The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #72
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- One for all, all for one: Not Just A Motto, But An Attitude for Life
- Topic 2
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
One for all, all for one: Not Just A Motto, But An Attitude for Life
Switzerland’s unofficial motto “one for all, all for one” guides leadership, teamwork, and resilience at work, in the military, and at home.
When you enter the Swiss parliamentary building, look up towards the ceiling and you will see a glass dome with the unofficial motto of Switzerland:
One for all, all for one.
The motto became popular in 1868, when a severe storm caused flooding in the mountains and the Italian-speaking part of the country. The Federal Council issued a nationwide appeal for donations. The fundraising for natural disasters helped to forge the identity of our nation of will and promoted federal solidarity.
So much for the history.
I often cite Switzerland’s unofficial motto — at work, in the military, and at home. Let’s look into some specific examples.
At Work
As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I know what it takes to build something out of nothing.
When starting the entrepreneurial journey yourself, one is all, and all is one.
Later, when we started hiring more people, we designed the annual targets in a way that nobody could achieve their targets without the help of others.
Ambitious revenues can only be achieved by the customer team when the sales team generates order intakes at least as ambitious. Happy customers require just as much of a great product as a great customer team. And software engineering is not an end in itself; software is made for the market and the customers.
In the Military
Switzerland is famous for its active reserve system, where ordinary people take over extraordinary roles. Originally designed for defense, it is widely used in security, politics, schools, and associations.
As an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, I know that military guys are hands-on. They do whatever is required for the mission to succeed. Even if you think they live in hierarchies, the reality is very simple in the trenches: One for all, all for one. Everybody’s effort is required to succeed. Just like in a startup.
At Home
During the last heavy snowfalls of the year, I was trapped with my three kids in Zermatt in a 36-hour power outage. This was a time full of life lessons for my kids: In a crisis, nobody has everything they need. But many people have some things they need. The key question is to ask yourself who can support you, and whom you can support.
Can we charge Dad’s laptop in a hotel connected to the backup electricity grid in exchange for having a drink in the hotel bar? Can we trade a hot cup of coffee from the emergency stove against something else we don’t have?
Are there people in the village who are worse off than we are? Do the trapped tourists need help? Are there any lonely people in the neighborhood we could invite to play cards in the dark?
The kids learned the true meaning of Switzerland’s unofficial motto in a situation of crisis, all without being frightened.
Conclusion
It’s not just a motto, it’s an attitude for life. Sometimes you have to give, and sometimes you can ask for help. If you only give or only take, companies, societies, and families will not work.
And given that the good times are over, get used to situations where you don’t have everything you need. Besides creativity, turning to other members of society for help will be a decisive element on the road to success.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Digital Documents: Don’t Turn Bad Documents into Digital Trash
Digital documents won’t fix your problem. If your documents suck, so will their digital versions. Cultural change is the real transformation.
Recently, I published two articles on information management that went viral and attracted many comments:
The articles share my belief that sticking unstructured files into digital folders is not the latest and greatest way to manage digital information.
When do articles attract many comments? It’s typically when the content raises strong emotions, both supporting and opposing. In the case of the mentioned articles, many opposing voices took sides with the folder.
Let’s look at some of the comments.
1. The entire world is built on folders
One comment said that our entire world is built on the folders concept:
Our houses have a kitchen folder, a lounge folder, a bathroom folder, a garage folder, etc.
Our room folders have sub-folders like a frozen foods folder, a cold foods folder, a pantry folder, a socks folder, a dresses folder, etc.
Our cars have a folder for the engine, a folder for the fuel, a folder for the passengers, a folder for our cups, a folder for the car’s manual, etc.
We live in country, state, city, street folders.
We carry folders called bags and wallets, each with their own subfolders.
Our technology ensures our foldered lives are maintained.
So, why again do we want to get rid of folders for our documents? We can implement linked documents and tags without getting rid of folders.
This school of thought is heavily shaped by the material world. Physical objects cannot exist in two places at once. That’s a limitation in the material world, but not necessarily so in the digital world. Still, our thinking is deeply shaped by physical experience. The real challenge of digitization is to learn to think beyond those physical analogies.
2. Even the brain uses folders
Another comment argued that our brains also use folders to a certain degree:
The folders in our brains may be connected in various ways and to varying degrees, but we all have buckets of information that are more or less compartmentalized.
One way to depict those compartments? Folders.
It’s not about digitally choosing between folders only and strictly no folders. It’s good to have the option to work with folders and tags. Instead of having a file belong to one folder only, a tag allows a file to belong to multiple logical groups at the same time.
I would argue that this is how our brains work. We compartmentalize information, but we can associate information with multiple logical groups at the same time.
3. Not all information is structured
Another comment correctly identified that not all information is structured:
Modularization is great for documents such as operations manuals. However, breaking down documents into modules requires deep knowledge of the content and the original documents. Without a deep knowledge of the domain and insight into the underlying structure of the tasks and information, this tends to produce smaller and smaller modules and fragment knowledge to the point where it becomes less useful.
Then we have the problem of other documents that are not operational manuals, such as research papers. In this case, the overall flow of the document is required to properly understand the information.
When structuring knowledge into modules, subject matter knowledge is key. But knowledge is not enough; it also takes lots of effort and tenacity to convert unstructured information into structured information.
4. It’s just too complicated
One comment said:
This was beyond my pay grade of understanding. Far too technical. As you said, small steps, and I couldn’t figure out even a small step to try it out. I’m sure the mathematically advanced can figure this out, but for an average guy like me, I’m stuck with folders, as inefficient as they are (and they are).
This comment is honest, and it reflects what we see often at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company specializing in documentation software. Digitization of documents is complicated, especially when the source documents consist of both structured and unstructured documents. It takes knowledge, effort, and tenacity to achieve a fully digital documentation landscape.
Conclusion
The selection of comments shows beautifully that digitization is not as straightforward as people think. It requires a new way of thinking, which often requires cultural change. And we all know that cultural change takes time.
Last but not least, always remember this:
If you digitize a shitty process, you will get a shitty digital process.
The same is true for digitizing documents: If you digitize a shitty document, you will get a shitty digital document.
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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