The mistakes of others are cheap

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• It’s cheaper to learn from the mistakes of others

• Three tips to better negotiate price

• Closing mental loops for productivity and serenity

• Capturing tasks in our sleep

• Pre-mortems are better than post-mortems

ON YOUR CAREER

Learn from the mistakes of others

Otto von Bismarck said, ‘Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.’ We save time and money by Otto’s approach.

Our manager may be reluctant to alert us to a mistake we are about to make. They understand nobody likes to be micro-managed. It’s worth asking them about the biggest mistakes they have seen in our job. It’s worth asking the same of our predecessors and gaining the insights of mentors.

We can study the mistakes of political and business leaders. There are ample books and podcasts to guide us. We can also study how to avoid cognitive biases - irrational thinking patterns that all human beings are prone to.

In the fifth article of this edition we discuss the power of pre-mortems. Learning from the mistakes of others is an important input to pre-mortems.

COMMUNICATION

Three tips to better negotiate price

Excellent negotiation skills deliver more dollars per minute than nearly any other skill. Brainstorming negotiation tactics with colleagues, and practising negotiation techniques, are a great investment of time for salespeople and purchasers of goods and services. Three negotiation tips:

1. Do not negotiate in fear

If you have fear, do not display it. Don’t talk about how tough business is. People don’t want to do business with the desperate – except to gain a bargain.

2. Be comfortable with silence

Don’t rush to fill the silence in a negotiation meeting. Some people make concessions to escape the discomfort and uncertainty associated with silence.

3. Concede discounts in small increments

Buyers are more likely to accept a price when they receive two small discounts than one discount equal to the two smaller discounts e.g. 5% + 5% is better than 10% in one go. Discounting in smaller increments also permits acceptance to occur with less discounting.

Click here to read our guide: 35 Negotiation Tips for High Value Sales

PRODUCTIVITY

Closing mental loops

Most of us have felt overwhelmed by the number of tasks we need to complete in our jobs. We quickly toggle between projects and requests, disrupting ourselves with multiple open loops in our mind. Closing mental loops helps us to be more serene, focused, and productive. Some ways to close loops:

• Capture all of your tasks in a reliable system

• Prioritise important tasks

• Manage time expectations of stakeholders

• Focus on one important task at a time

• If a new request or task will take less than 2 minutes to complete, consider doing it immediately because capturing it might take a similar time or longer

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Capturing tasks in our sleep

Our brains are constant evaluation machines. Events of the work day may be replayed during our sleep; sometimes waking us with a problem, opportunity, or administrative task. We don’t want such open loops on our mind. We want to capture the thought, close the loop, and return to sleep.

If we capture the task on our phone or computer, bright light will further stimulate our minds. Instead, try having a paper notepad and marker beside your bed. You will be able to write legibly in complete darkness. Task captured, loop closed. Sleep.

GET SMARTER

Pre-mortems are better than post-mortems

Organizations with a growth-mindset often perform post-mortems to evaluate what they could have done better on a deal or project. Individuals can also do this for their specific contributions. There are many benefits to post-mortems. There are even greater benefits to performing pre-mortems. Pre-mortems are analyses conducted before a project or deal on what problems may emerge. And how to mitigate them.

Benefits of post-mortems

• Learning means that new work has a lower probability of mistakes and losses.

• Opportunity to deepen relationships with customers by getting their feedback for next time. This makes it more likely they will purchase again.

• Builds a culture of humility and resilience.

Benefits of pre-mortems

• Learning means that current work has a lower probability of mistakes and losses.

• Opportunity to deepen relationships with customers by getting their wisdom and insight to avoiding mistakes and problems. This increases their investment and partnership in the project or deal succeeding.

• Builds a culture of humility, resilience, and dynamic adaptability. This makes the organization anti-fragile. It helps the organization and its people compete well in their industry.

Whenever you lead a project, or a section of a project, it’s worth you performing a pre-mortem. This increases the probability of execution success. Execution skills are transferable. People who have a reputation for excellent execution have a high probability of being promoted.

If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.

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