You only need one strat­e­gy: embrace learn­ing and change

Lead­er­ship is not a virtue, but the byprod­uct of our virtues. Bet­ter­ing our­selves and improv­ing our teams helps us plan ahead for real­i­ty instead of run­ning behind it. Busi­ness­es that learn are more sus­tain­able, out­per­form­ing their com­peti­tors. Work-relat­ed stress becomes more man­age­able, and the team’s cul­ture is hard­er to beat.

Drucker’s quote at the top of this piece— quite often and weird­ly mis­at­trib­uted to Lin­coln — seems par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant in this con­text. Adapt­ing our busi­ness­es to the fast-chang­ing piv­otal tech­nol­o­gy break­throughs (look­ing at you, AI), ampli­fies our abil­i­ty to shape our future and serve our audi­ences better.

Learn­ing and Change: Don’t stop me now 👑

Learn­ing to learn is train­ing to run twice as fast. Here’s a roundup of fresh con­cepts, tools & inspi­ra­tion we’ve kept return­ing to in our journey.

Where’s your 15%? 

Small and con­sis­tent changes lead to dras­tic trans­for­ma­tion and growth. What are the quick wins you’re not see­ing? How do you chal­lenge your pre­con­cep­tions and explore oppor­tu­ni­ties for evo­lu­tion? Godin’s arti­cle is from 2010 but still bril­liant­ly sim­ple and rel­e­vant. Also this.

The adja­cent possible

Use objec­tive data to learn con­clu­sions and evolve your strat­e­gy. Kauffman’s the­o­ry teach­es us to con­ceive orga­ni­za­tions as liv­ing, evolv­ing organ­isms. Every step for­ward opens new, expo­nen­tial alter­na­tives to dri­ve your com­pa­ny for­ward. Find­ing the time and bud­get to explore and break things always pays off.

Cre­ative Samba

Miguel Ferreira’s newslet­ter on all things sto­ry­telling, copy­writ­ing, and mar­ket­ing gives us a week­ly dose of food for thought. It chal­lenges the sta­tus quo and puts the val­ue back on human cre­ativ­i­ty and love for brands.

A cul­ture of (un)learning

Chal­lenge beliefs and assump­tions with­in your orga­ni­za­tion and be open to let­ting peo­ple chal­lenge the beliefs and assump­tions you, per­son­al­ly, hold to be true about what ​‘right’ looks like.

Far­nam­Street

A trea­sure trove of valu­able insights on per­son­al growth, learn­ing and change. Men­tal mod­els are essen­tial to train think­ing and inno­va­tion. This piece in par­tic­u­lar is a great reminder that true learn­ing requires a will­ing­ness to let go of what we think we know and embrace the jour­ney of learn­ing and discovery.

Num­bers. Most of them are not fake. 🤞

• Insid­er Intel­li­gence says retail eCom­merce sales world­wide will grow by 8.9% this year. Ini­tial fore­casts were slight­ly above 10% but were adjust­ed due to the world los­ing its mar­bles. After the 2020’s huge dig­i­tal sales boom dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the gap with brick and mor­tar seems to be shortening.
• 37% of B2B com­pa­nies have imple­ment­ed arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and machine learn­ing (ML) in some form, and 27% are plan­ning to do so in the next 12 months.
• It takes humans an aver­age of 10,000 hours of delib­er­ate prac­tice to become experts in a par­tic­u­lar field or skill. This trans­lates to approx­i­mate­ly9 years of dai­ly prac­tice for 3 hours dai­ly. Watcha wait­in’ for?
• The human brain can process and retain new infor­ma­tion at a rate of up to 60 bits per second.
• Dogs can learn the names of over 1,000 dif­fer­ent objects and com­mands and under­stand human ges­tures, with suc­cess rates rang­ing from 70% to 80%, out­per­form­ing most politicians.