No one can make a pencil

Leonard Read’s famous 1958 essay, I, Pencil, was written as a way to demonstrate the staggering complexity of the market economy.

As he points out, no one individual is capable of creating a modern pencil. The number of constituent parts, the diverse places they are from, the production goods and processes used to make them, and the people trained with those tools, extend into a-nearly infinite web of interdependency and interconnectedness.

This humbling and awe-inspiring realization offers insight into how not to attempt to deal with a complex ecosystem.

Instead of trying to control everything according to a single blueprint, the best results come from strengthening the individual parts within your reach and fostering communication, exchange, and interconnectedness among the rest.

What emerges will be stronger than anything planned and executed by a single source. When it comes to an ecosystem approach, what you give up in control, you more than make up for in scale and resiliency.

Gaps causing performance issues

Jessie Shipman’s recent article, Need a Partner Enablement Program but Don’t Know Where to Start, outlines the gaps that cause performance issues:

• Skills Gaps

If your audience isn’t being given an opportunity to experiment with including partnerships in their sales cycle, they will never grow in their understanding of the power of it.

• Motivation Gaps

One of the hardest motivation gaps to overcome when attempting partner enablement is the unique gap of unlearning.

• Resources Gaps

Tackling a resource gap means proving ROI. ROI comes from experimentation. Experimentation can only happen if you’ve built a solid enablement foundation.

Discoveries

You never know who will help create the next pencil. Reach out to someone new. Make a connection. And if you like it, pass along the PhD!

Be a part of the first-ever Go-To-Ecosystem Maturity Study

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