Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Andy

How to ask (answered)

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Start by first doing research. At least google your question or learn a little about the person you’re going to ask. If you make an ask to the wrong person, your ask will go nowhere.

Once you’re positive you have the right person, ask someone who knows you both to make an introduction. If you don’t have such a person, you’re making the wrong ask to the wrong person.

Once you have the attention of the askee, ask whether your assumptions are true. If you ask the wrong question to the right person you’re wasting everyone’s time, and you and the peer that introduced you look bad.

Once you’ve validated your assumptions or corrected them, seek to understand where the askee is coming from. Sometimes they will tell you, often you must at least partially guess. The better you understand the askee, the more context you’ll derive from your ask and the better your follow-up questions will be.

Once you have your answers and info, decide what clarity you need to seek in your follow-up asks. Once you’re done engaging, be sure to thank them. Bonus points for following up later with info about how their answers helped you.

Asking is hard work, and it means more than just writing a great subject line or neatly organizing the body of an email. It is not transactional, and it is unlikely the answer to your ask will immediately result in the outcome you want (unless your expectation is simply meeting a new person or learning something).

If you’re not asking correctly, you’re pitching. In a pitch you’re fighting against statistics and the chances of your pitch landing are very low. The chances of you annoying people are very high. The chances you learn anything are almost nothing. And the chances that you create a mediocre perception of yourself are almost certain.

By all means, make the ask. But do it with a thoughtful approach. It is the only way to get an answer that will lead you to the next ask.

If you do this well with consistency, one day you will be in a position to be asked. At that time you’ll understand why asking thoughtfully is so important. If someone isn’t good at asking, you’ll have a hard time answering them because they aren’t you, they don’t have your experience, and aren’t lucky in the same ways that you were. But if they are good at asking you’ll be glad they asked, and flattered that such a thoughtful person sought them out in the first place.

The Approach

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Bowling and surgery both require one. So does landing an airplane or chipping from the rough. If you want to remove a spleen or make par it requires practice, experience and consistency. It requires a point of view, understanding how others do it and why, and then adopting the elements that suit your own unique attributes and skills for the given situation.

An approach doesn’t require doing exactly what you’re told — not only is that likely to be someone else’s approach, it’s also inefficient if you run into something other than a standard scenario where you have to think for yourself.

An approach requires hard decisions and hard conversations. It requires giving the benefit of the doubt and having a reason for what you’re doing and why.

You may not land planes full of people or be on the pro bowling circuit for a living, but if something as serious as human lives or as simple as a game benefit from an approach, why not try it in your work too?

The death of big growth

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An oak tree doesn’t promise how tall it’s going to be when it’s a seed. It doesn’t predict the number of branches it will have or how many leaves it will lose in autumn. It doesn’t promise the squirrels any certain quantity of acorns. It just grows. And while early on, the growth is very visible, no one expects a tree to keep growing until it’s as tall as a mountain. At some point a tree’s growth becomes invisible and simply regenerative. Then the growth stops.

As with all cycles, we’re coming around to a new period – one more affected each day by inflation, war, and possibly recession.

For at least as long as I’ve been working professionally, big growth companies (like tech giants) have enjoyed cheap debt and consumers whose idea of scarcity is waiting the full two years to buy the next iPhone.

The companies that middled (or worse) during this time are likely to be toast in the next year or 2. Their funds will dry up quickly and investors will turn their sights to something less shiny, more predictable, and ultimately familiar.

Companies that grew quickly will try to get that magic back because big growth is all they know. But if they’re not in a commodities business that can make a cheap offering to cost-conscious consumers, or find ways to normalize their operations, or choose projects to ignore while they focus on shoring up fundamentals, they will continue to have to make sacrifices to protect their margins and please their shareholders.

We can learn from the big growth folks who used to do pretty much anything that even looked like growth – hiring for hiring’s sake or spinning up new projects, spending money because money was cheap and seemingly endless.

Yes, there is still capital, and investors will need to deploy that capital, but they may be more hesitant. They’ll be looking more closely at the relationships and business models to vet opportunities with a new, more pragmatic lens.

This is good news if you’re pragmatic and thorough, if you’re thoughtful and patient; now is your time to shine. But don’t expect big growth. Those rules have changed.

Start small. Deliver exceptional products and services. Get a couple of people so excited about your work that they ask you solve more of their problems. Then figure out how to streamline those operations. Yes, seek growth, but not by ‘big growth’s’ rules.

This still works, it’s only in the necessity of big growth that big spending is required. Big growth incentivizes managers to ‘grow’ – not to build great businesses.

If you work very hard, and if you’re lucky, you may hit a regenerative phase. Just don’t start promising the squirrels how many acorns you’re going to produce.

Ducks

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Tomorrow, you’ll get started. You’ll finally have enough information. You just need a little more time. A little more knowledge. Less fear. More courage.

Tomorrow that person will be helpful. The world around you will organize itself in way that the stars, your stars, are aligned.

Then you’ll have the insight. The pattern will finally be clear. The ducks will be in a row.

If you’re waiting for tomorrow, then you can be sure of 2 things:

1. It will never come

2. You will waste today.

A row of ducks, after all, is imperfect. So you may as well start today, because the only thing tomorrow has that today doesn’t, is your attention.

The ceiling and the walls

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Most people know about the ceiling, but whether you realize it or not, the walls are there too.

We don’t hear much about the walls because we’re often looking up, hoping for height, when perhaps a little breadth might do the trick.

The ceiling may be high, and the walls are harder to move. But hard isn’t impossible, and the walls can still close in on you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you can design your room however you choose – after all a beautiful space that people appreciate will do more for you than one smeared in frantic, haphazard colors of protest.

But if your ceiling is low, and your walls are close, and then someone starts to critique your design, the second thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to live in someone else’s house, you can build your own.

Hints

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It took me a while to trust my gut. After I’d make a choice, there seemed to be something there that would agree or disagree. It’d be wrong to call it a whisper that grew louder. It feels more accurate to call it an ambient sense that, once I paid attention to it, became a trust-worthy hint.

Interestingly, as I trust it more, and as I concurrently learn and develop skills, so too do the hints seem to improve. I also learned I don’t need more information or more hints to do a thing, but I do find that hints stick around if ignore them. If the hints are sticky, that tends to mean I need to take action on them.

Sometimes the hint is that I should call or text someone. Sometimes it’s that I should step away from a reaction. Still other times the hint has a grandiose plan or a minuscule inclination – either way the outcomes are interesting.

If you’re like me – you know hints don’t make things easier. Hints aren’t short-cuts and sometimes they cause introspection that is both necessary and scary.

These days though, I’m glad to get hints either way.