Tim Duggan: Leadership Lessons for Time Poor Founders

We’ve collated some of Tim’s key lessons from his years of writing about how entrepreneurs work, live, and grow.

Lesson 1 - Launch into a rising tide: Success often comes by aligning with movements larger than oneself.

Lesson 2 - Humanise B2B interactions: Treat B2B engagements with the same principles as B2C. Businesses, at their core, are collections of individual people. Embrace this human element to make meaningful connections

Lesson 3 - Chasing bigger isn’t always better: “I actually think that some businesses can build phenomenal businesses with a team that gets to a certain size and then it's just all about refining the business model in order to increase the margin or in order to impact more people, or in order to make it a great lifestyle for the people in the business and the founders of the business.”

Lesson 4 - Centre your customer: If I had to choose just one of the creativity exercises in Killer Thinking, I would choose a really simple exercise that I love to do at the start of every big meeting called Centering the User. The whole point of centering the user is making sure that the customer who we're trying to reach, who we're trying to have impact with, is at the centre of what we're thinking about.”

Lesson 6 - Dive headfirst into new technologies: “The only way to address technology when it is super innovative and has the ability to completely upend entire industries, is to dive headfirst into it.”

Lesson 7 - Seek out investors aligned with your values (and if you don’t know your values, uncover them using Tim’s MAP method): MAP stands for Meaning, Anchors, Priorities.

Lesson 8 - Make small adjustments that will change your course over a long horizon.