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    The hard thing about building great things

    • Monday, Mar 2, 2020
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    [Reading time: 1 minute 44 seconds]

    I’ll let the cat out of the bag right away: the hard thing about building great things is that you need to get everything right. All the time.

    Many organisations can pull off something great every now and then. But that’s not enough. In order to actually build something great, you need to pull it off consistently.

    And that means getting a long list of things right. Hard things.

    You need to get your organisation right: incentivise the right behaviours, reward the right kind of successes, in fact reward the right kind of failures.

    You need to get your processes right: build the crucial flows of information that tell you where the great things are, and whether you’re even headed in that direction. And what’s hindering you from going that way, or speeding up.

    You need to get your tooling right: to enable and facilitate that flow of information, to take your colleagues' mind off the mundane, and allow them to focus on the important.

    I know, sounds kind of handwavy.

    But not because I’m trying to be so vague about it, but because there’s so much to keep in mind.

    Every one of the previous paragraphs is certainly deserving of its own book, in fact probably its own library.

    But you don’t have time to read books, let alone libraries. You’ve got an organisation to run!

    Well, that’s why they say it’s hard I suppose.

    But there’s a less flippant answer: getting it right isn’t a goal, it’s a process.

    You don’t need to get everything right; in fact, you never will – I was told that you can recognise good parents by the fact that they only make 50 mistakes per day.

    What you need is to get something right-er than last week. And keep repeating this approach.

    Just imagine where you’ll be a year from now, when you’re doing 52 things better.