The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

by Scott Belsky

I like to equate serving a network to being in the hospitality business. When customers are in your restaurant or hotel, any iota of discomfort or unnecessary friction can cause them to turn around and walk out—nothing’s stopping them, and they have plenty of choices. You can’t tell your network what to do, and you can’t prioritize your objectives and process over their experience. A community, especially a virtual one, resides where they are respected and their needs are served. You must listen and aim to serve your network’s participants knowing that the loyalty and trust you earn will keep the network healthy and valuable for everyone involved, including you.

You don’t appoint leaders in a network. Instead, influence is often determined through community curation.

Schwartz divides people into the two groups of decision makers we learned about earlier: maximizers and satisficers

“Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made,”

A maximizer is the type of person who will spend an entire day schlepping around from shop to shop, searching for the best option for the best price, whereas satisficers “settle for something that is good enough and do not worry about the possibility that there might be something better,”

The leaders I admire most maintain healthy incrementalism while imposing the occasional transformational jolt when it is needed.

Value is best measured by the resources you’d be willing to spend to do it again, knowing all that you know now.

The real reason we cling to our original convictions is the energy, time, reputation, and money we invested in them. These resources are sunk costs the moment they are spent. Only by allowing yourself and your team to cut such investments loose can you empower people to change their mind when they should.

The best advice doesn’t instruct—it provokes.