johnmaconline

Every interaction you have is some sort of pitch.

How’s your pitch deck?

Most pitches fail. Not because your idea is weak or your deck isn’t slick, but because the language is wrong.

You’re fluent in you. Your product, your roadmap, your excitement.

They’re fluent in them. Their pain, their pressure, their goals.

So your job is to translate. Turn your language into their language. Speak their language. It’s not about you. It’s about them.

Whether you’re pitching to a potential customer, leading your team, or discussing weekend plans with your spouse, speak their language.

If they don’t hear themselves in your pitch, you’ve already lost them.

You’ve done it. We’ve all done it.

“Don’t touch the hot stove!”

Yet, sometimes, you do it anyway. It’s not rational. It’s not you thinking it through (although you may convince yourself you are). You know, deep down or even on the surface, that you shouldn’t touch the hot stove. They’re right.

However, touching it yourself is the only way for you to feel the consequences.

And feeling the consequences is exactly the point.

That’s where you start.

If you don’t know or don’t know how to address the question of “why would they care,” you won’t get anywhere.

This is the main lesson I’ve learned over the last 9 months as we try to get 4TLAS off the ground. 

Why does someone care?

Fear. Pain. Status. Left out or left behind. Pressure.  

Not your skills.
Not your tech stack.
Not your “better” solution.

(although you’ll need those to help them succeed)

They care because something in their world feels urgent. Unsafe. Unfair.

If you don’t speak to that, they hear more cacophony or maybe silence.

I mistakenly assumed clarity. We’re a very niche product in a niche market. I assumed our people inherently understand what we do and how we can help. I assumed interest. I assumed people would connect the dots.

They didn’t. That was my fault. 

Because they had their own fire to put out, and smart and knowledgeable people are still people. They need you to address what they care about.

What’s keeping them up at night?
What’s at stake if they ignore us?
What happens if they choose nothing?

Why would they care?

That’s the real pitch. Everything else is noise. 

Ship it fast. Break it fast. Fix it fast.

In many situations, that’s my mantra.

But speed amplifies trajectory. If your trajectory is wrong, getting there faster may not help.

Automating tasks that don’t need doing doesn’t help. Optimizing a non-functional system doesn’t help. Parallelizing dependent work doesn’t help.

Solving the wrong problem faster doesn’t help.

As a leader, your fundamental job is to ensure your team is solving the right problems.

Ask better questions. Have better conversations. Solve better problems.

Life is our journey between inflection points.

You’re moseying along on a path. Bam! An inflection point happens, and that starts you on a new path.

You planned some of these inflections, foreseen some others, and were blindsided by several. But the journey continues.

Our journey, in hindsight, looks like a map of these paths strung together. When you look back at this map of your journey, what does it tell you?

What caused that new direction you took? The left turn. The dip into the canyon or the climb over the mountain. Maybe even the retracing of paths already taken.

Was it fear? Confidence? Excitement? Necessity? Vision? Providence? Dumb luck?

Your paths have led to you where you are right now. Maybe you’re happy with where you are. Maybe you’re not.

Regardless, this next inflection point will set you on a new path. What direction will you take?

Complexity causes chaos.

And chaos stalls progress. Yet, complexity is always conserved.

You can’t eliminate the complexity, but can you tame it? Can you bring some order to the chaos?

As a leader, your job is to figure that out.

Can you eliminate some variables? Can you keep the team focused on the most important requirements? Can you swat the flies and minimize distractions? Can you find some underlying structure on which to place your feet?

You’ll want less meetings, but more important discussions. You might need to encourage some wandering, but wandering with purpose. You’ll definitely want to protect the team from the outside noise, but you might need internal dissension.

Chaos doesn’t obey.

But good leadership can see through the complexity.

My co-founding team and I have been working together for almost 10 years. We’re high-functioning, very good at what we do, individually excellent, and our whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We have solved some very hard engineering problems. 

But bar none, the hardest thing we’ve ever done as a team is name our company. 

We named our company 4TLAS.

If the first thing you see is our logo (https://4tlas.io), you might intuitively know that we pronounce it “atlas.” If the first thing you see is the word typed out as above, you’ll be confused. Is it “four-tless” or maybe “four-atlas?”

At first, I disliked the name because of this. Nobody knows how to say it. It’s too hard. There are a million companies called “atlas.” I pass four companies named Atlas on my way from Berks County to center city Philly to see my daughter.

A funny thing, though, has happened along the way — conversation. The confusion or the foible leads to converation. People ask how to say it and how and why we came up with it. 

The name has become an opportunity for me to tell the story. To have conversation.

And more conversation is how we move forward.

P.S. I haven’t told the story above of how and why we came up with 4TLAS, but I’m happy to have that conversation with you. Reach out to me and I’m happy to tell it.

“We should do it this way, and here’s why.”

“No, we should do it this way, and here’s why.”

Then, it goes back and forth or round and round. 

The most underrated characteristic of a high-functioning, creative, A-player team is creative tension.

Useful creative tension includes several features:

• “Here’s why…”
• “Ok, I see that…”
• “Good point…”
• “I think the most important requirement is…”
• “If we do it that way, here’s the downside…”
• “Ok, we’ll try it this way…”

Reasons. Acknowledgment. Respect. Discussion of requirements and outcomes. Trade-offs.

High-functioning creative teams don’t always agree on the path to the solution. But they always agree on where they’re trying to get to and they respect each other as people and professionals.  

The horse has left the barn.
That ship has sailed.
The genie’s out of the bottle.
You can’t unring the bell.
The train has left the station.

Some decisions or actions are one-way. Once you’ve said it or done it, there’s no going back, or at least something has fundamentally changed.

When you recognize you’re in one of these situations, slow down. Measure twice. Cut once. Don’t hit send. Breathe. Take a walk.

But if it’s passed, remember that the question is not whether you can undo it, but what you will do next.