Trending Assets
Top investors this month
Trending Assets
Top investors this month
You Heard This Lie Before
=========================
### The Biggest Myth Related to Competitive Advantages

Post media

"Long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity."
Bruce Lee

To read the entire post, access our blog.

This quote embodies what many fail to realize, that being a successful and high-achieving person results from the consistent effort. Success is a marathon, not a sprint.

One of the most important, though undervalued, aspects of evaluating performance is the environment.

I think one of the reasons the environment is so powerful is that it communicates with your subconscious and has a conversation that you’re not privy to in your conscious mind.

This may sound ridiculous, but if I’m trying not to eat potato chips and I see them, it’s easy for me to eat them.

And so, nudging your physical environment can shape your behavior because it’s having a conversation with your unconscious self.

For instance, especially in the new year, we have these desires to set goals and achieve these huge goals and change our lives, work out more, start a new relationship, and travel to different places.

And we have to overhaul everything. Now, that takes a lot of energy. That takes a lot of attention.

And when you set out to do that, the moment you achieve something like that, you also sign up for the process that’s going to get you there.

You also sign up for the effort that will get you there. And what happens to many people who try to make these enormous overhauls of time and energy and introduce challenging habits.

And I think it is often misunderstood because people over-index its importance. And what I mean by that is they overestimate how important confidence is.

I have learned from talking to professional investors how many lack confidence. Considering their career, it’s something really awkward to hear.

If you ask them how they succeeded for years, they’ll tell you that they don’t care about how they feel. Instead, they focus on their actions.

Confidence is often misplaced. Instead of being placed on the ability to bounce back, to learn from failure, its belief is based on something that might not be there when it needs it.

In the market, we go across similar experiences a lot of times. For example, have you ever got in a position/trade extremely overconfident and ended up losing money?

On the other hand, have you ever got in a position/trade where you didn't feel comfortable but ended up making a lot of money? That's happened to all of us. Confidence isn't an accurate predictor of success.


### It’s all about it
I think the primary thing is that in any organization, the whole premise of organizational life is that together you can do more than you can do in isolation, but that only works if people are connected.

It only really works if they trust each other and help each other. But unfortunately, that isn’t automatic and requires effort from leadership.

I mean, obviously, it’s imperative who you hire. So the signals you send to them and the kinds of behaviors you want are really important.

I think that having kind of critical people who appreciate generosity is a business characteristic for thriving companies.

It’s not something you just save for out-of-work time. I think that’s a really fundamental yet rare characteristic to find in different businesses.

Suppose you really believe that the value of collaboration lies in the aggregation or compounding of talent and creativity.

In that case, you have to have an environment where people are really prepared to help each other.

People are only really going to be prepared to help each other if they feel they will be supported when needed. If you think that, not egregiously, but respectably, you might get some credit for your contribution because people don’t like to feel invisible quite widely. Stanley Milgram wrote about this brilliantly.

He talked about how when we go into an organization, our moral focus shifts from wanting to be a good person to a good job, and we implicitly assume that doing a good job is doing what we’re told.
The person you work with is not identical to the person you are at home, which is probably not entirely consonant with the person you are on the golf course or the gym.

Identities are not as absolute and fixed as we used to imagine, so we have to be very alert to how we change in different environments and pay attention to what we leave behind and what gets amplified.

Organizations are much more complex than a single human being. Dealing with people from different cultures, economic backgrounds, gender, and so on is challenging.

### Reduce Friction
After years on the road, interacting with different organizations, you figure that most companies are equally competent, though just a few thrive.

For Company A, even though they deliver good results, the management relies on complex and dizzy internal processes to make decisions. Company A just can’t keep track of what they need to do.

Meanwhile, Company B shows up knowing what they need to do, and they simply execute. Moreover, they deliver without any complex internal processes, which is excellent!

From Company A’s perspective, even though they’re competent, they see themselves in the position of not taking “reckless” and “hurry up” decisions.

From Company B’s perspective, they’re equally competent and wondered why investors compare them to Company A, as it was a close peer.

From investors’ perspective, they’re both valuable and competent firms, but not equally valuable. Company A is much more valuable.

This is interesting because it's a "what to add?" situation. Many employees believe the secret to gauging a career is delivering more value to the company.

This is not true. A substantial value could be collected using your boss's perspective, such as reducing friction.

You don’t need to learn any new skills for this; you have to shift your perspective to your boss’s point of view and see how hard it is for them to get you to do something.

Then, like in nature, which removes mistakes to progress, you can draw things to survive and thrive.

Think about it this way. The C-level management has a limited unit of energy throughout the day to accomplish something.

Suppose your internal process spends much more on delivering execution due to constraining internal processes.

In that case, it’ll always be significantly less than a company with streamlined internal processes, despite their diligence in executing the strategy.

When we think of improving our value to an organization, we often think about the skills we need to develop, the jobs we should take, or the growing responsibility.

But, in so doing, we miss the most obvious method: reducing friction.

### The first-entrant bullshit…
In the classic about corporate strategy, most start-ups advocate a competitive advantage being the first entrant and gaining scale faster than competitors.

To continue reading the post for free, access our blog.
Giro's Newsletter
Giro's Newsletter
An independent investment newsletter that offers insightful analysis of LatAm's most incredible businesses and impacting events. Join +1,000 subscribers.

Giro Lino's avatar
$10.9MFollowers
Related
Already have an account?