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in the early stages of building a brand, the problem you’re solving should be a constant guiding light.
The best brands, the strongest brands, the ones that everybody loves, stand for a concept that is much greater than the product itself. To use two well-worn examples, Nike isn’t about sneakers; it’s about performance. Apple isn’t about computers; it’s about creativity.
While the intricacies of your product may fascinate you, it’s quite possible that they complicate the product and frustrate your users.
The data shows that people who are rich aren’t any happier, so you might as well derive your happiness from what you are doing today.
Building a sustainable business starts with making respect for your customers a sacred value. It also often means taking steps that don’t quite make sense in the short term—at least at first.
We start businesses to make the lives of those around us better or easier (and earn a little scratch in the process). Nothing is more rewarding than launching a new product or service you believe in and then asking your customers to help make it better.
Ask yourself: How are you tapping into your audience’s aspirations and dreams?
Ask yourself: How is my product going to change the way people think or go about their daily lives?
Ask yourself: How can you share more of the process behind your product with customers? It can be good, bad, or ugly—as long as it’s honest.
Businesses “center[ed] on improving people’s lives outperform their competitors,” he writes, after studying a decade of market performance of fifty thousand brands.
The true leader’s job is to help everyone around them do their job better.
Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses.
Why? Because a dismissive attitude toward leadership is exactly what makes us end up with bad managers in the first place. When you decline an opportunity to lead, you open up a vacuum for other people to take on management roles, sometimes the very people you set out to avoid. What’s more, you’re essentially leaving the happiness and productivity of your team to the whims of fate.
I’ve always thought that the hardest and most valuable thing in work is to get a group of smart people to work together toward a common goal.
When the makeup of your team is constantly changing, you lose the continuity and institutional knowledge so important to maintaining quality and consistency.
Use your physical space to encourage new conversations. The jury is out on whether the benefits of open-plan office spaces are worth their cost in productivity. But one thing is for sure: you communicate more frequently with those in close physical proximity to you. Exploit this fact by switching up your seating chart a few times a year. Move your designers closer to marketing. Have sales sit next to engineering. Informal communication (and idea exchange) is often a product of happenstance—so engineer that to your advantage.
