Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

The Roots and Growth of Decisions

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They’re cutting down a tree on the corner of my block. A big tree. There are 3 big trucks and 6 guys with chainsaws. The tree is outnumbered, but it still seems like it’s winning.

This one’s major offense is that its roots have completely upended the sidewalk. It’s dangerous. I know because I’ve tripped on it more than once.

Cutting this tree down has done nothing to fix the sidewalk. And putting a sidewalk next to this kind of tree in the first place is a short-sighted idea – but whoever made that decision is at least retired and maybe dead.

So if the decisions people make have consequences, and if they’re hard to undo, and if there’s even a remote possibility that 6 men with chainsaws will have to undo it – maybe it makes sense to think more about the roots and growth of our decisions in the first place.

Friction and Opportunity

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Yesterday I bought a beer at a movie theatre. The bottom of the cup is smaller than the cup holder on the theatre seats, and the cup turns sideways and spills if you try to use the holder.

When a UPS driver couldn’t find my father-in-law’s house, I was prompted to change the address of my delivery and forced to ‘update’ a correct address because the driver was lost. My delivery date went from 1 day to 2 weeks, and I had to spend an hour on the phone to sort it out.

A new printer installed seamlessly for a new Mac. But for an old PC, the only solution is to upgrade the entire operating system, even though HP forces you to install all of their proprietary software.

My pre-booked, 25km Uber ride cost me $57 – the driver got $21. You can tell me about willingness-to-pay and value, and then I’ll tell you that I was served ads the entire time using the app.

It’s not easy to stay passionate about cup holders, shipping and printers, but that’s not the point. Passion can be found in elegantly solving problems that would otherwise create friction in the lives of your customers.

If you need a business idea, companies show their hands everyday; just go about your life and wait until you have to talk to customer service for a large brand or buy a product off the shelf that disappoints you. The friction is where the opportunity is.

Feeling Stuck?

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When there’s no momentum, when the conversations happen when you’re not there, when you try something new and it doesn’t take off, that’s when you feel stuck.

Stuck is annoying. Stuck isn’t the same as failure, stuck is stuck. Not moving ahead, but also not falling behind. If failure is a pool of sharks, stuck is the treadmill in front of it. To be stuck, you have to be trying.

I wish I had the answer for getting unstuck, but I don’t. All I can think about are the jars I haven’t been able to open. They were stuck. And they were stuck. And they were stuck. And suddenly…they weren’t.

Checklist

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Tasks you can complete do you the smallest amount of good. Don’t let them distract you from spending time on the work that never ends.

A decision made

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Decision-making can be quick, pragmatic, slow, careless. You can hear all the arguments or not. You can do the analysis or rely on intuition. You can mix these approaches.

In any case, if you’re the one deciding in the first place you’re likely to benefit. It’s difficult to undo a decision made. That’s a positive and a negative depending on where you stand.

If you’re going to burn the boats, it’s a risky bet with upside if you’re right. If you achieve first-mover advantage, it’s hard to beat, at least for a while. And in both cases, being wrong will quickly be forgotten and being right (or lucky) is sure to bring reward.

So the lesson is to look for opportunities to decide – rather than to simply react to a decision someone else has made.

Boring people

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Seek out the boring people. The ones who slug it out, doing the work. The people who bring big impact even in small spaces, who aren’t vying for credit, and who show up every day to do it over again even as they go unnoticed.

Boring people know how the sausage is made because they make it. They know what it feels like to do something well. It is their point of pride. They could take it apart and put it back together again.

Boring people are different than the people phoning it in. A boring person is doing a job most people ignore. The phoners are doing a job that everyone ignores.

The conditions for a boring person to excel are: the identification of a problem, the permission to fix it, and constrained resources.

When you stop and marvel at how something works, chances are a boring person figured it out. Not because they’re especially smart, talented, or wealthy, but because they had to even though it was hard. And because everyone else knew someone boring would do it if they just waited.