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The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #68

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Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

• Redwork vs Bluework: How Leaders Balance Thinking and Doing
• Preparedness Takes Time: Why Resilience Is Built Over Decades
• Efficiency in Teams Beats Solo Productivity Hacks

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

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LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Redwork vs Bluework: How Leaders Balance Thinking and Doing

Discover how redwork and bluework shape effective leadership. Learn to balance action and strategy to lead with clarity and purpose.

​The best way to not do something is to discuss it. Let’s face it, how many times did you witness people starting a huge discussion to avoid doing things?

On the other hand, how often did you write an email instead of having a phone call or an in-person discussion to find a good solution?

Welcome to the discussion paradox.

The discussion paradox isn’t my personal invention, but it quite well reflects my leadership style: I am a strict advocate of solving problems instead of discussing them, but I also enjoy healthy discussions with my team to find good solutions.

Recently, I discovered that I’m not alone in this leadership style. In his book Leadership is Language, L. David Marquet distinguishes between Red Work (doing) and Blue Work (thinking):

Redwork

Redwork means doing things. Day-to-day operations and admin work fall into this domain and consume most of our time at work. In those domains, we want to avoid variability, comply with the rules and processes, and get as much work done in as little time as possible. Our focus is narrow, and the hierarchy is steep.

The archetype of redwork is factory workers. They report to work, do as they are told, and they leave after their shift.

Leaders are also trapped in redwork most of the time. Respond to all those requests from customers and team members. Prepare reports for that management meeting. Implement decisions taken in that management meeting with their teams. And get that inbox to zero every day. All at the same time.

Bluework

Leaders often complain that they are in a hamster wheel and that they want to leave it. That’s where bluework comes in. Bluework allows a broad focus to improve things, discuss the best way forward, and plan the work ahead.

Bluework can be done in isolation or in teams: Returning to the factory worker example above, a Kaizen workshop to improve the assembly line is typical blue work. As an entrepreneur, I am regularly holding 2-day extended sessions with my co-founders to discuss new ideas and the next strategic initiatives. Typical bluework.

Balance Red and Blue

If you spend all your time on redwork, you will gloriously burn out at some point. You also run the risk that you are doing the wrong things, as you never take the time to think of where you should be going.

If you spend all your time on bluework, you will not get anything done. And in business, getting paid by your customers means getting things done for your customers.

Therefore, as usual, leadership isn’t black and white. You will have to find a balance between redwork and bluework. Whether you weave in a 2-hour bluework slot into your weekly schedule or do your bluework once a month in a 2-day session largely depends on your personal style and your business.

An Example from History

Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord (1878–1943) was a German general. From 1930–1933, he was the chief of the army command. Thereafter, he was an active member of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler.

What does this have to do with redwork and bluework? Here is a Hammerstein quote:

Hammerstein is known to have spent lots of time hunting and fishing, whilst his staff was taking care of all the redwork for him.

With all that bluework time available to him, maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that he decided to join the military resistance against Adolf Hitler rather than join the terrible regime of that time.

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LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Preparedness Takes Time: Why Resilience Is Built Over Decades

From military defense to energy and entrepreneurship, preparedness takes time. Long-term investment in preparedness beats short-term fixes.

Before 24th February 2022, I was often laughed at for serving as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, my “power anxiety”, my “oversized solar installation” and my apparent stupidity in spending extra money on building technology.

As an adolescent, I wasn’t any better. I have laughed at my mum myself, when she still stocked up on canned foods in the late 1990s, telling her that the war was over.

There is nothing to laugh about here. Good stuff takes time. No matter if you are preparing for times of crisis, revolutionizing energy, or building a company, you will need to think long-term.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the term “invest in preparedness, not in prediction” in his famous book, The Black Swan. And preparedness takes many years to reach a level that defends you against all — or at least most — odds.

Let’s look at some examples.

Military Defense

I was summoned to national service in the Swiss Armed Forces when I was 19 years old. The year was 2001, and Europe was peaceful. Talking about the enemy coming from the East was more of a joke than a tactical principle at that time.

Then came 9/11. I remember how we learned about the attacks in Washington and New York during a break in an army exercise. For a short period, we thought all hell would break loose and we would soon become the new war-time generation.

However, despite all the havoc breaking loose in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, Europe remained largely peaceful.

Countries happily reduced their defense budgets and capabilities, focusing more on countering terrorism than on defending a military adversary.

In the meantime, I became an active reserve officer in 2006. I went on to command a company, and later take over staff functions in the General Staff.

Lots of people asked me if it was worth spending all that time in the military.

Then came COVID-19. Switzerland mobilized 8’000 troops to assist the health system. I was mobilized for 8 weeks — at a time I had to get a young company through a major crisis, and with three kids in homeschooling.

After the lockdowns, many people still didn’t think an army capable of defending a military adversary was necessary. Hey, the new adversary is a virus. How do you want to combat a virus with tanks and fighter jets?

Then came February 24th, 2022. War came back to Europe. Within weeks, defense budgets in several European countries were increased significantly. My critical friends suddenly started asking me about tank tactics, our defense capabilities, and how I would judge the situation and its development.

Why could I answer these questions? Because I had accumulated over 15 years of experience as an active reserve officer of the Swiss Armed Forces. There wasn’t a single year in those 15+ years I didn’t spend time in the military, exercising and training.

Well-trained soldiers and officers are the core of any army. You can’t create them just in time when a threat appears at your front door. Furthermore, some functions need experience: If nobody would have served during the peaceful years from 1990–2021, there wouldn’t be any senior officers today. Just cadets.

The same is true for military equipment. In times of crisis and war, things like tanks and fighter jets are in high demand and can’t be procured just in time. Investments into defense capability need to be continuous, also in peaceful times when they might seem unnecessary. Even when some people don’t understand it.

Energy Transition

We all know that we will need to rethink our energy sources and consumption. Even if you’re not a member of the Green Party, climate change becomes visible wherever you look.

In its “The Limits to Growth” paper of 1972, the Club of Rome issued its first warning about sustainability and environmental limits. That was 53 years ago. In its “The First Global Revolution” paper of 1991, the Club of Rome declared climate change as a global issue. That was 34 years ago.

And where are we now? We have made some progress on the energy transition, but by far not as much as we need if we want to avoid a climate collapse.

The energy transition takes time. Speaking for myself, it took me 10 years to retrofit my house with solar panels, a house battery, and a rainwater tank. Those retrofit projects lifted my house to 70–80% self-sufficiency over the year. Because many people asked me how I did it, I wrote up my experience in an eBook.

70–80% self-sufficiency for a residential building is great. But it’s by far not enough to push society as a whole towards clean energy. There is still a lot to do for the years to come, and it will be another few decades of blood, sweat, and tears before we will see success.

Building A Company

​Building a company from scratch is possibly the hardest thing you can do. It takes grit and resilience to find product-market fit, grow, and eventually reach profitability.

Most businesses on this planet are small or medium-sized companies. Only a very few become very large, and of those who eventually do, most take a long time before they become large. Let’s look at some examples:

• Microsoft was founded in 1975 and reached 1B in revenue in 1990. That was the time most corporations introduced PCs for their workforces, running on MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.
• Apple was founded in 1976 and reached 1B in revenue in 1982. But we all know that they went through many ups and downs before they became a household name by launching the iPhone in 2007.
• Google was founded in 1998 and reached 1B in revenue in 2008. They became a household name once the internet started to become available to nearly everyone on the planet.
• OpenAI was founded in 2015 and is assumed to have reached 1B in revenue in 2023 or 2024. As it is still technically speaking a non-profit organization, its numbers are not as reliable as those of a listed company.

The point of the story? Even the giants of our time took longer than the typical 3-to-5-year focus of many VCs before they became successful. And because we only hear stellar success stories in our social media feeds, we tend to forget about all the small and medium-sized companies that became modestly successful after many years of hard work.

Conclusion

Get-rich-quick won’t work, never. It takes decades to build a resilient and prosperous society. And it takes blood, sweat, and tears from many people who silently pursue their work and mission.

And if you lose your long-term focus to take advantage in the short term, you’ll do the next generations much more harm in the long term than you benefit in the short term.

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INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Efficiency in Teams Beats Solo Productivity Hacks

Forget solo productivity tips. Real efficiency in teams comes from fewer tools, clearer processes, and more human connection.

10 life-changing productivity tools.

Why creating a meaningful morning routine will make you more productive.

Top 10 Elon Musk productivity secrets for insane success.

I’m sure you came across many such headlines, and I will immediately stop that kind of lingo right now. Because honestly, I think it is complete and utter bullshit. Why?

People who speak about productivity usually speak about themselves. They cloak their egoism of working the way they want behind the buzz word of productivity. But even in the new age of remote work and solo entrepreneurship, most of the work is done in teams. And sorry to say, teams are not a thrown-together set of individuals who all work along their own definitions of productivity, but a bonded group of people working towards shared goals along agreed routines, creating minimal friction. Like the cogwheels in a beautiful mechanical watch. Lightweight, silent, and low-energy.

That sounds easy. Here are some real-life insights from growing our B2B SaaS company to 30 people.

1. Fewer Tools

Like almost every startup, I admit we overtooled at the beginning of our journey. Common wisdom has it that you save time by using productivity tools — instead, you are losing money by spending time with migration and manual work.

After using a ton of different tools, only a minimal set of them has survived in our company. Here is what I would recommend:

• Stick with the tools you have, even if they have limitations. Your company isn’t as special as you might think, and you can probably use the same note-taking functionality, sales funnel, or marketing automation workflow as everybody else. Customize as little as possible, as customized tools are hard and thus expensive to interface with.
• Overspend on pro versions of your selected tools when starting your company. In this way, you’re not setting up work-intensive manual processes you will have to migrate later on — typically during a phase of rapid growth.

2. Less Involved People

The tools part was easy. Now on to something more difficult.

Legend has it that when your company grows, your team needs more resources. Whilst that is certainly true in functions like customer success or customer support, let me share a secret with you:

Sometimes, it helps to have fewer people on your team.

At 30 people, you don’t need a full-time QM or CISO. You don’t need six people on your executive team. And you certainly don’t need a finance guy who prepares tons of Excel sheets, the CEO can do finance himself. That’s how we do it at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

​Parkinson’s Law at its finest. You need fewer chiefs, but more Indians. When things go badly, don’t hire an additional manager. It’s better to fire a manager, not replace him, and organize the work more efficiently. By the way, that’s not just theoretical talk, I’ve done this before.

The fewer people principle doesn’t just apply to managers, but also to team members. Teams need to be able to organize their work by themselves. That’s why we rotate the SCRUM master function in our development teams and don’t employ a full-time SCRUM master. And that’s why we don’t make the teams too big, otherwise, you suddenly need an additional manager, who needs to be fed with reports and kept in the loop on tons of emails.

3. Fewer Emails, More Talking

Now it gets even harder. Productivity guys swear by working asynchronously, which is often just a smoke screen excuse for sending too many emails and Slack messages.

I’m afraid there is no way around talking to each other — be it in person, or over tools like Slack’s huddle feature.

And that’s why you need leaders. One of their primary tasks is to make sure people talk to each other rather than write to each other. What sounds simple is a never-ending marathon.

4. Less Trash News

For your sanity, get away from all the trash news on social media and in tabloids. If you feed your brain on that junk fuel, your thoughts will degrade. If you feed your brain on quality news instead, your thinking will sharpen, plus you will be able to focus much more on what’s relevant.

As a team in a company, there are three additional sources of trash news.

First, it’s the rumors that spread about the coffee machine. They divert time, energy, and focus from the main effort — which is usually to make money. Avoiding rumors is a leadership task. It’s not done by the occasional town hall meeting but by yet another never-ending marathon of communication.

Second, it’s the misunderstandings that come from discussions between different teams, or with customers. Misunderstandings happen all along the way, especially when your product is invisible as is software or consulting. A constant discussion with your team on products and services is required to avoid misunderstandings — yet another marathon.

Third, corporate politics suck tons of up time, energy, and focus. Even when you are a small team and you don’t have any corporate politics, you probably have customers who have corporate politics, and this will spill over to your team. In my view, the best way is to filter out corporate politics and focus on the main effort instead of getting emotionally invested in political topics.

5. Processes

The last element on the road to efficiency is a set of clear and simple processes. If it’s clear to everybody what to do and what not to do, time and energy are suddenly sufficient to get all the stuff done within a reasonable time.

Processes shouldn’t be carved in stone but adapted if and when the organization evolves. And that’s the last never-ending marathon the leadership team of any organization needs to run.

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About Me

Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.

As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about my experience in entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.

When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.

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