10% Better, 30% Worse

Somebody somewhere once said that a good Coach / Executive / Leader makes things 10% better than a baseline. Meanwhile, a poor Coach / Executive / Leader makes things 30% worse.

I'll bet you've experienced this phenomenon.

I recall being in a meeting where the CEO made an employee cry. I went into the bathroom just to get away from the dysfunction, but the CEO followed me in, and that's where he shared stuff that would have made the entire room cry.

That business did not perform well. The CEO was a -30% Leader. He didn't have the ability to recognize it.

I have a client where the CEO/Owner is a +10% Leader. He hires good people, kind people, and he allows them to make decisions. This business messes up ... every 18-24 months they revert back to old behaviors, but the CEO nudges the brand back in a positive direction. They're not perfect. But they're 10% ahead of everybody else, and the interest in his investment compounds over time. It's a really, really good company.

I thought about the concept (I'm writing this on Monday night) after watching the USMNT lose to Uruguay. Here's a collective group that should perform better, and just ... doesn't. Outsiders can usually see the -30% in action ... if you are on the inside, you're working too hard to know if you are a -30% Leader or a +10% Leader.

Tomorrow is July 4 ... if your boss is encouraging you to put in some extra time on July 4, you might be working for a -30% Leader.

Tolls vs. Tribes

I will paraphrase the conversation to protect those involved.

Person A:  I think I want to get the Zero:2 iems. They're $15 on AliExpress and $25 on Amazon. Anybody else had an experience with AliExpress?

Person B:  Get them on Amazon. It's only $25. Why take a risk with somebody you don't trust?

Person A:  $10 additional dollars is important to me.

The world seems to change slowly, then it changes all-of-a-sudden. The conversation above (which happened three times in the past two weeks) is an example of the world changing slowly (it was an exchange between two individuals 1-2 generations apart). Person by person, day after day, new habits are formed. There will be a day ... maybe 5 years from now, maybe 12 years from now, when all of a sudden old-school folks will say "what happened to Amazon?". They'll realize Amazon became Montgomery Wards. They'll have no idea how it happened, they'll just look and go "wow".

It happens one fifteen year old at a time, trying to save $10, seeing that Amazon is too expensive.

Think about the last half of that sentence:  "... seeing that Amazon is too expensive". A sentence unthinkable twenty years ago when the argument was that Amazon could never be profitable being so inexpensive.

I've been waiting for something to happen since the death of "omnichannelism" nearly a decade ago. We're there now. Something is happening. It's the end of catalog-style print marketing from the 80s/90s. It's the "e-commerce is now mature and at risk" situation that ultimately happens to all incumbent business models - e-commerce is now old-school, ripe for disruption. 

We're transitioning from tolls (paying Google/Amazon/Facebook for access to customers) to tribes (Seth Godin would be so happy).

From tolls to tribes.

The older individual at the start of this post is willing to pay Amazon a $10 toll because he trusts Amazon.

The younger individual is part of a tribe that needs to save $10. This individual will form habits that send commerce in a very different direction.