This chart is from the UK government’s recently published Patient Capital Review.

I’m publishing it here because I often hear it said that the US startup ecosystem has a significant advantage over the UK and Europe because on this side of the Atlantic we are hobbled by a greater fear of failure. This has always annoyed me because a) I didn’t see it in practice, b) a certain amount of fear of failure is rational, and c) people used our supposed fear of failure to talk down the local startup ecosystem.

As you can see from the graph on the far right it turns out that fear of failure is roughly the same in the UK, the US, France and Germany.

It’s so good to finally have data on this topic!

Getting value out of board meetings is tough. Lots of VCs have written posts with great tips – this recent one by Mark Suster is a very high quality example.

There are lots of reasons why value can be hard to extract – mostly to do with the fact that often board members don’t pay enough attention and CEOs don’t prepare as well as they could. However, today I’m going to write about a lesser known reason: the law of triviality.

From Nir Eyal’s What to do when someone steals your idea:

The British author C. Northcote Parkinson is famed for his “law of triviality,” first elucidated in a satirical article published in 1957. Parkinson writes of a committee assembled to approve plans for a nuclear power plant that instead spends most of its time arguing about a bike shed. The fictional committee wastes so much time on the bike shed because people are more likely to have an opinion on things they understand. While few feel qualified to speak about nuclear power, everyone can put in their two cents about a bike shed.

In board meetings this plays out with non-executive directors focusing questions on things they understand, often the accounts, but it can be any area of expertise – rather than what’s most important to the business at any given moment. On a lucky day the accounts might be the right thing to focus on, but usually the right thing will be something else, often something that is specific to the business and harder to understand and hence many shy away from. This scenario plays out most frequently with less secure or less experienced board members who have a need to be heard.

So what should we do?

As directors of companies we should try and catch ourselves when we dwell on topics that are in our comfort zone but aren’t the most important topics, and we should move the conversation on when other directors make the same mistake.

As CEOs we should identify the most important topics to discuss in advance and bring the conversation back when it wanders.

As you may know Google has done an almost obsessive amount of research into what makes a high performing team. This post from Michael Schneider summarises what they found, into five traits that are easy to understand and easy to identify. Very powerful.

1. Dependability.
Team members get things done on time and meet expectations.

2. Structure and clarity.
High-performing teams have clear goals, and have well-defined roles within the group.

3. Meaning.
The work has personal significance to each member.

4. Impact.
The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good.

5. Psychological Safety.
When everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions.

I love this for it’s simplicity and completeness. Unfortunately implementation sometimes remains challenging.

Want to see the confirmation bias at work?

Then read on.

I just read Spending 10 Minutes a Day on Mindfulness Subtly Changes the Way You React to Everything and loved it. I meditate for 15 minutes first thing every morning and feel that it makes a big difference to me. As I meditate I can feel stress dissipate and my mind feels somehow less taut. In the same way a flexible muscle is able to absorb more shock than a taut one I feel I’m more able to control my response to things that go wrong or might otherwise instigate a knee jerk reaction. The article tells me that my experience is common and this excerpt goes a little way to explaining why.

Leaders across the globe feel that the unprecedented busyness of modern-day leadership makes them more reactive and less proactive. There is a solution to this hardwired, reactionary leadership approach: mindfulness.

Having trained thousands of leaders in the techniques of this ancient practice, we’ve seen over and over again that a diligent approach to mindfulness can help people create a one-second mental space between an event or stimulus and their response to it. One second may not sound like a lot, but it can be the difference between making a rushed decision that leads to failure and reaching a thoughtful conclusion that leads to increased performance. It’s the difference between acting out of anger and applying due patience. It’s a one-second lead over your mind, your emotions, your world.

Mindfulness is a powerful practice.

This growth equation is brilliant in it’s simplicity. I love that it forces the focus on a magic moment and core product value. Both are essential. Read more about this in First Round Capital’s latest article.

I just read Andrew Chen’s Growth is getting hard from intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation. His argument is that we are at a point in the cycle where distribution is controlled by a small number of companies who limit the opportunities for differentiation via marketing. He mentions Google, Apple, and Facebook, and I agree wholeheartedly. Facebook’s growth in revenue per use shows just how successful they’ve been in extracting value from the system and I’m sure we could find similar charts for the other two.

Amazon is the other company that is dominating distribution, and for me most impressive and therefore ultimately the most scary of the lot.

All four of these businesses have monopolistic tendencies that make it hard for startups to compete and get noticed. Chen identifies six trends which continue to make life more difficult:

• Mobile platform consolidation – The App Store and Google Play dominate, and they are in turn dominated by Facebook and Google apps
• Competition on paid channels
• Banner blindness = shitty clickthroughs (now extending to blindness for referral programmes)
• Superior tooling – makes it easier for companies everywhere to be data driven
• Smarter, faster competitors – copying successful new product ideas more and more quickly
• Competing with boredom is easier than competing with Google/Facebook – the bar for new products to gain traction gets ever higher

Against this background, a great product is a startup’s only weapon. Great product gets companies heard above the noise and gives them good conversion rates which in turn allow them to out spend competitors on Facebook and Google. Being data driven and first class at exploiting paid marketing channels is now table stakes.

And the only way to reliably build great product?

To understand your customers better than anybody else.

In our experience the three best ways to get that experience are:

• Work with customers in your target market for years before starting your company (the founders of all three of our last investments have done this)
• Do “Mom test” style interviews with target customers before building your product (not customer surveys or focus groups)
• After you’ve launched build processes that keep you in constant communication with customers and pump them for insights

I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity recently.

The first thing to say is that it’s a woolly concept. As an individual I am clearly me, and therefore of undisputed origin and not a copy. In common parlance then to be authentic is to be genuine, to be truly what we say we are. The problem with this is that most of us are, in fact, many different people. The person we are with our kids might be different from the person we are with our partner, which might again be different to who we are at work, and we might even be a different person depending on which group of friends we are with.

There’s a tempting notion that the true person sits somehow at the middle of these different external facing people, but if you subscribe to the view, as I do, that we are no more than the sum of our actions, then it follows that we are really just a collection of different people. That’s born out for me by the tension we sometimes feel between our different personas. I often suffer from inner conflict because I genuinely want to do more at home and at Forward Partners, but there’s no time for both. If there was one inner person governing everything then it should be possible to resolve the issue, but I find that when I’m in family mode my desires are different from when I’m in work mode.

All that said I am a firm believer that, generally speaking, if we can be more authentic we will be happier and more effective in our lives. Firstly, from a selfish perspective, maintaining multiple personas is tiring. We constantly have to remember where we are in order to remember how to behave and there’s cross over between the different areas of our lives that threatens to expose the differences. For most people this is a low level stress that’s eminently manageable, but it’s there and it impacts performance. I was discussing authenticity with a friend recently who partly thought of it as being able to say what he genuinely thinks. Many of us censor what we say a lot of the time, and that becomes exhausting after a while.

Secondly, the more authentic we are the easier it is for other people to trust us, making us more effective as friends, partners and leaders. The more knowable we are, the easier it is for people to rely on us, which means they can spend less energy worrying about whether we will do what we say and whether we will look after them.

Bringing this all together, it follows for me that the first key to being authentic is achieving an alignment between our different personas. The more aligned we are the more we have one true self, which makes us more genuine by definition.

However, there is a caveat. If we are successful in achieving an inner alignment, but there’s is a lack of alignment between what I want and what my friends, family or colleagues want, then being true to what I think all the time might make me feel better, but can put a burden on others. In most of our relationships we find a shared space that works for both parties. That space defines what we talk about, the topics we avoid, what we expect of each other, and a whole host of other things. The process of getting to know somebody is in large part a process of defining that shared space. If we unthinkingly change our behaviour to be more authentic then we unthinkingly change that shared space with each of our friends, colleagues and partners. That can be a jarring experience for them and could well be a selfish thing to do. You might be able to think of someone you know who has achieved a good degree of internal alignment but comes across as selfish. I know I can.

Which brings us back to alignment. The journey to authenticity is ultimately a shared journey towards alignment with everyone we share our lives with. Writing that sentence really made the penny drop for me, so I’m going to repeat it. The journey to authenticity is a shared journey towards alignment with everyone who shares our lives. Full alignment with everybody will be out of reach for most people, but the more aligned we can get the more authentic we can be and the better everything will work.

That’s one of the reasons why great leaders place huge stress on aligning their people around a unifying company mission and why many successful couples are aligned that their relationship is the most important thing in their lives. As I think this through we have many tools for building alignment in the work place (vision, mission, company values and OKRs spring to mind) but we don’t have anything comparable for our personal lives. That feels like a gap to me.