Making the right decision is always desirable, but it is even more important to make a decision at all. Any decision.

Decision-making is the most important aspect of the CEO’s job and one of my favorite sayings goes “as long as you are making decisions, you are moving forward”.

Making decisions can be hard. There is even a term coined for the emotional drain the effort takes, experts talk about “decision fatigue”; and to conserve some of that “decision-making equity”, there is a little useful trick I first heard from Tim Ferriss. He defines the concept as “make the decision that removes 100 decisions”.

Here’s how it works:

You make a blanket decision on one aspect that is affecting your life or that is standing in the way to achieve some goal. And you apply it over and over again. It is sort of a “policy”. The next time the issue comes up, you don’t have to decide, the decision has been made way back. You can even outsource the decision!

Familiar examples of this are the decision to quit smoking or skipping dessert, and just saying “no” every time. But it can be applied to other areas, for example, when you decided that you will wake up at 5 AM and go for a run, regardless of how you feel, then you don’t anguish about it anymore. Or when you establish that you won’t take meetings that are not planned at least an hour in advance, they just don’t happen.

Set your policies.

Should you partner? Go direct? This is an article that I wrote many years ago, and a lot of things changed since then. These hold true however.

1.- Failing to choose the right model from the start
It seems simple, but it can really make a difference. The right decision will depend enormously on the client base you are trying to reach and second, your product. There are certain products that are just not made to be sold through a distributor, or maybe the Internet. Conversely, there are customers (and demographics) that you will never reach effectively unless you utilize the same reseller/retailer that they are used to make business with. Same applies for wholesalers, your product has to be carried by those who sell to your retailer of choice.

2.- Not making it clear
We like to go around making our own decisions and we don’t really bother on letting people know what we do. But informing the market know what type of Channel we engage with and under which policies is crucial to have the community properly align itself. Those who feel that your model resonates with them, will look after you.

3.- Not being honest
If your decision is to sell direct, say so. You can suddenly become someone’s competitor but you will still be known to be a trustworthy individual (and Company!) in the industry. Always stick to the rules that you put out (if you don’t, who will). If you need to change them, do so but honor whatever happened under them when they were valid.

4.- Not having a “Channel Specific” plan
Channel Partners  are in the business of sustaining their own companies and they will only behave in a way that supports these objectives. Vendors and Manufacturers COMPETE for their mindshare. Being one of the many that they carry, making it easy and profitable to do business with, is on our own interest. Failing to have a Channel-Specific team and tools such as Channel support, Channel Marketing, Channel Portal, etc. will make partner adoption much slower.

If you follow me, you are probably either sick of hearing me talk about them, or you are already a believer that the world has gone exponential. I just wish it would be as simple as to ask anybody to just recognize that there have been probably more advances in the last 10 years than during the century before; that I could just instantly share that feeling that there is a new thing every week, even every day, and that the things that were hip just a few months ago are quickly becoming obsolete and even embarrassing.

Then there is the inevitability of it all. How do we know if it will ever slow back again? will it always be like this?

Like with any strong belief, they first hit us with an intuitive blow, and only after we have faith in them is when we find the logical explanations to what we already know. How do you make an argument for exponentiality?

True exponentiality, is not just about speed, but about things getting ever faster. With the linear thinking we are accustomed to, it may seem hard to believe that there are no limits for how fast can we go.

Starting with something much simpler, something that can be experienced during a more intuitive timeframe, can help to understand what we are facing.

I am referring to how individual technologies are introduced, something that we have seen many times in our lifetime. This is also a concept that I have caught Peter Diamandis mention almost in a throwaway fashion in many of his talks, usually as “hundreds of compounding ‘s’ curves…”. I think that the concept is so important, that it deserves an article like this.

Most technologies take some time to develop and to become truly useful. Some, when first introduced, don’t even have a use-case that would help with their adoption, and even when products or solutions mature and have all the features needed, it takes some time to go mainstream. As a result, the introduction of most technologies ends up following something like an “S curve” (or “sigmoid” for its mathematical function). The “technology hype” graph (with its typical shape shown below with a dashed line), is a slight variation, with an initial overshot accounting for the overexcitement and initial hype.

In the first  phase, progress is slow, and it looks like nothing’s happening, almost a failure, but then, something creates cloth and the public starts to adopt the new technology. We enter the growth phase. At this point, progress seems almost linear, predictable. It is tempting to think that growth will continue at that trend. New ventures many times capitalize on this trend to predict exorbitant valuations and secure funding.

Eventually, either because the market becomes saturated and the pool of new customers is depleted, or because the success of the business attracts competitors, growth begins to slow down, and a “plateau” develops. With purely fad-driven innovations, there is even some kind of decline, but usually, if the technology has a true advantage and it adds value, it stays around for much longer than after the headlines stop talking about it.

Now I am going to make a leap. A small one, but still a leap. I will say that the overall benefits that a technology provides to society at large, follow an S-curve as well. No adoption, no benefit. Maximum adoption, maximum benefit. We can call this the “technology benefit”, or  “technology impact” curve. You may argue that there are some technologies that don’t require a lot of adoption to have an impact, but they still need to be adopted by the few users that are needed to have an impact, and they will still have a period of no impact, and then, after a while, top impact.

Interestingly enough, technology introduction is not the only place where these types of curves come into play. They seem to be connected to a variety of natural processes. Actually, in the very definition of the sigmoid function on Wikipedia, this behavior is mentioned to be related to learning curves, crop yield, titration curves, etc.

But innovations don’t happen in isolation. There are a number of technologies being adopted at any given time, at different stages in their cycle. In reality, you may have dozens, hundreds of these S-curves overlapping at different times.  It is easy to accept that this is the overall approximate behavior of any technology’s impact because we have seen it before. If we consider that there seems to be a new, smaller invention, or improvement coming out all the time, we’ll have something like the graph below.

So far, good? Alright!, so here is what happens when these individual S-curves are added together to calculate the overall “technology impact”:

This is without even considering that some technologies may have a larger impact than others (the curves in the example above had a maximum plateau of one).  Now, the first part of that curve looks way too much like an exponential, and it only plateaus out because I stopped at four “inventions”. According to this reasoning, as long as we keep coming out with small, incremental improvements, the result will never plateau out, and will be a full exponential, going up, into the right, getting steeper and steeper all the time.

By this, if we accept our “S” curve model, and that there are endless small innovations possible, then the world has gone exponential, and will never go back to what it was. We will continue to see changes coming at us ever faster, continuing to accelerate.

But what does this really mean for all of us? Can’t we just get off the train? Jump off the treadmill?

More on that on the next episode in this series.

NOTE: A version of this article was published a couple of weeks ago on EXOInsight.

When investing, there is a meme that describes market behavior in terms of the different mindset of people who engage in a particular asset. The first wave is -suitingly- the early adopters. These people usually know something. They are either an insider to the company, the industry, or they are a visionary recognizing a trend. They come in early, and after some time, when they feel they have received enough reward for their original investment, they get out, or -at least- scale back a bit.

At that point, the trend is recognized and now a better-funded group follows. This is what they call “the smart money”. These include institutional investors, with big wallets, and who usually know where to put their capital to work. Eventually, these folks also get their reward, and also pull out.

Then the “late adopters” or the “dumb money” comes in. Some times, these are the people that get stuck with their investment when the smart money guys pull the rug from under their feet.

You may have seen that technology adoption also follows a similar pattern and you may have also picked up on the trend of me talking more and more about Exponential trends. This is a topic that I have become increasingly interested in.

This topic used to be the exclusive area of visionary futurists like Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize and Singular University, and Salim Ismail, former Chief Innovation Officer for Yahoo and founder of Open ExO.

But lately, another trend has been developing. Last week, I heard, not one, but TWO hedge fund managers talking either about “The Exponential Age” or the “Age of Abundance”.

In my experience, when the hedge funds start rattling on something, it is time to pay attention, it may be fairly close.

If you are interested in getting the details on these, checkout these two videos:

Raoul Pál – Former Goldman Sachs executive and founder and CEO of Real Vision

Jordi Visser, president and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, interviewing tech visionary, Sultan Meghji, CEO and co-founder of Frontier Foundry

TLDR;

The world is about to shift. Again. Some technologies that are coming down the pike will deliver a shift as big as the splitting of the atom. Some resources are about to become very abundant, and the world will shift from offering scarce resources, to managing abundance.

Consulting is an interesting role. We go about our lives being somewhat experts at what we do, and we think that we have all the answers. That’s why most of us think that doing the same thing as a consultant will be a piece of cake.

Having been on both sides of the table, I am here to tell you that it is, actually, a very different skillset. Most people, in a regular role, will never consider confronting a customer. But not the consultant. In many cases, they actually get hired to confront the client, in a respectful and constructive way. It is very much like pulling off the Band-Aid.

Hungarians, are the descendants from the Huns. “Barbarians”, they called them. So what could be more fitting than this thing showing up in one of the drawers in my Hungarian cousin’s kitchen?

A hatchet, just like AI, can be either a tool in the right hands, or a weapon in the wrong ones.

The topic that is occupying my mind lately, is the nature of exponentials and how they play into business. I am working on some long form content, which makes it hard to publish my regular Daily PPILL while I also take care of business. But I thought, why not dig up some of my favorite posts? Here is another one:

Making the right decision is always desirable, it is even more important to make any decision at all. Decision making is the most important aspect of the CEO’s job and one of my favorite sayings goes “as long as you are making decisions, you are moving forward”.

Making decisions can be hard. There is even a term coined for the emotional drain the effort takes, experts talk about “decision fatigue”.

To conserve some of that “decision-making equity”, there is a little useful trick I first heard from Tim Ferriss. The concept is “make the decision that removes 100 decisions”.

Here’s how it works: you make a blanket decision on one aspect that is affecting your life or that is standing in the way to achieve some goal. And you apply it over and over again. It is sort of a “policy”. The next time the issue comes up, you don’t have to decide, the decision has been made way back. Heck, you can even outsource the decision!

Familiar examples of this are the decision to quit smoking or skipping dessert, and just saying “no” every time. But it can be applied to other areas, for example, when you decided that you will wake up at 5 AM and go for a run, regardless of how you feel. Or when you establish that you won’t take meetings that are not planned at least an hour in advance.

The topic that is occupying my mind lately, is the nature of exponentials and how they play into business. I am working on some long form content, which makes it hard to publish my regular Daily PPILL while I also take care of business. But I thought, why not dig up some of my favorite posts? Here is another one:

I. Cannot. Stop. Talking. About. This. One.

Ryder Carroll has been working on this idea for a while. I got first introduced to it through fine journal maker Leuchtturm1917.

Carroll has come up with a method that makes paper journaling flexible and multi-purpose. When I have used paper journals, I always faced some challenges that are intrinsic to the medium, but Carroll’s method allows you to:

• document experiences, to-dos, notes, and scheduled events
• make changes to items, even when using a pen
• have a scheduled events view for things that happen at a moment in time
• make the content searchable through an index

He explains the basic tenets on his website, but I definitely recommend his namesake book, which is not that dry and has some entertaining, hearth warming stories as well.

To me, keeping notes about my daily meetings, and having the ability to draw, as well as write by hand, is fundamental. And while I am fully digital and on the cloud, I still crave the connection to a page.

You can buy the original Bullet journals, but I’ll confess that I don’t. I buy “Artist Loft” journals from Michaels. They run for half as much. I get their premium version with dotted and numbered pages, two page markers, a back pocket for storing loose leaves, and a pen loop.

In a world where technology is constantly advancing, simple yet ingenious inventions can capture our attention. The humble flywheel, often overlooked, these rotating wonders possess an appeal that inspires me, especially now that I am more and more involved with the creation of Exponential Organizations and the exponential technologies that are disrupting everything else!

It runs out (I literally learned this TODAY!) the flywheel was the first ever wheel invented, and it stores rotational energy leveraging its mass. There are some modern applications, things like energy storage. Checkout Airthium, which I am actually a modest investor in!

Beyond their practical applications, what truly captivates me about flywheels is the way they work. The slow steady push that seems to do nothing at first, until it does, and then slowly builds, until is unstoppable!

This is the behavior of Exponential Technologies, your Channel Program, and your Customer Success motion. Slowly building, going unnoticed, even disappointing at times, until it’s not. And until it’s unstoppable and everybody agrees that “it was genius”, “the only way to go”.

Let’s build your Channel Go to Market Strategy. Let’s get your organization started on Customer Success Best Practices and apply the attributes of Exponential Organizations. Let’s stick to it. Let’s build momentum.

Most stuff we use wear out as we do. Every single time we do our thing, we leave a little bit of it in what we made. The soles of our shoes wear thinner, the edge of our knife gets dull.

But some things get better every time we use them. I rode with an Uber driver the other day who had 16,000 trips. You can be dang sure that this gentleman has seen it all, but he also knows his streets, and drives safely. It would be quite hard to teach him something.

Humans, in general, get better the more than they do something. And now, AI has joined that club. Every time you use an AI, you teach it something. Make us (humans) proud.