Great stuff from Andy Molinsky, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Brandeis International Business School.
Picture this: You are at a networking event and see across the room a potential employer from a company you’re interested in. You walk over to that person, look him in the eye, and say the following:
“Hello, I noticed that you’re from IBM. I’m very interested in IBM and would love to give you a sense of my background.”
I recently posed this scenario to a group of foreign-born professionals in the United States and then asked whether they believed that according to American cultural norms, the person’s statement was:
(a) Too direct
(b) Not direct enough
(c) Appropriately direct
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I say it to everyone and anyone that I come across who is building a product or service without the assistance of a specialized business professional. Don’t get me wrong, it is great to have your Accountant taking a second and third look at your model, however, there has to be a combination of “what you do” and having a person near by that understands and provides you with the necessary advice to get “what you do” done… be it financing, marketing, or simply just direction and leadership.
If you needed a reason to keep your Business Consultant near by or hire a good CFO read Ndubuisi Ekekwe’s latest blog on Tech Startups and the the need for non-techies in order to succeed.
“In the tech startup world, technology is important for success, but it does not disproportionately determine winners and losers. Two companies can invent similar technologies; one will win and the other will lose. Focusing on technology supremacy alone is a model for failure. Over the years, I have consistently seen what I call “latent factors” — business features that are generally outside the scope of the core tech team — to be real factors in a company’s success. ”
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