and structure to have people who can just deep dive through those layers to get closer to knowing. To develop stronger ideas about what might be the thing to make the company work better for its employees, customers, and backers (investors / shareholders).
Eh, I disagree with myself here actually. I think this is probably just as, if not more, important for startups… Startups who are fighting that most brutal battle for product-market fit, where the competition isn’t just your competitors, it’s the runway you have, the timing of their offerings in the market, and the not-yet-knowing if this thing is going to work… And also knowing without a shadow of a doubt that it’s you who will probably the largest determinant of that. You and your team. As a startup, you are pushing so hard to uncover hidden and not-so-hidden truths about markets, people, technology, regulation… all at once!
In closing, and in a huge nod to my employer Microsoft: “Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all”
^^^Damn, that might’ve been a better, more concise way to communicate this essay, but — once again — Exonomist is written in a quick-write, no editing format, with typos, and occasionally raw ideas that I will come back to later and disagree with :).
Have a great weekend! I’ll be back with more writing next week :-).