August 16, 2019 • #
Seneca had great advice 2000 years ago on how to calm ourselves down:
“It is not to your benefit to see and hear everything. Many injuries ought to pass over us; if you ignore them, you get no more injury from them. You want to be less angry? Ask fewer questions.”
I read “ask fewer questions” metaphorically as “don’t feel compelled to engage in every single dialog”. Much of the media discourse fans these flames: show everyone incendiary content, get them annoyed, make it easy to respond, beget another response — an ever increasing turning of the dial toward destructiveness, anger, and negativity.
It’s a daily reminder to, when seeing something that irks you, disengage and redirect attention.
June 22, 2019 • #
This is great to see from a company like Atlassian with “openness” as one of their core values. Their take is that the standard M&A process affords too few protections for the company doing the selling and too many for the big buyer. Most importantly, to me, these M&A engagements are one-sided by nature: the buyer has likely done it before (often many times) and the seller it’s likely their first time around.
M&A is a key part of our strategy – over our history, we’ve acquired more than 20 companies for approximately $1 billion, including Trello, Opsgenie, and AgileCraft. And one thing has become very clear to us about the M&A process – it’s outdated, inefficient, and unnecessarily combative, with too much time and energy spent negotiating deal terms and not enough on what matters most: building great products together and delivering more customer value.
An interesting way to look at customer service along the dimensions of scale and loyalty.
Customer loyalty is the holy grail of business and the ultimate moat at scale. Brand deposits are made with every single positive customer interaction but the only way to scale these positive interactions is to build a culture that self-enforces a high standard of excellence and customer service.
I got a copy of Discourses recently and looking forward to reading. This post gives a nice overview of the high level themes of his discourses and lectures.