Guess what?

I've always been wrong. I used to consider the Fox a loser, a victim of circumstances. But the Fox taught me a lesson: sometimes, defining a good excuse helps you move forward. You can't change immature grapes.

How Fake Purpose Undermines Company Success

This week, I was in London for a meet-up of my Write of Passage class, cohort 12, and I had the opportunity to speak with Mark McCoy.

Mark is a strategic consultant who wants to redesign the evolution of organizations through complex dynamics. He recently published an essay about the Sidney Opera House that explores how the architect designed the building with a coherent approach.

Speaking with Mark, we discussed how companies that are not succeeding in scaling up spend too much time rephrasing their mission and vision. What's happening is that people believe that writing a compelling vision would make the company succeed.

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I believe that purpose is an incredible activator for faster decision-making, as it moves the whole crowd in a specific direction that refines each idea in the company.

But the purpose is not "being a leader" or "growing 10x." The purpose must be transformative and massive. A real purpose changes the world, something that, reflected on a larger scale, could improve the trajectory for many people.

Instead, leaders focus on copywriting their purpose.

They are faking their values to appear something else.

I remember once hearing about a company that stated in its values that it would be transparent.

Transparency means, strictly speaking, that you can see through it, that light passes physically so that you can see beyond the surface.

When they published this statement, people in the company started to reflect on what transparency means. They started to notice closed doors and opaque walls. They started to ask to participate in board and executive meetings or to have all the salaries published.

It was a revolt.

And it's all because of a vague tentative to appear with a fake purpose and value setting.

If you don't have a value, but you would like to say it clearly.

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When I look back to my job as a company leader, I can see clearly (and when not, people told me about it very often) that I tend to think about directions as acquired goals, also when they are just in my head.

It's like I am building my mind on the idea of the desired situation.

But it's not. The process of discovering the purpose must involve digging up what you are as a person and as a company. It's not a discovery of "what you like;" that means precisely "what you would like to have."

No, it's a humble, vulnerable, imperfect disclosure of what you really are.

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That’s why fake purpose is a threat to organizations.

Leadership frustrates people in the company.

Every organization is a group of many people with few leaders. While we have many possible ideas, leaders do bad jobs to frustrate people and cause them to underperform. Whether it is a lack of bad organization or awful communication, leadership is too often an obstacle to making the company scale.

This piece was originally published on my website.

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New blossoms

Here are some quick updates from me:

• It was a great week, full of meetings, new people, and new places. There is lots of excitement for the future. Stay tuned.
• I'm on a journey with a psychotherapist, and I can’t say how precious it was for me. I am open to sharing it because I think people expect to be too sick to ask for help, like I did. This week, I felt finally rejuvenated, and we are reducing the frequence. Fingers crossed.
• This week, I was in London to meet European pals participating in Write of Passage. It was an incredible night, with amazing people sharing our ideas about how and why to write. It’s weird to meet people in person who you have met in a big classroom only behind a display. I enjoyed the event a lot, and I want to thank Harrison Moore, the editor and gym leader, for organizing it.

Something worth sharing from the contents I consumed:

• “Show up to give, not to take. Be there in service of other people’s work rather than your own. Share gratitude.” Carly Valancy is a maximalist writer and a network enthusiast. I started to reach out to people recently, and I am changing my trajectory because of this. I met Carly in WOP, and this essay perfectly depicts how I feel now because of this change. Is the secret to life a good email?​
• “Split the profit and loss (P&L) statement into two, with the top half showing revenue minus COGS, which results in gross profit, and the bottom half showing gross profit minus operating expense, which results in operating income.” Many companies do wrong calculations for their margin, in particular when this is related to growth. Some expenses are going to grow with the revenues, and others that companies must maintain fixed until a specific scale. This is the basis for the economies of scale. Improve Operating Leverage Growth.
• “As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.” Morgan Housel writes about personal finance and finance in general, and he is a great writer. Here, he shares an insight into the Japanese culture of companies that lasted over 1,000 years. How I Think About Debt.

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That's it!

Tell me if something stood out to you.

I'm curious about everything, for example:

• good leadership
• beautiful things that happened
• healthy productivity tricks
• parenting suggestions
• discoveries that would change the world
• unknown facts about you that everyone should know about

See you next week,

Matteo