Processes and procedures have the potential to make our organisations more efficient, but we often conflate efficiency and effectiveness. Just because you've made it easy for someone to follow the steps to get a job done, it doesn't mean they'll do it well.

This is especially true when it comes to developing digital products.

Every product and market is different, and individual successes are often hugely contextual (and based a lot more on luck and being in the right place at the right time than any sort of repeatable process).

Even when you're working on a single product as a PM, you'll often find that the approach you take to get one idea from inception to launch needs to be totally different for the next—what worked in one situation isn't guaranteed to work in another (for all sorts of chaos theory-style reasons you could spend a lifetime trying to figure out).

This is magnified almost infinitely if you're an agency product manager working across multiple products at different lifecycle stages in different domains.

Trying to create a single product management process for your organisation is a wasted effort. What you need to do instead is create the conditions for success—a set of principles for how you do product that can be applied to any initiative and give your organisation the best possible chance of winning.

Like legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson says:

This links closely to the way Marty Cagan talks about leading by context rather than control.

You could argue that principles are context, and processes are control.

By giving your teams a set of guiding principles to work from you're giving them the freedom to figure out the best way to achieve their goals.

By handing them a Standard Operating Procedure, on the other hand, you're removing the opportunity for creativity and adaptation.

And building great products is all about creativity.

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, argued that simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behaviour whereas complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behaviour.

It's this adherence to a set of principles which a great number of people can use that was one of the core tenets of his management philosophy, and one of the key things that drove Visa to become one of the most successful financial organisations in the world.

This links closely to military strategist John Boyd's qualities of victorious organisations, one of which is “Auftragstaktik” (leadership by contract).

This idea of contractual, decentralised leadership is a huge part of what made the German Army so successful in the early stages of the Second World War. Once Hitler made himself supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and began to lead by complete control, things fell apart very quickly (and very badly).

There's a lesson for product leaders to learn there, which is about giving your teams the freedom to figure out the best way to solve the problems that are in front of them instead of dictating approaches and solutions.

Top-down processes don't empower your teams, they disempower them.

Instead of trying to figure out the process for how you want to work, take it up a level and define the principles you want to work by.

#riffs #prodmgmt

An MVP isn’t about stripping back features and functionality—it’s about maximizing opportunities for learning.

If you’ve got an idea of what the fully-fledged version of your product looks like and you’re trying to wind that back to the minimum set of features you can go to market with, that’s not an MVP—it’s your version one, and you need to be honest with yourself about that.

A true MVP is the minimum viable product you can create to test your assumptions about the value you’re creating for your customers.

Your MVP doesn’t even have to be a working app (Dropbox’s was a video demo of a product that didn’t exist yet), but it needs to be something you can get into your customers’ hands and get real feedback on straight away.

A true MVP is an experiment, not a launchable product.

From Robert Schlaff's excellent article on MVPs:

In reality, though, this approach to MVPs has become the exception rather than the norm.

Working for a product development agency, I've read a ton of tender-style documents that talk about MVPs in relation to features rather than learning, and that misses out all the value of what an MVP ought to be about.

Like Jason Godesky says:

That's not to say figuring out what the v1 of your product should look like and how to get to your ultimate version is inherently wrong, but it's a lot of wasted effort if you're not going to test your assumptions about it before you build.

To paraphrase Mike Tyson, everyone thinks they know what their market wants until they get punched in the face by their customers.

The only way you can really know if a product idea is worth pursuing is when you get it into the hands of the people you think are going to use it. Ninety percent of the time, the idea that you thought was unstoppable will land badly, and you'll need to iterate on it to figure out what the real solution to your customer's problem ought to be.

Putting effort into building a launchable version of a product before finding out if anyone cares about it is hugely wasteful. Even if you keep the feature set super-tight, there's no point in building things that people don't want.

A true MVP can go along way to helping you mitigate that risk.

To go back to the experimental nature of MVPs, this other quote from Jason Godesky sums it up nicely:

An MVP is your first step towards building the product your customers want, not the one you want to get to market. The difference feels subtle, but it's absolutely massive.

Like Ha Phan says:

#riffs #prodmgmt

If I’d stuck with my first blog, it’d now be older than my niece who just celebrated her 18th birthday.

At the time, though, creating online content felt ephemeral. The Internet was young enough that there was no sense of permanence about anything. I didn’t see any problem bouncing from platform to platform and having my own “writing year zero” every time.

Nearly two decades on, though, and I’m left with a massively fragmented online presence. This blog is a few years old and until I revived it recently was mostly just a collection of old Medium and LinkedIn posts.

I’ve got thousands of tweets and threads about product management on Twitter that, in hindsight, would’ve been better turned into articles on my own domain.

I’ve had TinyLetter, Substack and Beehiiv newsletters that I’ve launched and killed multiple times—then there’s all the other blogs and sites I’ve forgotten about that are still out there in the ether (or on the Internet Archive if you dig hard enough).

David Perell talks about writing online as the best form of networking, and he’s right:

But the ability of your content to compound only really works if you own it.

Like a lot of online creators, I sacrificed ownership and control for reach. It felt no different at the time to choosing to write for mainstream music publications instead of my own ‘zine, but the reality has been very different.

I recently read a great article about the importance of building your own castle on the Internet (which is where the meme at the start of this post came from).

While you might get more reach from using other platforms, that’s far outweighed by the advantages of having your own personal space online.

Blogging seems to be having a resurgence recently, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of content creators have been burned by Musk’s destruction of Twitter, or Substack’s unwillingness to ban Nazis from their platform.

More and more people are beginning to realise that letting other people own what you say and who ends up hearing it online is a mistake.

I’ve always been a blogger at heart; I’m just rediscovering what that means in 2024.

Turns out it’s not much different to what it meant when I started nearly 20 years ago—it’s just feels a shame that I drank the social media Kool Aid and lost sight of it.

#riffs #blogging

In many ways, it’s true.

As a teenager in the 1990s, the seventies felt like a lifetime ago. It was my parents’ era of flares and platform boots, vinyl records and novelty pop songs. It had little in common with the world I was growing up in.

For my children, looking back on the nineties probably feels the same. The pre-Internet world might as well be a hundred years ago.

Roll back two decades to the mid-2000s, though, and things look very familiar.

There’s a great article from Paul Skallas that talks about how culture has become stuck in the digital age:

Tech hasn’t so much frozen popular culture, though, as eaten it for breakfast.

It’s no surprise that Oasis, one of the last British bands to ride a cultural zeitgeist, have attracted so much attention for their reunion shows.

Now that we’re all creating our own soundtracks from the entire history of recorded music via Spotify and Apple Music, the chances of another band having the impact of someone like The Beatles seems impossible.

The same goes for all other areas of popular entertainment.

Nowadays, culture is curated for us algorithmically based on our likes and interests, not defined for us from above.

Our tech is shaping our influences on a very personal level, which is detaching us from our wider culture.

And because everything is available digitally for all-time, nothing feels like it’s of its time.

When movies made ten years ago look the same as movies made today, it’s hard to feel time moving on.

I thought this was part of growing older; that my parents must’ve felt the same way, but I don’t think it is.

If someone travelled back in time from 2034 to today, I bet you’d be hard pressed to tell they were from the future.

#riffs #culture

As a media & cultural studies graduate and former-journalist-turned-product-manager, I've long had a love-hate relationship with media on the Internet.

I've been what you could call “very online” since the peak times of forums and AOL Instant Messenger; I've launched, forgotten and deleted countless blogs and newsletters, from Blogspot to Substack, and have had a presence on most networks since we started talking about them as social (remember Friends Reunited, anyone?).

I sunk a ton of time and effort into building a “personal brand” on Twitter before Elon Musk killed it (and I came to the realisation that it had all been about virtue-signalling anyway) and I've found myself falling into Threads as my new habitual boredom killer.

In terms of the value social media adds to my life, though, it feels like it's been decreasing significantly. The early days of Twitter were anarchic and exciting, but the algorithmically organised feeds that reflect our own thoughts, opinions and biases back at us are becoming boring.

Om Malick recently published a post about social media intermittent fasting, and I thought I'd try the same, for very similar reasons:

Anyway, why am I thinking about “fasting” from social media? Or rather all of “media”? It’s because social media is an “engagement” game driven by “dunking” and derision. Even people I respect and listen to have started to sound tinny. Most of us aren’t self-aware enough to realize that the more we speak, the less we say.

With Twitter (and more recently LinkedIn), I found myself posting for the sake of it to “keep the algorithm happy”, mostly saying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. In hindsight, what I probably should've been doing was putting more effort into longer form content on this blog–it's this that will become the evergreen stuff, not my old social media posts.

On an episode of Peter Yang's podcast, Nat Eliason talked about the need to optimise for the most durable format of work, which is either articles or videos. What you do elsewhere should only be to serve your main platform. It can be easy to win on social media and build an audience, but if you don't do anything with it, what's the point?

When it comes to creating content, the whole Elon Musk takeover catastrophe with Twitter has reinforced the idea that you should play in your own playground, not someone else's. Building an audience on an owned platform is really building it on sand. While you'll get nowhere near as much reach, you'll be much better served publishing to your own self-hosted blog or newsletter. Even platforms like Substack and Beehiiv aren't really “yours”, however much they try to convince you otherwise.

The next question, then, is about content consumption. Is there enough value in social media content to make it worth engaging with?

A couple of years ago my answer would have been a very definite 'yes'. As a fledgling product leader, I got a huge amount of signal from industry leaders via Twitter. My Readwise is still full of highlighted threads from people like Shreyas Doshi. Nowadays, though, my social feeds are mostly noise and rehashed content from elsewhere.

In a recent Guardian article, James Hall talks about the exodus from X to Threads and why it's actually pretty dull hanging out on Meta's new platform:

The forces behind switching, though, are very much those pushing people away from X, rather than the attraction of the hot new social network that is Threads. “Threads has some great things about it, not least that it is linked to Instagram, which is probably the most useful social media platform around,” Sanghera says. “But not enough of the people I love are on it … I hope this will change. Or maybe I’m just getting closer to the time of quitting social media altogether.

My personal experience has been pretty similar. The OG Tech Threads scene was vibrant and exciting, but that's faded now. On Twitter, there was a hyper-engaged product management community, but on Threads it's mostly established thought leaders reposting old Twitter posts and LinkedIn content.

Obviously, I'm also not a fan of the trolling, fascism and conspiracy theorising that has come to dominate X. I put a lot of effort into keeping that sort of content out of my feed when there was other stuff worth coming back for, but I've now given up on Twitter entirely.

This recent video essay from Joan Westenberg gives a really good account of the state of free speech platforms.

When it comes to content consumption, I'd much rather curate my own personal feed than let someone else' algorithm do it for me. More than a decade on, I'm still gutted about the death of Google Reader, but I'm living with it.

I subscribe liberally to newsletters and blogs and throw them all into Readwise Reader. I gave up reading the news during the pandemic in favour of in-depth, thought-provoking editorial to help me make sense of what's going on in the world.

I very much agree with this intro to an article from Farnham Street on why paying attention to news media is a waste of time:

Our obsession with staying informed often backfires. We consume hours of news, believing it makes us knowledgeable. Yet paradoxically, the more news we consume, the less informed we become. This constant influx of information hinders our ability to think long-term and see the bigger picture.

I'm starting to feel the same about social media.

Does that mean I'm going to delete all of my accounts, throw away my iPhone and become some sort of digital hermit? Of course not. But I'm going to be much more intentional about how I engage with online content.

I'm going to move the bulk of my writing back to this blog and revive my Farcaster account for short-form stuff. LinkedIn's still important, but I've got no interest in becoming an influencer. I want my brand to built on rocks, not dust.

#riffs #socialmedia

My last (now deleted) post on this site was about how I was heading back to Twitter after initially abandoning my account in the wake of Elon Musk's takeover.

I'll admit I tried, but it's been hard to get excited about posting content to a platform that’s being torn apart by the whims of its extraordinarily rich owner.

Which got me thinking about why I even care about social media in the first place.

I’ve had a social-media-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter account since 2008, and it’s played a crucial part in my growth and development as a product manager and leader over the last decade.

When I became a product manager, I was the first and only PM at the company I worked for and had no one to turn to for support, guidance and mentorship. If I was going to stand any chance of succeeding, I needed to find some people to learn from, and fast.

I tried LinkedIn, but it never really chimed with me. Twitter, on other hand, was perfect. I’d used Twitter in my previous capacity as a music journalist to connect with artists and their PR agencies so using it to connect with product managers and tech people was an easy step.

But what started as a way to build a product management network I could call on for support soon evolved into a personal branding mission.

Why?

I think the biggest reason was imposter syndrome. I’d never been a product manager before and had no one to compare myself against to know if I was doing a good job.

But having 20,000 people following me on Twitter made me feel like I knew what I was talking about. The people liking and retweeting my content couldn’t be wrong, could they? I was telling myself I was tweeting to help and teach my fellow product managers, but really I was doing it for self-validation.

In her last blog post before she died, Hachyderm founder Kris Nova made some similar observations:

We have lost our prerogative to enact change. We aren’t using social media to drive action. We are using it to farm a false sense of worth. To cast stones at anyone who foolishly stumbles into the latest virtue-trap. Petty nuance has replaced bold hope.

But using social media to create a sense of self-worth isn't fulfilling. Later on in her post, Nova has these observations:

Broadcasting virtue to the world will never provide internal fulfilment regardless of how true it may be. Virtue signalling is effective in shifting public perception, but remains powerless in shifting an internal self-image.

You can’t tweet your way to self-respect.

Social media has provided a mass platform for extraordinary volumes of external engagement. However it has robbed us of the most critical dialogue, our dialogue with ourselves.

As well as robbing us of our internal dialogue, social media is also impacting our creativity. We might all be calling ourselves content creators, but when we're creating for social media we're really creating for the algorithms that get us our dopamine hits of likes and comments.

YouTuber Casey Neistadt talks about how social media affects creativity in a podcast with Rich Roll:

When influence is valued above creativity, craft is supplanted by self-marketing. Creativity is replaced by serving algorithms. And art is dead.

Maybe it's not all doom and gloom, though.

The disintegration of Twitter (no, Elon; I'm never going to call it X) has kickstarted a social media power shift. People who have no idea what federated content is all about have now heard of Mastodon, and Threads has rocketed to 130m users on the back of its feelgood antithesis to Twitter's hell-scape.

According to Rolling Stone, the Internet is about to get weird again. And one of the places it's already starting to get weird is social media:

A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today.

The idea of global social networks where everyone can “build a brand” is starting to feel a bit outdated. This isn't about broadcasting your own voice to millions of people, it's about finding a community of like-minded weirdos you can have fun with online.

If you can let go of your ego, stop virtue-signalling, and forget about trying to be influencer, social media still has an incredible power to bring people together. It doesn't matter how niche your interests are, you can connect with people all over the world who share the same.

It feels like early Internet-style communities are coming back in a big way across platforms like Discord and Slack.

Just look at what the amazing Eleonor Rose is doing with Tech Threads.

What do you think?

Is the age of personal branding and audience building over? What does the future look like for our online personas?

#riffs #socialmedia

All Facebook developers are able to push to production. And if it blows up, so what? It’s still in keeping with the company’s original ethos to move fast and break things. They even broke their Android app on purpose just to test their users’ loyalty.

Unfortunately, the rest of us don’t have the luxury of Facebook’s world-devouring scale. Even with the most well-oiled continuous deployment loop, we’ve got to test stuff. No one wants to take a call from their Managing Director when the system’s tanked during a major client demo thanks to an untried update that just went out.

From being in the trenches when a £500m corporate software implementation imploded on release day (despite five years worth of planning) to watching a quick-and-dirty MVP become a NVP because a button didn’t work, I’ve learned a lot about testing in my career. And sometimes I still get it wrong.

Even Sage, a FTSE 100 company and one of the most recognized software brands in the UK, hold “Prayer Meetings” before they push out a major update.

As a product manager, you need to be acutely aware of Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong; it’s how you deal with it that matters.

Here are my Ten Commandments for Software Testing:

1. EVERYONE owns quality
2. Test your own code
3. Evidence your test results
4. QA isn’t there to mop up sloppy development
5. Nothing goes out untested
6. Always verify new features and fixes in production
7. Try and break stuff
8. If it’s broken, FIX IT
9. User feedback matters; they’re your ultimate testers
10. Bugs happen; it’s how you handle them that counts

#essays #prodmgmt

But how do you make your tech guys sit up and take notice of bugs they see as minor annoyances? When the workaround is “just press F5” or “log out and log back in”, how do you convince them you need an urgent fix?

One surefire way to get your developers to fix and release bugs at lightspeed is to make them work on your helpdesk. Nothing gets a query resolved like an irate customer berating your Lead Developer.

In many companies, development exists in its own bubble where “works on my machine” is the ultimate stamp of approval. In that sort of world, though, there are always going to be issues.

Your customers don’t think like developers. Why should they? The secret is to try and get your developers to think like your customers; by talking to them and understanding their issues and annoyances.

Here’s how to do it, without causing a mutiny:

Set up focus groups where your developers and customers can meet

Your customers are your biggest source of ideas for new products, features and improvements. If you don’t talk to them, then you’re just making assumptions about what they want. But why leave your developers out the loop?

If you’re relying on your Product Manager and UX team to do all the requirements gathering, then how can your development team put what they’re building into context?

The best way for developers to find out what can make their product better is to spend time with its users and learn about their issues firsthand. Involve your development team at the very start of the product development process; they’ll come up with ways to meet your customers’ challenges that you’ll never think of otherwise.

Create a culture of “all company support” (which includes your development team)

If the responsibility for managing customer satisfaction only sits with your support team, then you’re absolving the rest of your company from taking accountability for the quality of your products. Fostering a company-wide culture of excellent service means everyone takes an interest in keeping your customers happy. And that includes your developers.

Get everyone in your company to spend some time handling support queries; it’s the quickest way to get an understanding of how your customers actually use (and feel about) your product. It’ll open your team’s eyes to issues that seem trivial when you’re looking at them in the office, but have a huge impact on your users’ experience.

And nothing encourages a developer to fix a bug quicker than a load of irate customers hassling them about it.

Make resolving customer queries part of your developers’ KPIs

Without targets for resolution, your bug backlog will grow and grow. Who wants to fix a mundane issue with a simple workaround when they can dive into a in-depth science project?

By nature, most developers are inquisitive types who like nothing more than solving a (brand new, complex) problem. Customer queries are just a distraction from the real work.

To stop bug tickets sitting in the backlog indefinitely, make them part of your development team’s KPIs. Incentivise your developers to get them resolved and find the time for the projects they really want to work on.

Implement a support process which mean your developers don’t need to speak to anyone

Many developers, by their nature, are introverts; try and get them to pick up the phone to customers and you’ll have a potential mutiny on your hands. That doesn’t mean you should keep them at arms length, though. There are plenty of tools out there to bring your development team into the support process and engage with customers.

With services like Intercom and Zendesk, developers can talk to customers from the comfort of their own keyboard. We’ve even implemented a dedicated Slack channel for one of our larger clients to easily facilitate the conversation with frontline staff using our software and the back-end developers who built it. It’s removed the “Chinese whispers” approach where the support team would need to relay a problem to development.

Foster a culture of collaboration between your frontline support team and your developers

Your support team wants to help your customers, your developers want to develop. In many companies, the two hardly ever cross paths. If you want your products to really address your customers’ issues, though, you’ve got to bring your customer-facing staff and your back-end team together.

The easiest way to do that is to create a product team accountable for delivering a world class end-to-end customer journey. This includes product management, UX, design, development, marketing, sales and technical support.

Delivering awesome products that leave a long-lasting impression is the responsibility of everyone in your business, from the CEO down. By insisting your developers become part of that journey and interact with the people who use their code, you’ve got a much better chance of building a loyal customer base who’ll stick with you.

#essays #prodmgmt

The problem with traditional product roadmaps is they’re obsolete as soon as they’re written. Agile technology projects are, by their nature, extremely fluid; old-fashioned project management techniques just won’t work.

Why waste hours building complicated Gantt charts if you’re just going to have to rip them up every time your requirements change?

The trick is to bring that Agile mindset to bear during your planning process as well.

Dates Are A Waste of Time

No new product is delivered on time. Ever. If anyone tells you otherwise they’re a liar.

How can you possibly forecast every roadblock, hiccup and product scope change ahead of time and predict, with accuracy, when your product will be ready to go in front of customers?

Deadline dates are always missed, so do yourself a favour; don’t set them.

That doesn’t mean giving your development team free rein to finish whenever they’re ready, though. You’re not painting The Sistine Chapel or building St Paul’s Cathedral. No product means no income for your business, after all.

Instead of setting arbitrary deadline dates that keep on moving, agree a time frame for delivery instead. Flex scope, not time, and make sure you’re getting new product features and improvements in front of people as quickly as possible.

Noah Weiss, Head of Search, Learning & Intelligence at Slack, advocates a Now, Next, Later approach for prioritising deliverables. I’ve tweaked it a bit to meet the needs of my business and now work to the following:

• Current: to be delivered within the next four to six weeks
• Near term: to be delivered in the next three to six months
• Future: to be delivered more than six months over the horizon

This approach makes it really easy for your team to focus on their immediate priorities (Current), what’s coming up in the pipeline (Near term) and their longer term goals (Future).

Link Your Deliverables to Business Strategy

The items on your roadmap need to have purpose; they’ve got to carry you closer to your vision, mission and goals. There’s no room for boring, platform-specific tags here.

I use ProdPad for my roadmaps (I used to use Trello, but ProdPad is awesome) and label my items with one of the following objectives:

• Growth: New products and features aimed at growing our business and/or pivoting into new markets
• Retention: New products and features aimed at increasing the retention of our existing customer base
• Engagement: Improvements to existing features/functionality to increase engagement
• Usability: UX/UI improvements to existing products and features to make them more usable for our customers
• Integrations: Integrations with some of the 3rd party systems our customers use
• Support: Improvements to the way we’re able to deliver support and make that part of our offering more efficient
• Resilience: Architecture and infrastructure improvements aimed at improving the reliability of our existing products and systems
• Other: Anything we’re working on that doesn’t fit into one of the other buckets but still needs to be tracked on our roadmap

It means I can see, at a glance, what the areas of focus are for Product and how my team is contributing to the business. If my roadmap is full of green “Growth” cards for example, then it’s all about building the customer base.

Stick to Themes, Not Tasks or Stories

Stories are for Product Requirement Documents, not roadmaps. Leave the “as a user, I can” stuff for the next layer down.

Your roadmap should be about articulating value.

You already know the strategic impact of what you’re working on; the next step is to think about the value that each item on your roadmap brings to your business and, most importantly, your customer.

Here’s a recent example from our roadmap:

Implement Automated Campaigns (Usability)

• Automate the Email Campaign process and make it really easy for schools to share their projects and ask for donations, volunteers and general support.

Make sense? It’s clear where the value is straight away; implementing automated campaigns will make sharing really easy. Easier than it is at the moment, anyway.

Don’t go overboard with detail here. All you need to cover is the idea and the value it’s adding. You can flesh out the rest with your team.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Technical jargon has no place in your Roadmap. It should be so straightforward that a brand new user of your software can understand what you’re trying to achieve.

ProdPad and Slack (to name two) have clear, concise public-facing roadmaps so their customers know what they’re up to:

• ProdPad Product Roadmap
• Slack Platform Roadmap for Developers

You don’t need to go that far, but it’s worth writing your Roadmap as if you are.

Keep It Up-to-Date

Your product roadmap should be a living, breathing document that you use to steer your team in the right direction. It should be the focus of your weekly meetings and you should review it, in depth, at least once a month.

As a product manager, I’d advocate updating your Roadmap every day with notes / updates on anything that’s moved.

A well thought-out product roadmap will help guide you and your team to their destination, but you’ve got to use it. Don’t just create it and think that’s the job done.

#prodmgmt #essays

Quoting military strategists in business has become cliched, but it’s still relevant; from carrying round copies of Sun Tsu’s The Art Of War in their briefcases, to team-building in the woods with paintball guns, plenty of business leaders have taken the actions of history’s greatest commanders to heart.

But what are the most powerful pieces of advice you can take on board?

Here are seven lessons that stretch back more than two thousand years and are as relevant in the office today as they were on the battlefields of Europe, Asia and beyond.

Lead from the Front

Follow Alexander the Great’s example and become a figurehead for success

He wasn’t called Great for nothing. By the time he died at 32, legendary Macedonian commander Alexander had conquered most of the known world; creating an empire that stretched for 10,000 miles and encompassed the Mediterranean, most of Europe and even reached the borders of India.

An intelligent and inspirational leader, Alexander forged unwavering loyalty in his troops. He rode and walked among them, drank the same amount of water his soldiers had, and deeply understood their physical and emotional state before a battle. It’s that understanding, coupled with his ruthlessness, that led him to amass one of the largest empires the world has ever seen.

If you want your team to follow your vision, then you’ve got to get on the frontline with them. When was the last time you handled a complaint from an irate customer, spent time in your call centre or sat alongside your team for a day? Being a leader doesn’t mean being aloof and unapproachable; it means being a genuine figurehead who inspires loyalty in those you lead.

Pursue your Aims with Audacity and Strength of Will

Adopt Clausewitz’ still-relevant 19th century strategy to overcome your obstacles

Inspired by his experiences in the Napoleonic Wars, Prussian scholar-general Carl von Clausewitz brought the study of warfare to an intellectual level that has dominated the discipline for more than 150 years. From the American Civil War to Vietnam, his theories and analysis have continued to remain relevant despite the ever-changing technology of combat.

Published after his death from cholera in 1831, Von Clausewitz’ book, On War, is arguably the single most influential military text in human history. Laying out the principles that have defined Western doctrine ever since, it’s an earth-shattering tome that fuses hardcore military tactics with in-depth political strategy to set out the rules for winning in battle.

But how can von Clausewitz help you succeed in the office? One of his most powerful quotes, “If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles”, sounds like it could have been written with today’s entrepreneurs in mind. The road to success in business is strewn with obstacles. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to have the mental strength to overcome them.

Empower your Employees

Take a leaf out of the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg book and let your team make their own decisions

Before Adolf Hitler blunted its attacking prowess through his own megalomania, Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht was one of the most impressive military organisations in history. Embracing the power of the tank, Germany’s army stormed through France in 1940, bringing the nation to its knees in a matter of weeks; something it had been unable to achieve through the four bitter years of fighting of the First World War.

The reasons behind the Wehrmacht’s early successes were the innovative tactics of its leaders, particularly the visionary theorist Colonel Heinz Guderian. Understanding that an inefficient chain-of-command would undermine his lightning-fast “reconnaissance in force”, Guderian empowered his officers to make their own battlefield decisions without the need to refer to their superiors, slicing the Allies in pieces before they had a chance to react.

It’s an approach that can work just as well in the office. Don’t create bottlenecks where your team can’t move forward without your say-so. Set clear goals and objectives and let them find their own way there.

Teach Your Team How to React Quickly

The OODA loop isn’t just a recipe for victory in air-to-air combat

Rarely discussed outside military circles until recently, Colonel John Boyd was arguably the most influential strategist to emerge since Sun Tzu. Obsessed with finding the truth about conflict, his philosophical approach to the analysis of military strategy has influenced everyone from the US Marines to police SWAT teams, the fire service and a host of other organisations.

A combat fighter pilot during the Korean War, Boyd was desperate to understand why the American F-86 Sabre had a kill ratio of 10 to one over the superior Russian MiG. The result of his study was the OODA loop, a near-perfect recipe for victory in air-to-air combat; it’s a tactic that can be applied to any situation where an upper hand is needed.

In the workplace, the four tenets of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act are pivotal. Teach your team to follow Boyd’s approach and their chances of succeeding are vastly amplified. From combating threats from competitors, to managing tricky customer support calls, the OODA loop is an extraordinarily powerful approach that nearly always pays off.

Consider all Possible Options

Napoleon wouldn’t go into battle until he’d considered all the risks; why should you?

Napoleon Bonaparte was, undeniably, the finest operational strategist of his generation. On the battlefield, though, it was a different story. For every major success, there was a disaster. From his triumph of Jena-Auestadt to his abject failure to subjugate Russia, his military career was one of bloodletting of near-mythic proportions.

But for all his failings in battle, Napoleon was an extraordinary military campaigner. A deep thinker, he would ponder all the possible outcomes of his endeavours, good and bad, before choosing to engage the enemy. He exaggerated the calamities in his own mind first, so he was absolutely prepared for whatever came to pass.

It’s an approach that any business leader can apply. Before kickstarting anything new, spend time with your team thinking about everything that could go wrong; it’ll stand you in good stead for whatever does.

Remember, Planning is Everything

What you can learn about planning from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the mastermind behind D-Day

Anyone with a passing interest in time management will be familiar with Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix. What many don’t know, though, is it wasn’t Covey’s matrix at all. Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War 2, General Dwight D. Eisenhower created the model to help him focus on his most important tasks.

A masterful military planner, Eisenhower never shied away from making important decisions. By understanding and evaluating where he needed to spend his time, Eisenhower was able to make real progress on his goals, instilling confidence in his subordinates even when it looked like events were conspiring against him.

Eisenhower’s oft-quoted statement that “what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important” powered him from the Allied advance through Europe to the presidency of the United States; it can certainly help drive you to the top in business.

Develop Your Character

Sun Tzu was right; understanding, empathy and self-awareness are critical to your success as a leader

Sun Tzu’s seminal The Art of War has been transforming the way military leaders think ever since it was translated into French in the 18th Century. It’s more than just a book about warfare, though; it became essential reading for everyone as soon as the words “business” and “strategy” were flung together in the 1960s.

At the heart of Sun Tzu’s philosophy is one of his greatest pieces of advice; a leader leads by example, not by force. Self-awareness, empathy and understanding are essential elements of every business leader’s strategy. As Sun Tzu elaborated,”treat your men as you would your beloved sons and they will follow you into the deepest valley.”

There’s a reason that The Art of War has become such an important work. It’s advice is timeless and is just as powerful in the modern office cubicle as it was on the battlefields of ancient China. Lead by action, not words, understand what motivates your troops and do your best to deliver it.

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