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Welcome to The Grey Area
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Happy New Year! I hope you had a good Passover from 2022 to 2023. And talking about numbers: How long did it take you to write the right year on your date? I write daily and with the conscious effort of "Think about the fact that it is a New Year" I managed to get it right for 13 consecutive days. And then I tripped. I didn't think consciously about it any more and on the 14th of January I wrote myself back in time because a "2022" crept in! How hard it can be to break a habit! And it's not that I am extraordinarily attached to the number of years. Habit just creeps in. And I know there's nothing I can do other than being conscious about it and wait for my hand to learn the intuition of writing 2023 and be prepared for next year to repeat the same pattern. Change is always something we need to get used to. Even if it is something so seemingly simple like writing a 3 instead of a 2 - making it a habit takes time & conscious effort. So how does the following sound for a New Year’s resolution? Let's give ourselves a bit of a slack here! Change shouldn't be feared. We need change & change needs us. Challenges await us. And new learning opportunities await us. Let's take the eraser, be gentle with ourselves and try again tomorrow.
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In the northern hemisphere, the new year starts in a fairly cold climate. For me, it is a time when my skin constantly consists more of blanket than of actual skin. A lot of them in different types are available at any time, spread around the house and one of them is in use at any given time. I prefer the ones that have some weight to them because I like that feeling of being hugged by the weight of the blanket. And because they tend to be extra warm, obviously.
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In the end, blankets do not come out of thin air. They must be woven together from threads. And just as they must be woven together to form a unit, sometimes those threads loosen up. And suddenly the whole piece of fabric comes undone and with it the cosy feeling of the warm hug.
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For me, much of the last year felt like my proverbial blanket came undone. I had some trouble making sense of a lot of things I am told and they don‘t really feel cosy. I started looking into some endeavours and somehow nothing seems to fall into place. It’s not the ideas themself. The ideas are solid. It’s more the way of how it feels I am supposed to bring them to life.
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At the beginning of this process, I read a lot of books about how to build a start-up. How to get funding, how to get traction, and how to grow your business. The more I read the more frustrated and discouraged I got.
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I do not want to get VCs to give me money. What I’m building should belong to a community, not to a fund, let alone a money-printing machine for somebody else. I do not want to build a business whose only purpose is to scale as fast as possible. What I’m building will grow into what it’s supposed to be over time. I do not want to build a user persona that then is the golden customer and make a plan for how to target them. And what I certainly do not want to do is send them through yet another dehumanising funnel. I am confident enough that this endeavour will attract the right people at the right time.
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Can you define the problem that you are trying to solve? I could. But I don’t want to use this negative language of a “problem” that I am the only capable person to offer the solution to. Where is the community aspect and inclusion thought behind that?
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How much revenue are you expecting in 10 years? I don’t know! Can we agree on the fact that since COVID everybody knows that nobody knows what happens in 10 years?
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As a consequence of all these objections, I fail the most basic task of drafting a standard business plan. Or better said, I am told that I failed it… The more I research, the more frustrated I become. Is our business world really just about the greedy, old money-based capitalistic system?
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In my head, I question the endeavour regularly. Where do I go without anything to offer that fits a regular scheme? Without anything that follows the rule of the game? None of the models out there feel comfortable. None of the models fully support what I stand for. None of the models give me the cosy feeling of a warm blanket.
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To me there are three choices of what to do in that situation: you can just ignore the discomfort and go with them anyways. Go with the flow is not an option for me. It's why I am thinking about all those things after all. I’m not willing to look the other way, because not only does it go against what I want to stand for. To and for me that is also not sustainable behaviour.
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You can put energy into rewriting the rules. But rewriting the rules to the same game also doesn’t feel right. It’s still the same game! It’s still the same place. And even if you come out the other end with a sustainable building block, it’s still meant to sustain the system. I don’t want to be part of that game.
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It was clear to me: This is not how I want to do business. But I definitely want to bring the idea to life, also because I already had very supportive feedback. Holding it back would be a shame.
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The option that remains is to create your own game. You can decide to play a completely different game yourself. I want to be part of something new, that’s more than a zero-sum game. And it seems, this wish means I have to write a rule book myself.
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So I changed my view on it. If I don’t want to do “x” the rule book way, how do I want to do it? This is where I am now. Sorry, dear VC fund managers, this start-up will not be profitable for quite a while - maybe never. But this is not what it is about. Also, this start-up will not produce extraordinary yearly growth right from the start. Things take time when you have to write the rule book with your actions.
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In the end, I decided to look ahead to summer. I want to play on the beach full of opportunities and build my own castle while everyone else is trying to compete for the limited resources in the sandbox they play in. I am not sure how long it will take to build a stable foundation. Or if a wave comes and washes it all away. But I can be sure I build it in a way that those coming my way to destroy it and profit themselves are not welcome at my beach. Also, I am not building alone. The people who come to the beach with me will all play their part in helping build the castle. And I know, whenever the waves will take away this castle, each sand corn will take a journey to be part of another foundation.
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Well, this was the long and very wordy answer to say that this blog will undergo some changes as it will become the publication channel for the endeavour. As the topics of my endeavour and this newsletter overlap, you can expect more content on the topic here soon. It will still function as a stand-alone newsletter, with the regular categories of long-form text and recommendations about other sources. It will not turn into an announcement newsletter, although I might add a section with announcements somewhere further down the line. I know, that what the business creates will add value to what I want to create for this newsletter community. I hope you follow me along for the ride.
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What others wrote
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No text I ever write just comes out of my brain from some form of abyss. I am not that genius creative. I read a lot of stuff that forms my opinion. Not all of it makes it into my articles. Some things are just a brain tickler. So I will share good pieces with you, so maybe they also tickle your brain.
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Over the Christmas holidays the digital world went CA-RAZY! The incredible possibilities of ChatGPT led to an even more incredible growth of users and everybody was playing with it to create some piece of text. Well, technically, ChatGPT is only the next step of an evolution that started with the first ever chatbot, ELIZA. So what happens when the family meets for a therapy session? This post has the answer to that!
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This episode is based on a deep research and confrontation with our capitalistic structures. One thing that I came across while doing the research is this collection of 7 short videos that explain very well and easily understandable (well, as understandable as these structures can be made...) where we come from and where we could go.
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Falling into the same category of how we can do capitalism better, this time about marketing. Isn't everything we do in business about people in the end? Marketing nowadays sometimes doesn't really feel like it... So here are some ideas about how to put the "human" back into customer.
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A word from...
Amy C. Edmondson
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"The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think" - Harper Lee
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When I started being part of the workforce company management behaviour was still very much based on fear-based efforts to make people "fit in", "follow rules and directives" and "divide and conquer". Luckily that is changing in many organizations. Amy Edmondson and her research on psychological safety in the workplace might have had an influence on that and is an inspiring read for everyone on the path to better collaboration. It's also a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks that "it has worked before, it'll continue to work".
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Ever since the Corona pandemic took its beginnings in Wuhan, the city is not a place we connect with a pleasant experience. For all the book lovers under the sun this might change with the opening of the new Central Library of the Hubei capital. Inspired by the geography of the surrounding landscape the architects the architects have designed a wonderful connection between the outside and the inside world of readers.
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That's it for this month. Thanks for reading the 15th Edition and for your support. Please let me know what you think of the newsletter. All feedback welcome!
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And on a last note, just to let you know: This newsletter, as any, was made by the loving support of snacks, coffee, and the vastness of the internet.
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We actively want to bring in colours, not just lighten the place up! We want to create the space, where ideas from other dimensions are included, where thoughts outside of the black and white realm find a touchpoint with the spectrum. We want to explore possibilities how our society can be a better one when we don’t fight the unknown but embrace it with open arms and a curious mind. It is an offer to think differently. It’s an offer for different views, opinions and insights so that the “One Size Fits All” story becomes a range of various stories that show us the immense beauty of what humans can create.
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Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you’d like to see more?
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Saskia Listle Konzept & Consulting | Robert-Schuman-Straße 6 | 85716 Unterschleißheim
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