This week on Adventures in Capitalism, Chris Yeh talks about how he recently worked with a team of entrepreneurs who had done a phenomenal job of building a product that their customers loved, but couldn’t figure how to sell it to big companies for the life of them.  In no time at all, Chris rattled off the marketing and promotional plan that had eluded the entrepreneurs for weeks.

Chris says that the key to remember is that your hard is another person’s easy. Maybe you’re great at programming, but you think “the revenue thing” is a dark and somewhat sinister mystery. To a business guy, it’s a simple matter of selling a product to the same customers that he’s sold to for decades. That doesn’t mean that the business guy is any smarter or more capable, just that he has different skills and experiences. Remember, to a business guy, extreme programming is what you call it when coders drink Mountain Dew and code while skydiving.

Chris’ advice is to focus on doing the things that others find hard, but you find easy, and finding partners who can help you do the things that you find difficult.  This is an approach I’ve always subscribed to myself, because I believe it is how you keep yourself doing well in a job while also deriving satisfaction from that job.  It’s why the best managers look for wingmen with complimentary but distinctly different capabilities and personalities, and how those same managers maintain their reputations as essential organizational assets.  Thanks, Chris, for reminding us again of one of these age-old but frequently overlooked tenets of success.