TRĒ CRM Media

Activator Behavior and Why We Should Let Lawyers be Lawyers

LinkedIn, May 14, 2024

“The fact that a lawyer isn’t an effective sales person doesn’t mean they are without value to the firm. Are rocket scientists valueless if they aren’t very good at selling SpaceX payload space?”

Why I Liked TRĒ so Much, I Bought the Company

LinkedIn, April 29, 2024

As you may have heard, I recently bought a company, TRĒ AI (most of it, anyway). For years, I had told pretty much anyone who would listen that my short list of last things I would ever do in my life included getting involved in a CRM company.

And yet, here I am. Why?

The Circle of Trust – A Company’s Greatest Asset

LinkedIn, August 8, 2022

The inspirational layer of the circle, if a company can achieve it, is the zone where the business lights its afterburners and is propelled into the stratosphere, well out of reach of its competition.

Incumbency and the Death of Founder’s Mentality – Part 2

LinkedIn, May 11, 2022

In my first installment of Incumbency and the Death of Founder’s Mentality, I drew a circle around the moment in a company’s lifecycle when it transitions from a fierce and agile insurgent organization with a nobler purpose to struggling bureaucracy. This moment in time is the one when a company’s departments are no longer dedicated to a single product or service. In other words, it is the moment the matrix is formed.

Incumbency and the Death of Founder’s Mentality – Part 1

LinkedIn, May 10, 2022

In 2014, James Allen, a partner at Bain, made a brilliant video about how the erosion of founder’s mentality at growing companies leads to incumbency and, ultimately, a struggling bureaucracy encumbered by the sheer weight of its complexity.

Allen talks about how these bureaucracies create “Complexity doom loops” that exhaust the company’s heroes and give rise to “Energy Vampires,” who suck the life out of talented people by blocking their actions.

If you’re a founder or a hero, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you’re a vampire, well, this video probably isn’t going to make much sense: https://www.bain.com/insights/what-is-founders-mentality-video/

The video is brilliant in almost every respect. There’s just one problem, and it’s a big one.

Covid and the Accidental Third Industrial Revolution

LinkedIn, June 30, 2021

According to legend, sometime in 1764, one of James Hargreaves’ daughters knocked over a single thread spinning wheel at his home in Blackburn, England. Hargreaves saw that both the wheel and the spindle continued to revolve despite the machine’s prone position. He realized that if a number of spindles were placed upright and side-by-side, several threads might be spun at once, dramatically boosting the output of the device. Hargreaves’ resulting invention, the Spinning Jenny touched off the first Industrial Revolution.

The Apple Spaceship Meets the Maginot Line

LinkedIn, February 18, 2021

The year is 1928. In the wake of the first world war, the French break ground on a 280-mile-long rampart along France’s eastern border. Though nearly a decade had passed since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany and the prospect of another invasion were never far from the minds of the French people.

So, at the outset of the second World War, what cunning plan did the Germans devise to defeat the Maginot Line?

They went around it.