Guess what?

Building a future-proof organization requires embracing the fear of failure rather than the fear of judgment from others. This is why I see the manager as an acrobat who continually oscillates between the fear of losing power and the fear of losing talent.

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It takes 20 years to build a manager. 20 years of continuous swinging on the tightrope of fear.

Like tightrope walkers, managers lean between the fear of being overtaken by people who have something more than them and the fear that their team will lose drive and, ultimately, competitiveness for having relied on unambitious people. Managers risk falling painfully. But those who make it and get to the end receive cheers from the audience—the same audience that lives in constant expectation of a misstep.

It takes 20 years and faced with such a long period of time, which is half of a person's working life, we understand how important it is to retain people. However, retention can be very expensive. When people want to leave, it's difficult for them to perform 100%. If they agree to stay for the money, it tells us that the value system on which we base the company is poor.

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I believe in open systems. I believe in knowing how to attract people who also have different backgrounds but who are attracted by values, perhaps at a specific moment in their life trajectory.

There are bees and gardeners. There is no point in forcing heroes to be farmers and vice versa; the company must be able to manage both.

The company aims to keep the bees moving to spread the pollen and contaminate.

At the same time, they must preserve the gardeners, who year after year make people grow, prune them, and make them blossom again.

Therefore, to grow the company, we need gardeners who grow people. To grow people, you need stimuli that trigger growth.

These incentives fail in a company that doesn't scale.

If we take this simple principle at face value, we realize that the manager's job is a continuous oscillation between two fears: the fear of losing talent and the fear of losing power.

This is why there is a need to grow; in growth, there is room for everyone.

To grow to walk with greater balance on the rope, you need to train on this same rope. Giving up the rope will lead to the tightrope walker's oblivion.

Walking the tightrope means improving that 1% every day, which will allow us to accumulate significant growth in 20 years. Growing by 1% every week means becoming 40 thousand times better in 20 years of your career.
Unfortunately, this growth path is often precluded to entrepreneurs who cannot renew themselves due to the inability to see the future as an ally. The company was born behind a dream, but often the dream is set aside for success that is enough.

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Seeing enough as fulfillment makes the tightrope walker give up, falter, and settle. He will be afraid of being wrong, rooted in the experience of what he has collected, like a parasitic plant clinging to a trunk. He will not have his own form, and he will not act like a gardener.

It takes 20 years to build a manager. In order not to find ourselves having wasted time after 20 years, we need daily steps to get out of the balance that we have achieved.

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This piece was originally published on my website.

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New blossoms

Here are some quick updates from me:

• I visited Fosber, an Italian company that creates production lines for corrugated cardboard. I was together with the Giovani Industriali of Tuscany. We had the pleasure of hearing Marco Bertola, CEO, speak and tell us the amount of growth and years to build company managers.
• I spent an entire morning trying to install fiber in the beach house. Between sensors that didn't sound, oxidized wires, we were unable to find the reason why the wire apparently connected from the closet and the one coming out of the house weren't working. A simple thing has become unpleasant. But you know what, in the end I picked up Maple, my oldest dog that I had brought with me and we went to the beach to have lunch.

Something worth sharing from the contents I consumed:

• Here is the Value Pyramid, which describes how people are interested in using their money to buy something. I found it useful for positioning in sales. Every company must understand which value they are fulfilling. H/T to Francesco Oggiano.

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