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You want people in a Rolls Royce
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“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce, to get advice from those who take the subway” - Warren Buffett If this sentence does not make you think for a while, read it twice. Or three, four, five times until your head blows up. This sentence contains the essential difference between an advisor and a mentor. The first talks to you from almost the academia. The second from life experience. At my MBA I thought that I’d see rich professors… but I didn’t. It was supposed that I would learn from people that made the journey I wanted to make. But they didn’t. That’s the main flaw of the education system these days. They teach you to be good employees, but not to thrive and grow personally. And worst… the system hides the fact that you must be learning… your whole life. I’m sure that you won’t see Elon Musk going to Harvard to join a course to get a pay raise or to find out how to sell more rockets, right? That’s the point. For mentoring options, I have a package for you, below.
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Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics did one of those experiments that sounds stupid… Not because you probably pay them with your taxes… But because you realise it explains half of the disasters in business. They took people to a forest. Then they gave them a simple instruction: “Walk in a straight line.” That’s it. No MBA. No strategy deck. No 147-page governance framework. Just walk straight. C’mon you can do it! Several participants were convinced they had done...
There is a famous story about President John F. Kennedy visiting NASA in 1961. While touring the facility, he met a janitor mopping the floor. Kennedy asked him what he did at NASA. “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Beautiful… Maybe too beautiful to be true. But who cares… the point is brutal. Now, no question how, a few years later, NASA sent three men to the moon using computers weaker than my kid’s lullaby machine. One team. For real. One objective. For real. Not because of an org...
Your team is not weak. Your leadership is. You can hire the best people in the market. The sharpest commercial director. The most experienced technical lead. The planner who can see delays before they are even born. The lawyer who reads contracts like other people read Netflix subtitles. All beautiful. Wonderful. Very LinkedIn. But if you don’t empower them… If they need permission to breathe… If every decision has to go through seven committees, four “alignment sessions”, two steering groups...