Feb 4, 2022

Follow this to ensure your company is never starved for growth

Fishing for opportunity? Across all entrepreneurial pursuits, The Rule of Moby Dicks, Mackerels, and Minnows applies. Use it to help you allocate your time and resources to ensure that you are never starved for growth.

Think of Moby Dicks as transformative once-in-a-lifetime targets like the giant national retail account you want to land or the big funder who can also be a powerful strategic partner. If you spent all of your time hunting only for Moby Dicks, pursuing just the impossible deals with no guarantee of materializing, you might never be able to feed yourself – and could eventually starve. On the other hand, if you strictly played it safe, going after only the tiniest, easy-to-catch accounts – call them Minnows – you might also wind up with a grumbling stomach, staving off hunger from living snack to snack.

Right in between Moby Dicks and Minnows are the Mackerels that provide consistent, filling food. Still, when it comes to advancing your entrepreneurial pursuits, you cannot be sure that you’ll catch a Mackerel every day. If you do reel one in, it may meaningfully bolster your enterprise, but it’s unlikely to catalyze breakthroughs.

The right way to fish for opportunity is to establish a balanced diet of all three.

Read more on Inc.

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You can’t make big ESG commitments while failing at the basics of kindness

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Ultimately, what we achieve as corporate leaders, even in the form of social impact, must work hand in hand with how we go about achieving it. How we act along our journeys is at least as important as–if not more so than–the destination. For example, if we are donating a portion of profits to at-need communities, but not being open-minded, respectful, and honest in how we lead in the workplace, we risk undermining our larger goals by contributing to a disrespectful, intolerant, or unethical culture. In fact, a company with no stated social mission that is modeling positive values like integrity and respect may be doing more good for our world than one with a big ESG commitment failing at the basics of kindness.

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The Media Is Over-Covering Divisiveness. It’s Going to Destroy Us

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In 2000, President Clinton hosted a peace conference at Camp David that gave many hope for peace in Gaza; but a few months later, the Second Intifada, a major Palestinian uprising against Israel, began. Having been working in the region for decades to found and build PeaceWorks, a company that used market forces to foster peace between neighbors in the Middle East, I was confused and depressed by the news. On Western television, I saw pictures of ruthless violence and terrorism from Palestinians, giving me the impression, at least initially, that the moderates I knew had succumbed to extreme ways. But when I went to talk to my Palestinian friends, and they showed me what they were seeing on the television, I was shocked:. Their news programs depicted all Israelis as merciless killers.

On both sides of the conflict, the news media seemed like it exclusively published stories portraying the worst of the other side, characterizing all Palestinians or Israelis as hateful enemies. It turned out that my friends hadn’t changed at all; they just weren’t the ones the media were showing. And in portraying things falsely in such a negative light, the media fed the conflict rather than helping resolve it.

We Americans are now facing this same problem, with potentially devastating repercussions for our democracy and our ability to lead the free world.

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