Can you smell fish…? | Issue #232
Why You Need To Find Your Stinky Fish Before It Poisons Your Business
Are your teams open and honest with each other? Or do you sense they’re carrying around things they’re not confronting? These are their stinky fish. And here’s the thing about fish. The longer it hangs around, the smellier it gets.
In any group of people, undercurrents are always bubbling under the surface. Things that have happened in the past that the whole team can’t get past. Misunderstandings, anxieties or even minor niggles that have the potential to grow and fester.
These things will hold your business back, particularly if you want to scale quickly. One of the hallmarks of high-performing teams is they engage in healthy conflict. They’re open and honest enough to tackle the hard stuff. So it’s crucial to get everything out on the table.
When we first start coaching teams, we recognise this. Early on in our process is an exercise that tackles it head-on. Its name? The Stinky Fish Exercise (no surprise there!)
E237 | Exploring the Power of Emotions To Boost Your Marketing with Anthony Butler
How do you want people to feel when they buy from you? How do you want people to feel when your sales team show up? As a marketer, if you really want to stand out from competitors and emotionally connect with your customers, these are important questions to answer.
This week we learned from Anthony Butler, author of Primal Storytelling and founder of the Marketing Agency Can-Do Ideas. His story really kicks off when he gets fired by one of his marketing agency clients, who told him that his work hadn’t made any difference in the business. That was a turning point in his career. In this episode, we find out why.
In this conversation, Anthony shares his Primal Storytelling methodology and how he helps clients drive emotion in their marketing. We find out what questions you need to ask yourself to better connect with your audience. He also guides us through his process to map sales to marketing and what type of content and messages we need to deliver at each stage.
A fantastic conversation, make sure to download and listen to learn more.
Recommended Podcasts
Hear me out on the Thought Leadership podcast
I had the honour of being invited as a guest for the latest episode of the Thought Leadership podcast. We talked about my journey growing businesses, why you should keep your team small and how to build a culture of accountability.
Recommended Articles
Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate
Culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity.
Americans Are Fake and the Dutch Are Rude!
Dutch friends and relatives privately commented to me that the American emotions they encountered seemed “fake” or “exaggerated.” White lies are less acceptable in the Dutch context: they are not taken to mean that you protect your friend or relative, as they clearly are to some of my American friends. They rather have the meaning of keeping you out, and of breaking connection.
Price’s Law: Why Only A Few People Generate Half Of The Results
Derek Price found out the following (now called Price’s law): 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Recommended Reads
In his mega-bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
[Free Webinar] 2X Revenue. 3X Profit. 10X Valuation.
Join Verne Harnish and Daniel Marcos in this FREE online training and discover the 4 tools you need to 2X your revenue, 3X your profit and 10X your evaluation.
You will learn:
- How to identify the top barriers preventing you from scaling up your business so you can develop a plan to overcome it.
- The four key fundamental decisions you need to scale up your business quickly, sustainably and fast—without stress and drama.
- How to evaluate and develop an industry-dominating strategy and the right steps to scaling up with it.
- The four practical tools you can implement immediately in your business to drive high-impact and measurable results this year.
- And much more.
Quote of the week
“I believe fundamental honesty is the keystone of business.”
Harvey S. Firestone
Dominic Monkhouse
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.