On the subject of goal alignment

I once sat next to and old general at a formal dinner.  After chatting to him for an hour or so I decided he was a genuinely nice bloke that had a wealth of knowledge about all things  military.  Not history, but the esoteric stuff like “why does the handle of my cup have a funny shape cut into it that nothing seems to fit”.  Because he was a nice bloke and seemed interested in me, I decided to ask him a question that had been bugging me for a while.  It had nothing to do with the amount of red wine in my tummy.

The question was “Why is every General I meet a really nice guy, but I only ever seem to meet Colonels that are seriously unpleasant”.  His response was “Son, that’s because Colonel is the highest rank your can get promoted to when you’re an aresehole, and you have to be a nice guy to get things done”.

This conversation was very much about military things, but I felt the parallels with my civilian career of entrepreneur were strong.  I met lots of arseholes that were running small ventures (and crowing about how good they were), but anyone achieving major success, seemed to be a genuinely nice guy.

My thoughts in regards to getting new ventures up was that anything worthwhile doing is going to take a while to get done and will be difficult to achieve.  Like Seth Godin says in his book The Dip If there is no pain,  anyone can achieve it and therefore the returns are much lower.

As the entrepreneur working by yourself this isn’t an issue, you take the pain for the long term gain.  But it can be a bugger getting other people to help out with your venture or do you a favour, because  only the insane would take short term pain without an expectation of gain.

Assuming that this week we are a bit short on insane people, your options to get people involved with your venture normally are:
1.    Share the long term gain, i.e. make them a partner in the venture (either conditional or unconditional, depending on the person).

2.    Get lucky and find someone whom happens to have a different long term goal, that happens to be helped by the same short term actions.  For many large enterprises, this is the principal behind joint ventures.

3.    Pay them to ensure they have a short term reward for their actions (employees, contractors or suppliers).

4.    Provide other short terms gains for their action.

Now I think its mostly likely that option 4 is the most desirable as it maximizes your return.  How do you then figure out what other people want in lieu of money?  Well you can start by being genuinely nice guy and  interested in them.   It then becomes easy to do them favours they value.

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