Management is often misunderstood as a role that involves controlling people and their actions. However, this is a flawed perception of what management really is. At its core, management is about guiding and supporting employees to achieve their best work and contribute to the success of the organization. In this article, we will explore why management isn’t about walking around to control people and what it should be about instead.
Working hard at the wrong thing: The quote is beautiful, but it’s not always easy to identify the right and wrong things. The way I’d interpret this quote is to find out the things that have the most impact. While running a startup, it is easy to get lost in finer details. We have to keep asking ourselves about the level of impact that our actions have. Based on the type of impact, we’ll need to temper our approach to save time.
This is a simple reminder from Cassey Ho, an entrepreneur, startup founder about focus on projections. Numbers are very exciting in a startup world, esp because you can see some quick changes. The results are often slow and painstaking, but just a reminder that it isn’t all about numbers.
Don’t assume that borrowing lots of money can make your startup fly: We know that funding is one of the most common reasons why a startup fails. This quote however highlights that apart from funding, there are several other challenges that a founder should navigate through. Funding is only a part of the problem solved. It gives you an opportunity to expand, but you ought to reach some requirements such as product market fit, customer agreements etc to make this viable.
Though it sounds a bit crass, the quote makes an important point about taking swift decisions in a startup. We always get caught up between strategy and acting fast. In most cases, it is also called being tactical. For a startup, both strategy and tactics go hand in hand. We are forced to take some decisions quickly and have little time to strategise about its wider impact. One may even argue that strategy is a challenge with a scale up rather than early stages of startup.