What Makes a Successful Startup Team: Why a Stellar Resume is Not Enough

What makes a successful startup team?  The common answer is that prior startup experience, product knowledge, and industry skills predict whether a new venture succeeds.  A recent study of 95 new startup teams in the Netherlands tested that assumption, and the answer it produced should trouble every venture capital investor still relying on a resume as a proxy for team quality.  Experience alone was not enough.  While experience broadens a team’s resource pool, sharpens opportunity recognition, and correlates positively with effectiveness, the researchers found that shared entrepreneurial passion and shared strategic vision were required to reach genuinely superior team performance.

When venture capital investors conduct due diligence, they scrutinise the financial side of the business with rigour.  Is the business model interesting?  How large is the addressable market?  What do the growth plans look like?  Firms hire expensive experts and deploy advanced data tools to interrogate every one of these questions.  When it comes to evaluating the human team behind the numbers, gut feel and intuition still dominate.  This is not a minor blind spot.  Data shows 60% of new ventures fail specifically due to problems with the team, and Professor Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School, in his research underpinning The Founder’s Dilemma, found that 65% of high-potential startups fail due to unresolved tension and conflict among co-founders.  A due diligence process that spends weeks on the spreadsheet and minutes on the people is auditing the wrong risk.

Why Shared Vision Beats Raw Experience

Among the startups studied, the group reporting high previous experience but average to low levels of passion and collective vision demonstrated weak team performance across innovation, customer satisfaction, cost control, and expected sales growth.  The group reporting only average experience, but high passion and collective vision, performed significantly stronger.  Greater team experience only translated into better performance when team members shared a strategic vision for the company.  Where that agreement was absent, the accumulated knowledge and skill on the team contributed only marginally to outcomes.

There is a sweet spot where stellar teams live, combining hard skills and experience with soft skills, passion and alignment.  Super smart, highly experienced team members who do not feel aligned enough to share that knowledge render the knowledge worthless to the business.  Worse, misalignment in passion and vision actively degrades performance rather than merely failing to improve it.  A technically brilliant CTO who disagrees fundamentally with his CEO’s future strategy is less likely to share his full expertise with the team at all, regardless of how deep that expertise runs.

A Case in Point: Clocker

Consider the case of Emma, an investor at a venture capital firm.  Names and institutions in this account have been changed for anonymity, though the underlying dynamic it illustrates is drawn directly from the researchers’ own fieldwork.  Emma was thrilled by a potential investment in a Stockholm software company she called Clocker.  The financials were interesting.  The team’s track record was outstanding on paper: a CEO with deep industry knowledge who had led Salesforce’s product division, a Harvard-educated CFO who had worked at Bain & Company, a VP of Sales who had cut his teeth at Microsoft, and a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit already on her record.  Every hard-skill box was ticked.

The pitch itself unravelled that impression.  The CEO wanted to expand into the United States and become the next Salesforce.  The CTO dismissed the idea outright, arguing the company had no bandwidth for global expansion that year.  The team’s goals diverged visibly under questioning, and their passion diverged with them: the VP of Sales was still running his own separate sales business on the side, while the CTO was quietly interviewing elsewhere.  Weeks later, Emma learned the Clocker team had broken up, their divergent goals having curdled into poor communication, withheld knowledge, and weak decision-making long before any product ever reached the market.

Real Names, Real Consequences

The Clocker story is illustrative, but the pattern it describes has played out repeatedly among companies whose names need no anonymising.  Steven Paul Jobs and Stephen Gary Wozniak co-founded Apple together, and by 1985, strains over leadership style and competing visions for the company had grown severe enough that Jobs was forced out of the company he had built, only returning over a decade later to rescue it from the direction it had taken without him.  Snapchat co-founders Evan Thomas Spiegel, Robert  “Bobby” Cornelius Murphy and Reginald “Reggie” Brown III fractured over a different fault line: Brown claimed he had been unfairly pushed out of the company, filed suit against his co-founders, and the dispute was ultimately resolved only through a legal settlement.  Zenefits co-founders Parker Conrad and Zachary “Zach” Weinberg diverged over company culture and business practice, a disagreement that culminated in Conrad’s resignation amid serious compliance issues the misalignment had allowed to fester.  Embroker’s own survey data confirms the pattern generalises well beyond these headline cases: 43% of entrepreneurs eventually part ways over internal disagreement, with 71% of those splits attributed directly to disagreement over the company's direction, and a further 18% to a co-founder who never shared the venture’s underlying values in the first place.

Previous experience has long been cited as the key ingredient of entrepreneurial success, and the data says plainly that experience alone does not deliver it.  Knowledge, skill, and passion carry equal weight, and experience only translates into performance when team members share their knowledge and hold a common vision for where the company is heading.  Investors evaluating a startup team on the strength of its resume alone are measuring the variable Emma’s Clocker deal, and Jobs, Spiegel, and Conrad’s own companies all proved insufficient on their own.  Building a successful startup is a long, bumpy road, and without entrepreneurial passion and strategic vision genuinely shared across the founding team, a stellar resume remains exactly that.  A piece of paper.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Mastering Negotiation: The Discipline Most Financial Services Consultants Never Formally Learn

 Every financial services consultant negotiates every day.  With prospects who are not yet convinced.  With clients who want more for less.  With referral sources who need a reason to send business.  With agency leaders who control pipelines, opportunities, and decisions that affect careers.  Negotiation is not a skill reserved for lawyers and diplomats.  It is the daily currency of everyone in this industry who wants to produce at a level that matters.

Most financial consultants negotiate on instinct.  Some on charm.  A surprising number on sheer persistence.  None of these is strategy.  They are habits, and habits, unlike frameworks, do not scale, do not transfer, and do not hold up when the client across the table is sophisticated, well-advised, and unimpressed.

Where the Negotiation Sits inside the Client Lifecycle

Every stage of the client lifecycle carries a negotiation of its own, and most financial consultants receive no formal training in any of them.  Prospecting is negotiating for the appointment when the prospect has no obvious reason to say yes.  The first appointment is negotiating trust and authority before the client has decided whether the financial consultant is worth the time.  Needs analysis is negotiating information the client is reluctant to share, and reframing stated needs against what the client requires.  Solution presentation is negotiating a recommendation into the obvious, rational conclusion.  Objection handling is negotiating resistance into commitment without surrendering ground.  Closing is securing agreement at a premium, not a discount, in a way that sets up the next conversation rather than ending the relationship.  Referrals are negotiating introductions the client wants to give, not merely agrees to give.  Renewal and review are negotiating retention against competitors actively courting the same client, and expanding relationships that have plateaued.  Agency leadership is negotiating the recruitment, retention, and motivation of financial consultants who have no obligation to follow instructions they disagree with.

Four Principles That Govern Every One of These Conversations

Preparation is the only real advantage.  The most effective negotiators in financial services spend more time preparing than negotiating.  Roger Denio Fisher, JD, Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Dr. William Langer Ury, co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, introduced the concept of BATNA, Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, in their 1981 book Getting to Yes.  Their own research found that developing a clear BATNA does not merely protect a negotiator from a bad deal.  It raises the minimum outcome that the negotiator will accept in the first place.  Understanding your own BATNA, and estimating the client’s, before the appointment begins is not optional.  It is the actual work of negotiation, not merely preparation for it.

Never make unilateral concessions.  Every concession must extract a reciprocal concession.  In a financial services context, never reduce a premium, extend a payment term, or adjust a benefit without making the client aware they are receiving a concession, and without securing something in return.

Silence is a weapon.  Most financial consultants are afraid of silence after a close attempt.  Experienced negotiators use it deliberately.  The pause after a recommendation puts pressure on the client to fill the void, usually with a decision rather than another objection.

Ethics are non-negotiable.  Effective negotiation in financial services does not require deception.  It requires intelligence, preparation, and the strategic use of information.  The MAS regulatory environment makes the ethical boundaries explicit, and staying firmly within them is as strategically advantageous as it is legally mandatory.

Distributive Negotiation: When There is One Pie, and Both Parties Want It

Distributive negotiation governs every conversation where one party’s gain is the other’s concession.  Premium discussions.  Policy restructuring requests.  Commission conversations with agencies.  Any situation where the client is trying to get more whilst the financial consultant is trying to give less, without losing the deal.

This requires understanding the Zone of Possible Agreement and reservation points, identifying the range within which a deal is achievable before the client voices a single objection.  It requires anchoring, since the financial consultant who frames the value proposition first typically controls the negotiation.  It requires a concession strategy where diminishing concessions signal an approaching limit rather than open-ended flexibility.  And it requires a structured response to the price objection, the most common distributive negotiation a financial consultant faces daily, one that resolves the objection without surrendering margin or credibility.

Integrative Negotiation: When the Right Deal Beats the Fast Deal

Integrative negotiation governs complex, multi-issue financial planning conversations.  It is not about splitting the difference.  It is about identifying what the client needs, as distinct from what they said they wanted, and constructing a solution delivering more value than either party anticipated at the start.  This is the model that converts transactional clients into long-term relationships, and it is the model most financial consultants never learn.

A client who says “I cannot afford this” is expressing a position, not an interest.  Understanding the underlying interest unlocks solutions the stated position forecloses entirely.  A thorough, client-centred fact-find removes objections before they arise, which is precisely why financial consultants who skip that step consistently leave coverage gaps and revenue on the table.  Trading value across protection, investment, legacy, and health needs, rather than closing a single product in isolation, is what positions a financial consultant as a trusted family adviser rather than a product salesperson, and that positioning compounds over years into referrals, renewals, and multi-generational client relationships.

Competitive and Collaborative Negotiation: Reading the Room and Playing the Right Game

Not every client negotiation calls for the same approach.  A competitive financial consultant in a relationship-dependent conversation destroys the relationship.  A collaborative financial consultant in a zero-sum premium conversation leaves money on the table.  The strategically intelligent financial consultant reads the situation and deploys the appropriate framework, then switches when the situation demands it.

The HNW and UHNW client negotiation demands specific adjustments: longer timelines, more sophisticated objections, multiple advisers in the room, and a decision-making process that rewards patience and penalises urgency.  Multi-party dynamics – spouses, business partners, family trustees, external advisers – require navigating competing interests without losing control of the conversation.  Collaborative negotiation in agency leadership, meanwhile, builds team cultures that create genuine commitment rather than mere compliance, a distinction most agency leaders never bother making.

Conflict Management: When the Conversation Gets Difficult

Conflict in a financial advisory negotiation is not a failure.  It is information.  A client who expresses strong resistance is a client who is engaged.  The financial consultant who understands how to manage that resistance, de-escalating it where appropriate, using it strategically where advantageous, is the one who consistently closes cases weaker practitioners walk away from.

This requires distinguishing genuine objection from tactical resistance designed purely to test whether the financial consultant will hold a position.  It requires knowing when to accommodate, when to hold firm, when to compromise, and when to reframe the conversation entirely.  It requires staying rational when a client escalates emotionally, and returning a charged conversation to a productive track without surrendering credibility.  And it requires active listening precise enough to surface the real objection sitting beneath the stated one, since most financial consultants respond to the wrong objection entirely, addressing the complaint voiced rather than the concern driving it.

Why This Matters

Financial consultants operate in a market where product differentiation is narrowing, and client sophistication is rising.  The financial consultants who win in that environment are not necessarily the ones with the best product knowledge.  It is the one who negotiates better, who anchors more effectively, concedes less readily, closes at a higher level, and builds the kind of client relationships that neither price competition nor portfolio reviews can dislodge.  Every production conversation a financial consultant has this month is evidence of whether that discipline has been learned yet, or is still being improvised one client at a time.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

The Benjamin Franklin Effect: A Tool for Sales, & a Confession about How Predictable We All Are

This concept is complicated and rarely well understood on first encounter.  Once mastered, however, it becomes an invaluable tool in sales and in building genuine relationships.

Every serious discussion begins with definitions.  Definitions set the parameters of what is actually being discussed, and establish shared understanding before anything else gets built on top of it.  Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Persian theologian, observed, to the effect, that before speaking of a cup, one should first understand what a cup is.  What follows here is considerably more complicated than a cup.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect is a proposed psychological phenomenon, a form of cognitive dissonance.  In essence, when people do us a favour, they become more likely to hold a favourable opinion of us.  The intuitive assumption runs the other way: people do favours because they already like us, and that may hold in some cases.  In business, however, the causation frequently runs in reverse.  People come to like us precisely because of the favours we induce them to perform on our behalf.

Leon Festinger, the American social psychologist, formalised the underlying mechanism in his 1957 theory of cognitive dissonance, arguing that people experience genuine psychological discomfort when their actions contradict their existing attitudes, and resolve that discomfort by adjusting the attitude rather than undoing the action.  A person who has already done you a favour cannot easily continue disliking you, because disliking someone he has just helped creates exactly the discomfort Festinger described.  Adjusting the opinion is simply easier than confronting the contradiction.

The effect takes its name from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who wrote in his autobiography, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”  Franklin illustrated this with an account of a rival legislator during his service in the Pennsylvania legislature in the eighteenth century.  Learning the man owned a scarce and curious book, Franklin wrote requesting to borrow it.  The book arrived immediately.  Franklin returned it within a week, accompanied by a note expressing genuine appreciation.  At their next meeting in the House, the legislator, who had never previously spoken to Franklin, addressed him with unexpected civility, and remained willing to assist him on every subsequent occasion.  Their friendship, by Franklin’s own account, lasted until the man’s death.

Anyone who has read Franklin’s biography in full knows he was not, by most measures, an especially likeable man.  He drank to excess on occasion, pursued numerous romantic entanglements, boasted more than modesty allowed, and could not keep a confidence to save his own reputation, a flaw so pronounced that his own government deliberately withheld sensitive information from him.  And yet he was widely liked, across an entire political career, largely through mechanisms exactly like this one.  If a man with Franklin’s considerable personal flaws could engineer genuine goodwill this reliably, the technique itself deserves serious attention rather than dismissal as a parlour trick.

Application

This principle applies across three domains: networking, prospecting for clients, and closing a deal or completing a negotiation.  Between them, these three scenarios cover nearly every situation a person is likely to encounter professionally.

Networking happens constantly, whether consciously recognised or not.  Even the most solitary person requires validation from at least one other human being, a basic feature of gregarious social creatures.  Prospecting is where a person markets himself, present in nearly every social interaction whether framed that way or not.  Closing the deal is where genuine accord gets reached on any outstanding issue.

Scenario: Networking

Networking, in this context, means meeting new people in specific settings, at events, and increasingly in non-physical, digital environments.  How and where those meetings happen matters considerably.

Every person wants recognition, wants to feel elevated.  That flattery, however, must feel sincere.  Insincere flattery breeds hostility, because people instinctively grow suspicious of unearned praise.  Applying the Franklin Effect requires cultivating the habit of requesting small, innocuous favours first.  Smokers borrowing cigarettes or a lighter from strangers illustrate this precisely.  The bond only forms, however, if the item is returned.  Failing to return it converts the exchange from a bond-building gesture into simple taking, and the psychological mechanism collapses entirely.  People resolve dissonance between their thoughts, attitudes, and actions by rationalising: having done a favour, they conclude they must like the recipient, and adjust their attitude to match the action already taken.

The reverse mechanism deserves equal attention.  Doing a favour for someone who already dislikes you tends to deepen the dislike rather than repair it, because the recipient feels burdened by an unwanted obligation rather than warmed by generosity.  This creates distance, not closeness.  It explains the instinctive suspicion many people feel toward those who appear excessively generous without an obvious motive.  Unprompted giving strikes most people as unnatural, and that discomfort is set aside reliably only in narrow circumstances, religious giving among them, where the power dynamic quietly inverts: the giver gives precisely to receive more in return later, a transaction dressed convincingly enough that conscience does not object.

Scenario: Prospecting

Prospecting occurs in corporate settings, across social networks, and at public events alike, and understanding the psychology of favours matters here just as much.  Performing a favour does not, on its own, create closeness.  A single major favour for a friend produces genuine gratitude.  Constant, repeated favours produce resentment instead, because the underlying power dynamic becomes impossible to ignore, and nobody enjoys feeling perpetually indebted or helpless.

In any setting with an audience present, the other party must be made to feel he holds the advantage in the relationship’s power dynamic.  The actual objective is never to demonstrate superiority.  It is to achieve the outcome sought.  Requesting a favour, properly framed, creates the illusion that the other person occupies the higher position, while the genuine intent is building a favourable impression and, ultimately, genuine liking.  Illusion, deployed carefully, serves the underlying reality.

What, specifically, can be “borrowed” from a prospect?  Nothing physical is required.  Credibility can be borrowed by quoting someone directly.  Achievements can be borrowed simply by remembering them accurately, correctly recalling who delivered which speech, who accomplished what, and when.  People crave that fleeting form of immortality, being properly acknowledged and correctly remembered.  Providing it, convincingly, is the actual mechanism at work, whether or not the sincerity behind it is entirely genuine.

Scenario: Succeeding

Just as failure requires planning, success requires equally deliberate planning: getting the deal over the line, addressing hesitation directly, and ensuring the other party believes the outcome was their own idea.  That final element carries disproportionate weight.  Consider how frequently interpersonal friction stems from exactly this failure to let someone feel ownership of a decision.

The Franklin Effect resolves tension precisely because some degree of hesitation accompanies almost every significant agreement, particularly where large sums are involved, and cold feet are a genuine risk.  Manufacturing the right cognitive dissonance forces the issue toward resolution.  Once someone has convinced himself he likes you, and that the decision was genuinely his own, reversing course means contradicting himself, which people resist instinctively.

Shaping the conversation to plant that ownership, framing the outcome as being in the other party’s own interest, driven by the other party’s own initiative, works reliably because most people, most of the time, do not have a firm grasp on what they actually want or what genuinely serves their own interest.  National politics demonstrates this mechanism at a considerably larger scale, and with considerably higher stakes.  President George W. Bush, following his narrow 2004 re-election victory, a margin of roughly 2.4 percentage points in the popular vote, declared, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” proceeding to pursue policy priorities, including Social Security privatisation, that had barely featured in the campaign itself.  The electorate had voted for a candidate and a party.  The winning side proclaimed a sweeping mandate regardless, and pursued its pre-existing agenda under that banner.  Executed skilfully, the electorate remains convinced this was precisely what it voted for all along.

In Closing

What has been covered here is only an introduction to the Benjamin Franklin Effect, and a handful of suggested applications within a selling context.  The deeper lesson sits beneath the technique itself.  The more thoroughly human psychology is understood, the more apparent it becomes that people are remarkably predictable, and correspondingly susceptible to deliberate influence.  Understanding precisely how this phenomenon operates is inseparable from recognising how often it has already been used on each of us, for better reasons and for considerably worse ones.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

HNWI Buy Solutions to Problems; Not Financial Products

Most advisers pitch features.  Successful advisers pitch relief.  The distinction is the entire difference between a follow-up that never arrives and a mandate signed before the client leaves the room.  The HNW client sitting across from you is not worried about returns.  They have survived enough market cycles to know that returns normalise.  What keeps them awake is a different category of problem entirely.

The Real Pain Points

The first pain point is succession anxiety.  They built something. They are not confident that it survives them.  The statistics are not reassuring — 70% of family wealth is lost by the second generation, 90% by the third.  They know this, even if they have never read the research.  They see it in the families around them.  The patriarch who built a business empire whose children promptly dismantled it.  The estate that took three years to settle while the assets bled value inside a frozen probate process.  They do not want to become that story.

The second pain point is a structural inadequacy that they cannot articulate.  They have wealth.  They have a banker, a lawyer, an accountant, and possibly a family office.  And yet they have a persistent, low-grade awareness that the architecture is not quite right.  The offshore structure that the private bank is quietly backing away from.  The Lombard facility that Basel IV is becoming increasingly expensive.  The CRS 2.0 exposure in the Caribbean vehicle that nobody has addressed, because addressing it requires admitting it exists.  These clients carry structural problems they cannot name precisely — and the adviser who names them first owns the conversation.

The third pain point is privacy.  The HNW client does not discuss wealth publicly.  The size of the estate, the beneficiary structure, the family dynamics around inheritance — all of it sits behind a carefully maintained discretion.  They are not secretive out of vanity.  They are secretive because visibility creates vulnerability.  Probate is public.  Court proceedings are public.  A will read after death is a public document in most jurisdictions.  The adviser who understands this and leads with privacy — Singapore’s judicial reliability, the trust structure that bypasses public filing, the policy proceeds that flow within fourteen business days without court involvement — speaks directly to a pain point the client has never heard addressed in those terms before.

Pathos: Speak to What They Fear, Not What They Want

Pathos in an HNW conversation is not sentimentality.  It is precision targeting of the emotional stakes.  The emotional stakes are these: the UHNW client has spent forty years building something.  The structural gap in their architecture means that forty years of accumulation could be unwound in a decade of mismanaged succession.  The estate that enters probate without a trust structure.  The heirs who face forced asset sales at distressed valuations because the estate needed immediate liquidity to meet obligations.  The business that fragments because the buy-sell agreement was never funded with adequate life coverage.  The legacy the patriarch intended to last three generations was consumed by courts, creditors, and compounding taxes within ten years of their death.

The adviser does not dramatise these scenarios.  They state them once, clearly, with the calm authority of someone who has watched them happen.  Then they stop talking.  That pause carries more persuasive weight than any product feature ever will.  The client sits with the consequence.  The adviser sits in silence.  The first person to break it loses the frame.

Loss aversion is the most powerful emotional driver in financial decision-making — Dr. Daniel Kahneman and Dr. Amos Tversky demonstrated that losses hurt approximately twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.  The HNW client who has built US$30 million does not primarily want to grow it to US$60 million.  They primarily want to ensure that US$30 million reaches their grandchildren intact.  That is the emotional engine.  The adviser who speaks to it directly — without inflation, without drama, without the word “but” following any acknowledgement — earns the trust that converts a first meeting into a mandate.

Ethos: Authority is Not Claimed; It is Demonstrated

The HNW client has sat across from enough advisers to identify within four minutes whether the person opposite them knows what they are talking about or is reciting a script.  Ethos — the credibility dimension of persuasion — is not established by a title, a certificate, or a firm name.  It is established by what you say, in what sequence, and with what precision.

The adviser who walks into the room having already diagnosed the structural gap demonstrates the competency that earns the right to propose a solution.  The patriarch managing a Gulf industrial dynasty whose Cayman structure is generating CRS disclosure obligations he did not anticipate is not impressed by a product brochure.  He is impressed by an adviser who says, precisely and without theatre: “Your current architecture has a specific exposure under CRS 2.0 that your private bank has not addressed.  Here is what it looks like, here is what it costs if unresolved, and here is the Singapore-domiciled structure that closes it.”

That sentence is ethos.  It demonstrates that the adviser understands the problem, has done the work before entering the room, and has a solution ready.  It does not require a credential after the name or a logo on the letterhead.  It requires the structural knowledge to see what the client cannot see — and the discipline to present it as fact rather than opinion.

The Inverted Pyramid disciplines the conversation’s architecture.  The first two minutes name the structural problem and quantify its cost.  The next four minutes are to the structure — not the product, the structure — as the coherent solution.  The final three minutes address the emotional consequences of inaction and offer a defined next step.  Seven minutes is the currency.  The adviser who spends four of those seven minutes establishing their own credentials has already wasted the most valuable resource in the room.

The Close

The close in an HNW conversation is not a question.  It is a direction: “Based on what we have discussed, the next step is to begin the KYC documentation.  Shall we proceed today, or would you prefer to review the illustration with your legal adviser first and reconvene next week?”

Both options move the process forward.  Neither invites the client to decline.  The choice architecture removes the yes/no moment and replaces it with a when/how decision — one the client has already psychologically made by staying in the room for the full eight minutes.  The adviser who understands pathos speaks to what the client fears.  The adviser who demonstrates ethos earns the right to be trusted with the solution.  The adviser who controls the close sequences is the mandate.

Everything else is product knowledge.  Product knowledge is table stakes.  It is not the differentiator.  The differentiator is the ability to sit in a room with a patriarch who has never discussed his succession anxiety with anyone, name it precisely, and present the architectural solution with the calm authority of someone who has built this for a hundred families before his.  That is not a pitch.  That is a diagnosis delivered by a specialist who has already seen the scan.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Quora Answer: Can Toastmasters Make Me Outgoing?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Can Toastmasters make me outgoing?” 

Toastmasters, by itself, is not going to change your underlying characteristics.  Joining Toastmasters, and actually taking advantage of the programme, will make you more confident when it comes to speaking, and interacting with others.  It will not make you speak more, or be more gregarious.  That requires changes in your psychology.

Waging War in the Organisational Sphere

Whether it is corporate strategy, or even involvement in hierarchical organisations, it is man’s nature to wage war.  We seek control, we seek dominance, we ultimately seek power.  That is our nature.  Humanity evolved because we are predators, and even with that veneer of civilisation, we never lost that instinct for blood. 

Publius Vegetius Renatus was a writer of the Later Roman Empire.  He wrote De re militari, “Concerning Military Matters”, a treatise about Roman warfare and military principles as a presentation of the methods and practices in use during the height of the Roman Empire and responsible for its power.  That text could best be summarised as “Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum”, “Let him who wants peace prepare for war.” 

Whatever we set out to do, there are always others who have an opposing view.  Not all can be coopted, and there are occasions where dominance must be asserted, or in the face on formidable adversary, then subterfuge, or discretion must be exercised.  The goal is to win, and win in such a manner that the victory can be maintained.  It is foolishness to win, and rule over nothing, or win and create the conditions for further conflict.  War is merely a means to an end; it is not policy.  Maj. General Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, author of Vom Kriege, famously wrote, “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” 

In hierarchical organisation, in corporate organisations, it is not enough to get to the top of power structures.  The purpose is to stay there.  There is a distinct difference between authority by position, and true authority by influence and power.  The former is easily replaced.  The latter needs to be identified, and is not easily removed.  Authority by power has terms of appointment, and they come and go.  Authority by influence is via patronage, and is more durable. 

In order to build that, it is important to build a team of generals.  Talent must be actively sought our and recruited.  They must be nurtured, equipped, and then unleashed where necessary.  Points of influence must be controlled, and influenced.  People must be tested for their loyalty, and either supported when loyal, or discarded when disloyal.  Their place must be earned. 

Contrary to laymen thinking, when there is opposition, it does not always serve the strategic interest to immediately neutralise them.  It is a strategic disadvantage to revealing the extent of resources and influence at every point of contention.  Competent opposition is a gift.  They can be co-opted, knowingly or unknowingly, towards a greater goal that serves both interests.  Incompetent opposition, on the other hand, is a threat to themselves as well as the organisation.  They should be treated with caution, and allowed the time and means to destroy themselves. 

Ultimately, this is merely a means, and policy is the articulation of strategy at a tactical level.  There is no benefit in being emotionally invested in the organisation or company.  They are merely means to an end.  There is no benefit to being drawn into petty retribution.  That is a distraction.  This is about winning, and winning requires results.

Breaking a Man

The following was culled from various sources from the Internet, although the primary source is The Atlantic’s series. 

At the start of the Cold War, Henry Alexander Murray developed a personality profiling test to crack Soviet spies with psychological warfare and select which US spies are ready to be sent out into the field.  As part of Project MK Ultra, he began experimenting on Harvard sophomores.  He set one student as the control, after he proved to be a completely predictable conformist, and named him “Lawful”.  The latter half of the experiment involved having the student prepare an essay on his core beliefs as a person for a friendly debate. 

Instead, Murray had an aggressive interrogator come in and basically tear his beliefs to pieces, mocking everything he stood for, and systematically picking apart every line in the essay to see what it took to get him to react.  But he did not, it just broke him, made him into a mess of a person and left him having to pull his whole life back together again.  He graduated, but then turned in his degree only a couple years later, and moved to the woods where he lived for decades. 

In all that time, he kept writing his essay.  And slowly, he became so sure of his beliefs, so convinced that they were right, that he thought that if the nation did not read it, we would be irreparably lost as a society.  So, he set out to make sure that everyone heard what he had to say, and sure enough, Lawful’s “Industrial Society & Its Future” has become one of the most well-known essays written in the last century.  In fact, many of us have probably read some of it, although, we probably know it better as “The Unabomber Manifesto.”  Lawful is Theodore John Kaczynski.  When you break a man, there are consequences.

Insane Dedication

Albert Einstein  said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

Literalism Can be Painful

Literalism can be painful.  People act intuitively and relate metaphorically.

Emotional Support Dog

Alexander Pope, the great English poet, said, “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.” 

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “You think dogs will not be in heaven?  I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.” 

Mark Twain  said, “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. It is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

Rethinking Retirement Planning

Men, more so than women, base much of their identity on their professional accomplishments.  They tend to have fewer social connections outside of their work, their professional networks, and associated clubs.  As such, when they retire, many tend to lose their sense of direction and worth, which results in early death. 

People should either invest in social connections and friendships outside of work, or run a business.  The former is accessible to everyone, the latter is not.  As such, we should relook what we understand about retirement planning.  Retirement planning is no longer about putting money aside, and then whiling away the time until death. Because we live longer, that time is now measured in decades.  Retirement planning is about maintaining a desired standard of living while medical costs rise, and income slowly diminishes.  That means funds must be set aside for extent activities.

Questions for That Strategic Edge

Every business, every organisation, every leader, needs a strategic road map.  Part of that strategic road map is ensuring that the team has the right capabilities, at every level, to advance the business strategy.  The team must also have the capability to execute their part of the strategic plan at every level below them.  To arrive at this, there are questions we need to consider, and ask ourselves, at every level, and at regular intervals. 

Is our business model relevant?

The business model frames the parameters of the market, and how we approach it.  A proper business model defines the demographics we serve, it define the problems and issues we address, and how we generate revenue from it.  That being said, we must recognise that the market evolves, and consumer habits change.  The business model mist adapt.  As such, every now and then, it is important to relook the business model, and ask ourselves if it is still relevant?  Does it need to change?  In what manner can we offer a better unique selling proposition? 

How do we go beyond the unique selling proposition?

There are, generally, three kinds of market leadership: greatest overall innovation, lowest overall cost, and best customer intimacy.  Depending on the area of market leadership we choose, that is the foundation of our unique selling proposition.  In the sole focus on the generation of revenue, businesses often forget about the intermediate and supporting processes, which lead to this.  That is part of our branding and goodwill.  To go beyond the unique selling proposition is to consider how these attendant processes add or detract from our market leadership.  This is especially important in an age of activist consumerism. 

How do we encapsulate the company ethos?

In this context, the ethos is the characteristic culture and values of the company, which we manifest in our vision and mission, our attitudes, our interactions with stakeholders, and our strategic direction.  As a business grows and expands, we sometimes lose sight of this, the spirit that brought founders together, that kept key personnel invested in the vision, and customers and clients identified with.  It is important to take periodic stock, and ensure we have not moved away from this.  This annual reflection is important to the continued existence of the business. 

Who do we take as role models?

We are, inevitably, influenced by others around us.  However, we must be careful about who we take as our role models.  We look at values and philosophy, and they must be congruent with what we believe in before we consider following them in anything.  There has to be a balance from learning and imitating, and adherence to our core values.  We then look at processes, actions, and outcomes we can imitate and assimilate. 

What are economic and political developments we can take advantage of?

A business should always remember that the world is dynamic.  It would be foolish to assume the market will be the same as it was.  Part of management is to keep an eye on economic and political developments, and project how these developments would affect the market, and to position ourselves to take advantage of that before the rest of the market has moved.  This also requires investing into a business intelligence network.  We should regularly ask these questions, and not be sucked into the here and now at the expense of the future. 

These are fundamental questions every business should have a habit of asking themselves, at regular intervals to sharpen competitive edge.