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Issue #14

Hi there,

We’re finally moving to the closing months of Q4 — like many other companies, this signals a final push for the year and laying the groundwork for 2023.

Looking ahead to 2023 and beyond, we’re delighted to see that Mäd continues to be an integral partner in the roadmap for several of our enterprise customers.

Alongside this, we’ve recently been in discussions with our friends over at Blue, looking to strengthen ties and provide exciting innovations in our service offerings. We believe that the power of Blue and the experience of the Mäd team will continue to enhance our position as a market leader as we create impactful, meaningful, and permanent improvements in our clients’ businesses.

Finally, if you missed this in our previous emails, we’d like to remind you to check out the free, downloadable chapter of our upcoming eBook Work Like Mäd — you can access it here.

Thoughts.

(Why we thrive on being a smaller organization — and how you can, too).  

Both Mäd and Blue are small companies, with less than 20 team members in total. We share one office where everybody knows each other.

This is not an accident; it is by design. It was a deliberate intention to keep it that way after trying and failing (twice) to aggressively grow and scale Mäd and its operations.

Of course, many companies manage to expand successfully, becoming large organizations and gaining enough experience and talent to automate and streamline most of their processes. Despite this, often, these companies lack the agility of smaller organizations, and it can be difficult to quickly take advantage of emerging opportunities.

Sure, large businesses look great on paper, and they give an (initially) superior impression with their lists of big-name clients and their impressive resumes of team members. But, they can often suffer from a number of issues that cause them to be slower, less nimble, and less efficient than smaller organizations.  

So, being a small company lets us ensure that we consistently focus on quality instead of quantity and offer high amounts of time and effort to all our clients. We also benefit from much quicker decision-making and a dynamic communication structure — both especially crucial for important projects.

All of this, so far, has enabled us to always produce high-quality work and see happier clients.

Read more about The Advantages of Small Organizations.

Work Like Mäd: Free Chapter.

You might already know from our past newsletters that we’ve been actively preparing to publish our first ebook, Work Like Mäd. If you haven’t received our previous email, we’d like to invite you again to read a complementary chapter of Work Like Mäd to get a preview of what’s to come!

Download it here.  

News.

  • Team Updates. We’re happy to welcome Kevin to the Mäd and Blue team. Kevin will be supporting Blue as Junior Developer.
  • Blue. Blue continues to make impressive additions to its project management platform. In particular, we like the new real-time Wiki feature for each project — it’s a real-time collaborative document, perfect for structured writing like shared SOPs or any project information. This month also marked the first gathering of the Blue customer advisory board, in which participants from across the globe learned about the Blue roadmap and future plans.

Spotlight.

  • Steven Rudolph of Multiple Natures. We’re pleased to share that we have been working with our long-standing client and friend Steven on two of his exciting new projects that Mäd will be supporting end-to-end.
  • DFDL. We’ve had the pleasure of continuing to work alongside one of Southeast Asia’s Leading Law firms to recreate their web presence from the ground up.
  • Blue4Good. Blue4Good by Blue aims to provide up to 10,000 licenses worth $5M to organizations across the world that operate in one of these four key verticals: NGOs, non-profits, educational, and open-source. Help them spread the word to any organization that you think will benefit from this initiative!

Insights.

  • The Landscape of Digital Banking in Cambodia. In the last few years, Cambodia has seen some important shifts in fintech development, particularly with the growing demand for mobile banking apps. Through our experience working with major local banks, we’ve observed firsthand how industry leaders have embraced new technology, developing digital banking solutions with clear potential for success. We took a deep dive into the Kingdom’s digital banking landscape, summarizing our key findings.  

To discover more about our approach, visit our Financial Institutions practice area, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hi@mad.co.

  • Digital Public Goods. The range of digital products and services and the opportunities they afford have increased significantly in recent years. Some digital tools have shown especially high potential in enabling positive change and innovation across the world. To benefit from their capabilities, governments and organizations have started developing digital public goods — open-source digital platforms that offer inclusive solutions to global issues like reducing inequality and bridging the digital divide.
  • Change Management. Organizational change is essential for businesses to evolve, but company-wide transformation can be challenging and even disruptive. To adapt to the dynamic business landscape and enable successful change management, business leaders need to define, plan and execute an effective strategy that supports the organization and its people. They can utilize frameworks: not only to identify areas of improvement but also to prepare for and better manage change.
  • Project Management: First Principles. One of Mäd’s areas of expertise is project management. We know that lots of skilled project managers tend to navigate and run projects intuitively. This is a great, authentic approach — but it’s not always ideal to deliver consistently high-quality work. So, using our experience, we’ve defined some first principles of project management: the building blocks required to successfully handle a project.

From the Web.

A clear sign of a thriving, successful business is robust and consistent revenue growth. But in the last few years, it has been increasingly difficult to accomplish growth — and even harder to sustain it. With current issues ranging from the pandemic to a slowing economy and rising inflation, sustainable and profitable progress continues to be elusive for enterprises of all sizes. McKinsey & Co outline the ten rules of value-creating growth, which can help business leaders set growth benchmarks and craft a holistic growth plan for their organization.

The space between 0 and 1 is an infinity, although a very small one. That’s because some infinities are actually bigger than others. In fact, sets of numbers can be different-sized infinities, and so can the spaces sandwiched between them, or between individual numbers, and even between infinities. We won’t try to explain much more (no mathematicians on our team as of yet), so read on to discover more about the fascinating concept of infinity — there is an infinity of information on that, too.

Read.

It takes an enormous amount of time (some say 10,000 hours!) and persistent effort to become an expert at anything. Perhaps most of all, it requires repetition — doing the same series of actions over and over again, making tiny improvements every single time (or as we like to say, 1%).

While the path to being an expert can be complex, frustrating, and essentially endless, it’s also immensely fulfilling. You might start as a full beginner, and you will almost surely make mistakes and fail along the way. Remember, though — errors are the best teachers! The key is to stay patient and be open to any and all learning opportunities.

This detailed article guides you through the process of becoming an expert while navigating (and overcoming) the inevitable bumps along the way.

We hope you had a productive and cozy month. As usual, we’re here to support you with any concerns and inquiries.  

Cheers,

Manny

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