Seth Godin: In search of the worst CEO 🎙

Akimbo Podcast, 16. Februar 2022

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Akimbo Podcast, 16. Februar 2022

Shownotes

Das Wichtigste in Kürze

1. Wir sind busy, aber wir erfüllen unsere Chef-Aufgaben nicht.
2. Mach die Sachen, die nur du machen kannst, und outsource alles andere.
3. Für Outsourcing braucht es „Spec“. Andere können nach diesen Vorgaben arbeiten. Unterschiedliche Jobs brauchen unterschiedliche Grade von Spec.
4. Wir wissen ja, wie Outsourcing geht. Wir tun es ja auch, z.B. mit dem Mechaniker und der Steuerberaterin. Aber wir tun es nicht genug!
5. Welcher Teil deines Jobs ist „really valuable to the world“?
6. Wir sabotieren uns selbst. Uns und all die Anstrengungen und Mühe, die wir bereits in unser Lifestyle Business gesteckt haben.

Meine Notizen

“I want to shift gears now to the typical small business person, freelancer or entrepreneur, because these people are a special case. These people are people who might be terrible CEOs and yet really and truly busy. Busy all the time, busy doing the tasks they have assigned to themselves. So busy doing the tasks that in fact, nobody is the CEO.”

“The question then is, how much time are you spending on the CEO work?”

“The question is: If you can go to the aforementioned Fiverr or Upwork or find some place where you can get a virtual assistant, someone who isn’t particularly good at being the CEO of their career, who for five or ten or twenty dollars an hour can do many of those tasks for you, and you hire that person to do those tasks so you can do things that only you do. Is it possible you will sell one more house this year, two more houses this year […]?”

“It pays for itself many times over. Not only are you making more money, but if you believe that your work as a real estate broker is helping people, you’re helping more people! Because you are showing up to do the task that only you can do by outsourcing the things that other people can do.”

“You don’t build your own car. You don’t even fix your own car. They’re obvious or the ones everybody does. But if they’re the ones everybody does, then you haven’t really done much in the way of CEO work, have you?”

• “obvious” ist: Steuerberaterin, Buchhalterin, Webdesigner, … und dann?

“The job here is to take any job that can be specified to turn it into a spec. To say: This is what good output looks like. To figure out a job that is being done by other people for other folks. And say: If you do this job for me, to this spec, I can get back to doing jobs I can’t spec. That is the core of the work a CEO needs to do when she’s doing her best work.”

“What I’m asking you is: What part of your work, your day, whether it’s your job, your freelance gig, or your entrepreneurial venture, which part of it is really valuable to the world? And is that the part that gives you joy and energy that you want to focus on? And if the answer is yes, then why are you spending most of your day doing tasks that could be done by other people?”

“And the second half of it is: Strategically, are you building assets? Are you investing in a place that is growing, that is vibrant, that is paying off what you are putting into it? Or have you decided to stick with what got you here in the first place? Because you’ve gotten somewhere pretty far. But the thing that got you this far, more of it is not going to get you to the next place.”

• Genau das ist der Sprung vom Selbständigen zum Unternehmer

“We have to figure out how to set down our addiction to tasks, to doing what came before, to doing what everybody else does, to simply having a job with no boss. And to realize that we might be the world’s worst boss.”

“We might be – given how much we are giving up, the opportunities we are giving up, the choices we are making – we might be sacrificing the effort of somebody we care a lot about. Ourselves. And that sacrifice of effort, that mistake is keeping us from helping the people that we want to help.”

• vgl. Selbstsabotage

“So it’s easy to look at Steve Ballmer from the side, from afar and realize that beyond his clownish demeanor he just kept making mistake after mistake after mistake because he didn’t really understand what his job was. That’s easy. What’s hard is to look in the mirror and realize how many degrees of freedom are available to us. That what we could do is specify the parts of our job that others could do. What we could do is to take some time and be strategic. To acknowledge that what got us here might not be what gets us to where we want to go next. That you could be a better CEO. I hope that helps. Thanks for listening.”

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Bonus: Here is a talk I gave a little over five years ago at Acumen

Alles beginnt damit, dass ein Mensch einen anderen Menschen SIEHT: “I see you. Not: I seed you from a demographic point of view of you’re one more customer I can sell to. I see you, I see your parents and your grandparents. I see your dreams and your desires and your fears and where you hope to go. And they aren’t my dreams and desires and fears. They’re yours, but I have a light switch and if I can turn it on, I will be happy to turn it on for you. […] You can join us or not.”