Mediocre

Cristina and I have both been swimming in “how to prepare for an impending recession” advice for the past few months, and decided to rant about what feels like all of it. Is there any actual insight out there, or is everything just old content with tried-and-true sound business practices updated to include the phrase “coming recession”?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The tragedy of the submersible Titan…is it one of hubris? Is it an anthem to brave adventurers? Is it both?

It’s pretty well established that Titan was a revolutionary design, using carbon fiber for the pressure hull. Early results of the debris field found (after this episode was recorded) indicate that there was likely a catastrophic failure of the pressure hull.

Was this mediocrity raising its ugly head? An entrepreneur’s rush to trust their judgement over the judgement of outside so-called “experts”? I’m sure we’ll hear no end of different narratives…some of which will themselves be mediocrity run amok.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joyce Cordi has a lifetime of building expertise in helping companies achieve results — the foundation of all customer value. She and I regularly have great conversations on a variety of topics, including sales excellence, customer experience, and understanding the customer’s world. Listen to her expertise!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cristina and I have heard a lot, thought a lot, and written some on weathering bad economic times. In this conversation, we talked about which ideas are new but not good, and good, but not new. There’s a lot of mediocre advice out there, but the best protection against recession is perhaps…don’t be so mediocre.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cristina and I hang out with a lot of speakers, trainers, and consultants. While the biggest challenge in all of those businesses is getting clients, there is a whole industry devoted to helping “build an audience”. When you manage your business for clicks, likes, and shares, you are focusing on “fame”, when the real challenge is paying the bills, or “fortune” — and we’re not talking about vast fortunes, just “profit motive”, or “pay the bills”. While people who end up buying from you need to know you exist, and then trust you enough to want to talk, you don’t need to have Kardashian-level numbers of followers. In fact, you only need a small number of the right people.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of the launch of www.mediocrates.wtf, we held a call introducing a few of our excellence junkies to each other, and sharing our vision of what we’d like the mediocrates community to be, do, and stand for. Each of our excellence junkies (OK, experts) introduced themselves and their backgrounds. Then we talked about what we all want mediocrates to be. If you listen, you’ll learn a little about what we stand for and who is part of our movement already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bill Humbert is “The Recruiter Guy”, and he has built a career — speaking, consulting — off of addressing the mediocrity of HR professionals doing recruiting. It turns out that recruiting new people to work for your company is a sales function, and in a time of high job vacancies, quiet quitting, and ever-lower loyalty in both directions between employer and and employee, it’s not the kind of selling that you should trust to an untrained seller who thinks they chose a non-selling career.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Samuels is one of my new favorite people. He followed all of the conventional wisdom of leadership team-building, saw it not work that well, and … figure out what works instead. Now, that’s what he does. He wrote an article for www.mediocrates.wtf that makes fun of the canned leadership rituals that don’t work. We had a little fun with it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Pizzini spent decades as a special forces operator with underwater demolitions expertise…Needless to say, he was in a branch of the government we often think of as having access to infinite funding. The happy part of that (for us lowly citizens, not for Bob at the time) is that he spent every day of that military career getting pushback on spending requests…”there’s no money for that”. Bob knew that there was money for “that”, but had to crack the code for getting through the decision process. Now, Bob runs a business of his own, and is has control over his company’s finances, and has to be the one deciding whether “there’s money for that”. Listen to how he carried his lessons from that first experience to the second. Thanks, Bob!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices