103 rules and counting — contributed by the community.
Sell the hole, not the drill. Make people imagine what benefits are going to bring into their lives - comfort, status, opportunities, experiences, emotions, etc. Listing specific properties of your value proposition without the value will not convince people to start convincing themselves to buy into your value proposition. For example, if you're selling a software service your client imagines worry-free collaboration with an efficient team who empathize with their sense of ownership and purpose of their business. Or if you're trying to get an employee to join your team, they imagine an where they can advance their knowledge, communicate openly and have autonomy to perform which ever tasks they want whenever, however and with whomever they want. The list of your actual benefits & perks (dental insurance, say) is nice, but it will neither open negotiation nor close the deal. When talking to the spouse or a friend in need realize that the need often isn't advice or favors, but simply being acknowledged and heard. Stand back, listen and assess before jumping to sharing something that worked for you and may not work for anyone, anywhere ever again and making it about you.
Investing is a voluntary act. We invest not just money, but time, knowledge, attention, influence, etc. To be willing to invest any of these we need a sense of engagement. For example, if your family has history with cancer - you're more likely to empathize and engage with cancer prevention charities. In turn, our engagement obviously increases as invest. It's a positive feedback loop. The easiest path to initialize the loop is by asking for less limited resources like an advice or opinion. On top of being practically free, giving advice makes us feel important and wanted. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to immediately attract limited resources: money, energy or time. If you're out for donations, start by asking for input, sharing updates, expressing gratitude. In early 2000s our alumni events would gather no more than 100-120 people. For the alma mater's 20th anniversary, we were determined to bring to give it our best shot. Instead of the usual 3-4 organizers, a committee of 15 or so were included in the committee. We reached out to them asking for ideas for an interactive experience to be set up at the event. Ideas were great: bringing in a legendary couch from the main building, making a map of campus locations people had sex, faculty quotes collection, etc. Simple ideas needing no more than a few hours to organize and implement, so that we could ask the same people to organize them. Each of the invited organizers was intentionally selected from a different "clique". Building up their engagement and sense of ownership gradually led them to actively invited their friends. People we wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise. It was social proofing at its finest. Ultimately the event ended up with 600 attendees and fundraising on the spot was a huge success. The biggest alumni event to this day some fifteen years later. Imagine if we had gone the stardard route, i.e. distributing an e-mail to the disnegaged alumni asking them to support the university with a donation for its 20th anniversary. Standard participation rate is around 4-5%. What we got was close above 15% participation - in person. The same approach can be applied when trying to solve engagement issues at the office or company events. We made it a habit to ask colleagues for feedback in early stages of event organization, things like location selection or cocktail menu. At home we always ask kids where they want the next family trip to be. There's a friend who always asks us where we'd like his birthday bash to happen. It just works. He gets the most expensive gifts.
A cliché for a reason. After several relatively quiet flat years for the company, we returned to steady growth. What changed? We set up proper measurements. For example: how well we distributed work, how much revenue we were generating per unit, and how long it took us to actually collect due payments (always an issue for a company). As a result, we could finally see the difference in utilization rates between projects, increasing our average utilization from around 60% to almost 80% over several years. That’s almost 20% added straight to the bottomline. We also reduced our average payment collection periods from 90+ days to around 45 days drastically reducing cash flow management issues. Less tangible factors, too, not as directly linked to the "economic engine". Average overall satisfaction increased from 3.81 and reached 4.31 on a 1-5 scale in the five years since we introduced the engagement survey. What made the difference? We were able to identify specific issues, which enabled us to investigate and learn what our employees wanted or lacked. One example is the revamped benefits package which included the exact perks employees needed, The other is a dedicated training budget and strategy for distribution, both of which were discussed and implemented with the teams’ participation. The data was necessary and hard to argue against. The hard part was identifying the actual reasons behind, identifying sustainable processes and actually implementing them. One hard decision that made all the difference was giving up on our dream of creating products and refocusing on our strength which was the service part of the business. Again, the indisputable measured cost versus return triggered the change of course. In personal life you can apply the same principle. Around my 40th birthday, I was luckily reminded that it may be time to start planning for retirement. The plan required input: data on income, expenses and desired standard of living. A close-to-final version was done in about an hour. How? We had kept a detailed family budget ledger for over 10 years. Now, several years into it, the plan is working. How do I know? Measuring portfolio performance data. Spreadsheets be blessed. What aspects of your habits, personal life or business do you believe are worth enhancing? Make measurement the initial step toward reaching the next level of improvement. Then also make it the final step of each iteration of improvement.
We make thousands of assumptions each day about people, events, ideas, etc. It's a pre-programmed shortcut that often involves stereotypes or misconstrued beliefs because being objective is costly and hard. Where we should be careful is applying broad assumptions in a specific context, especially if important. For example, having a Balkan business partner over for dinner. Would it be safe to assume they’re not vegetarian? Rather than rolling with it - it's usually best to ask directly. Eddie Vedder, the frontman of Pearl Jam, had a habit of getting to high places in venues and jumping into the crowd. At a festival in the Netherlands in the '90s he climbed a camera crane counting on the crew to lift him above the crowd. Eddie shared that for decades he'd felt sorry for the cameraman sitting on the same crane who kept shouting in Dutch throughout the ordeal. Eventually, Eddie sought him out, determined to apologize. It turned out that the cameraman wasn't yelling out of anger, but out of fear. He shouted at the crane pullers as he had realized he would get catapulted the moment Eddie jumped off. The two were working as a team, but Eddie didn't know it - he just assumed there was some bad blood, probably out of a sense of guilt. The story rang a bell on situations at not just the office, but family or friend gatherings, too. For years I thought a circle of employees perceived me as a persona-non-grata at social events given that I was against playing synthetic folk music at large company gatherings. Combining this with being part of the management team was less than ideal for shortening the distance. After an authentic folk music event we'd organized, members of the group came forward. They'd thought I was against folk music overall. Two assumptions built an artificial barrier and cost us years of opportunities to build trust instead. A simple question, a short conversation with ego sat aside could have prevented it all. Assumptions tell us more about ourselves than they do about others. When you do remember to check your assumptions, try to remember checking why they existed in the first place.
Do not assume people remember things you say. You certainly don't remember everything you have been told. We don't pay attention, let alone memorize, over 80% of what's said. We are too preoccupied with grooming our ego. When intending to get an important message through what we control is: a) carefully packaging the message making it engaging, relevant and memorable b) consistently and persistently repeating it being mindful of the setting and the timing c) not take it personally if we fail. When organizing company events, I'd get frustrated about my e-mails not being read with the same meticulous attention that I had crafted them with. All the details were right there! Every question pre-empted. Formatting carefully engineered. Until years later I realized the number of questions and misunderstandings can only be reduced but never eliminated. The trick was to both do your best to package the messaging and humbly accept the need of patiently repeating the same messages across all available channels. Figuring out how to spread information about a single event was just the beginning. What about messaging on larger or abstract topics like strategy or culture? Much less tangible or relevant to a tired colleague trying to get through the day of operational hell. It's a huge undertaking. It's also a two-way process and no job for a single person. And certainly cannot be something you mention once in an e-mail or speech believing everyone owes you their undivided attention. What if someone hears it more than once? Well, then they'll know you're on a crusade for something you truly believe and work towards. Power to you. Imagine trying to get a message across to a city, a country or a planet. How many times, across how many channels and in how many ways should you be ready to repeat it? No matter the audience or the message - responsibility for getting it through is shared at best. Focus on the controllables. Do not fingerpoint, do your homework, and set your intentions and expectations accordingly.
We make stories up all the time. To fool ourselves even. It's called confabulation - inventing narratives wihtout the intent to deceive. A relatively famous experiment by a neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in the 1960s proved it. Severe epilepsy at the time was treated by physically severing the left and right halves of the brain enabling them to act independently. Patient's right brain would be flashed a visual instruction to walk. After complying and asking the left brain why they'd walked - it would make up a story the patient actually believed (e.g. "I went to get a drink"). What good can we do being aware of the phenomenon? If your genuine intention is to get a message across then wrap it in a story. It's what we expect (consciously or not), what makes us listen and, if you're lucky, what will get us to act. You can still grab attention with fascinating facts, support claims with theories and frame your case to persuade. Storytelling, though, is the only necessary ingredient. Resources on storytelling are abundant. You can read about Aristotle's seven elements of storytelling, Joseph Campbell's "Power of Myth", the 5 C's, etc. Too many to even list here. The important part is to internalize the idea of the inimitable power of a narrative. But I will mention three favorites: - Use components which will mix up the "angel's cocktail of hormones". Invoke compassion (oxytocin), joy (endorphins) and suspense (dopamine). Together they create focus, connection, and positive emotional states in audiences, boosting memory, empathy, and motivation. Opening one's heart just wide and long enough for a change of mind to creep in. - The lower the trust of the audience, the shorter a story should be. If trust in your logic is really low, just go for the headline and then list your facts and arguments, or you'll lose their attention. - Think of stories only you can tell. That's how to make them uniquely compelling, but also easier to tell. As a listener, remember that people unintentionally make explanations up, even elaborate ones. Do not rush to judge them. Our brain is primed to fill in the blanks because of the need for continuous, seemingly logical, narratives.
Not sharing information because you forget, prefer not to bother or assume what you know is known by everyone creates an information vacuum. Happens all the time in teams, companies, families, and communities. A vacuum unless hermetically shut, which groups of people rarely are, invite content of higher pressure environments until the pressure equalizes. In this case, that content is assumptions. When the truth isn't broadcast, something else will take its place. Rooting out already established false information is considerably costlier than any organized effort to communicate the truth. Healthy flow of information requires conscious, consistent and persistent action. Use any channel that reaches the intended audience (121s, chat groups, info screens, newsletters, etc.). Just make sure you know and not merely assume where the conversations are - it may not be where you think. Communicating needs to be inclusive. Both in terms of language and intent. A two-way street. Where there's no healthy two-way communication ignorance thrives. And lack of knowledge leads to fear. Fear leads to hate. Homophobia strikes where homosexuality is fenced out as taboo. Evolution is considered a hostile theory in settings where preaching replaced critical thinking. Employees and management perceive the company in two completely different ways and compassion gets lost when there's only top-down talking. Smaller groups aren't immune to it, too. If in a band only the drummer and the bass player discussed the tempo, others feel lost or left out. A teenager may be expected to share all the inevitable mounting worries while never hearing parents express unconditional love. In all these cases communication breakdown gives way to untruths and fear. Make sharing and listening a habit and part of your individual and group identity.
Zoom calls, e-mails, or chats cannot substitute a face-to-face meeting. It's not about being the best but the only way to build rapport, trust, empathy and understanding. And yet since the pandemic, we focus on the cost of a commute rather than the benefits of sharing a physical space. It's clearly impossible to bring everyone together frequently, but there's a balance to be struck. Find space and time for periodic, logically assembled get-togethers - whether it's with co-workers, partners, friends, or family. As our company expanded shortcomings and challenges of distance became increasingly obvious. First with an office in another city, then another country, and finally as a a global company. People separated physically quickly developed in-group versus out-group mentality. How else could one explain that without exception "in" were the people from the same office and "out" was everyone else? Conversely, bringing people together would without exception result in a series of small miracles. A vivid case was a Sofia-based employee befriending a member of their team from a diametrically opposite cultural value system. They even ended up visiting the other's home town hours of driving away. Eventually the narrative of the other and the language between them changed. In-person interaction isn't sufficient. It is, however, necessary to create psychological safety - the key prerequisite for efficiency and cohesion. Observing the social dynamics, I developed a scale of familiarity seeking improvement and starting by measuring, however imperfectly. I only used it for myself and made a conscious effort to move people I worked with on regular basis up the ladder. The levels were: 1) heard about them 2) had a call 3) met in person 4) spent some time in an informal setting 5) worked togeher for a while on a project 6) worked together for quite a while on various projects and spent considerable time together informally The higher the level, the less likely it would become to develop negative biases. Any random shared activity allows individuals to shine through in a new light. Good or bad, learnign about each other - and yourself - is always the right thing.
After unexpectedly taking on a more responsible role in the company, I spent over a year reading books and preparing a strategy. Even though I kept the ongoing process afloat there was not much sense of achievement. Then a partner walked into the office and compassionately said: "You know, you'll need to start doing something at some point?" It reverberated like few other gently stated criticisms ever have. The path was clear - I would never feel fully ready. So, I got started. Whatever it is: deciding to start a family, learn to relax or read a book. The best time to kick it off is always now, because it's the only type of time we will ever have. The brain loves idealizing the image of our tomorrow self as able and willing to act. But as someone once said: "Our future self is not to be trusted." Much like our present self obviously isn't - we're someone's future self, too. I don't believe anyone is lazy or a natural procrastinator. We're simply weak in the face of impulses of pleasure or fear. Once you give in, the mind conjurs up elaborate, convincing narratives justifying the decision. What you are up against is not a mountain of work and suffering. It's a lightning fast, fleeting moment of decision. A mind trick that works well in periods of low dopamine is to tell yourself: "Just 2 minutes". By the time they're over, you will have already dove deep enough not to feel like you need to stop. Before you know it, you're not wasting any more now's. Same principle applies whether it's exercise, writing, chores, career change, etc. Our most precious resource isn't money, connections, knowledge, or health. It's time. Time is finite and there's no choice involved whether you're spending it or not. Ironically, we treat it with least care. Each "yes" to something is a withdrawal and each "no" is a deposit in your piggy bank waiting to be spent on something worthwhile. Not dillydallying, I'm sure everyone would agree.
Values of an organization are the choice of the organization. But we can choose which organization to get involved with. Call it a matter of preference, but my conviction is that organizations valuing people over product, process or profit are worth getting involved with. Moral arguments aside, I believe that long-term value is in the team. At least until technology is able to completely replace us, if ever. In short, innovation and motivation. One thing an organization cannot afford losing is the ability to adapt to circumstances beyond it's control. I see no alternative to a healthy working environment filled with smart, engaged people as a source of ideas for improvement, let alone implementation (the hard part). Even if you're an organization who can afford to dictate the circumstances, you will still need people willing and capable of figuring it out. And yes, profit buys access to the top people, but what it doesn't automatically get you is the basic motivational factors (given financial needs are met): autonomy, mastery and purpose. These you need to cultivate by putting people first. What does it mean to put people first? A team member comes forward sharing they're in real trouble, you stop whatever you're doing as soon as practically possible and help. Substantiate the otherwise hollow words listed as your values as a "people-first organization". It builds trust and a safe environment where people's concerns and needs are heard and supported. It needs to become instinctive. Only then the values remain within the company and its next generation leaders. If you don't, the company will empty itself not just of its values, but the people you won't to keep. The people you want to keep are the ones that can afford to choose their organizations. Imagine a scenario where it comes down choosing between letting go of a client or a team. What would you choose? There's your conviction.
All resources are limited - time, budget, willpower, skills, etc. We cannot accomplish everything. It doesn't get easier with time, either, as battles accumulate. The earlier we learn to pause and think before taking up arms, the better it is for our health, performance and the people around us. Our primate brain is great at making short-term decisions that keep us alive. But it's very poor for strategy. Thankfully the civilization no longer signs us up for a sprint, but a marathon. We're not choosing battles to survive, most of us at least, but where to invest our limited resources. Already suffering burnout in my mid 30s, I was juggling a technical team, marketing a portfolio of 50+ mobile apps, building an HR function from scratch to support 100+ employees, and coding on client projects. Eventually I had little choice but to prioritize. What helped was validating my thoughts with people who trusted, knew and confidently encouraged me to act. Whether I chose right will never be clear. That's the trick: does it matter once its done? Collateral damage is inevitable, but manageable - and there's no need to manage alone. Another source of waste that's plaguing contemporary humans is getting into arguments. A powerful framework called RISA helps structure thoughts or avoid meaningless debates. I find it works for internal debates just as well. The framework revolves around four questions, traditionally ordered into the title acronym: 1) Is the debate Real? Are we perhaps misunderstanding each other rather than having a real issue and difference of opinion? 2) Is the debate Important? Is the issue significant enough to warrant a full-blown disagreement argument between us? 3) Is the debate Specific? Is the topic focused and well-defined enough to enable progress? Or is it too broad and theoretical leading us to nowhere actionable, even in case of a resolution? 4) Are we Aligned? Are both sides entering the debate intent on finding a solution to propel us forward? Or we're in it just to prove we're right? Do not to let your emotions or someone else's agenda dictate yours. Otherwise, all that awaits is fighting on too many fronts and eventually burnout, i.e. emotional exhaustion, distancing yourself from the work you love and losing the sense of purpose. And then more autopilot and more battles you wouldn't have chosen had you allowed yourself time to stop and think.
Assume that there exists a person for whom everything in their life is perfect. Obviously, not everyone will be in the same position and will desire to change the status quo. Once they act, the "life is perfect" person is now less happy because of the change. That person could be anyone, but always someone: your business competitor, your team member not buying into a new initiative, or someone who likes you the way you already are. The conclusion is someone being unhappy is not sufficient reason to stop the change. No change will ever happen otherwise. Being aware of this helps one overcome the mental barrier when it inevitably pops up. While growing the company we disappointed people playing any role: partners, clients, team members, ourselves... But we made conscious choices most of the time following our moral compass as best we could. Keeping the wolves fed and all sheeps alive often isn't an option. And it never will be. Sometimes, we were the disappointed ones, but we understood why it had to happen. All mature people eventually will because that's what it means - understanding the consequences of your actions. Conversely, if everything you're doing is making everyone happy, you're not contributing to any change in a meaningful way. At some point this either makes you unhappy or hurts your cause as the rest of the world marches forward. Is your company any good if you don't get a few sour side glances at a conference? Is your band any good if the established bands don't bad mouth you in interviews? It just comes with the territory, so stop worrying about it and use it as a signal, rather than a blocker.
Companies seek scale, revenue and profitability in the name of the sacrosanct shareholder value. As the market allows price increases (willingness-to-pay) only by that much, it's the employees who bear the pressure, i.e. produce more (increasing scale) and more efficiently (improving profitability) for almost the same or less take (willingness-to-sell). The same thing happens at home: costs go up, so household income needs to follow suite. The working folks get bogged down in the operational. It's instinctive. Doing more is familiar, less risky than real change and as such perceivably the right choice. But it's not. The right way is to zoom out, find what few others are doing and generate space in the busy schedule for strategy. Why are we in this business? What purpose does it serve? Is everything we're doing essential and urgent? Could there be more efficient ways to do it? Is the perceived market value of our work as it's always been? Have any expected changes of yesterday become true today? These are but a few questions the answers to which could lead to more value than the default choice of "more". In our management meetings we wondered when the time would come to speak about the "important stuff". But we rarely would. Everyone agreed strategy required our attention, but quietly continued granting precedent to immediate operational issues. Hence, most strategy level changes came not from senior management as a group, but its members' individual initiatives. Thanks to our long shared history and values never negatively disruptive. Periodically (once in every few years), we did have to regroup and clean up the "strategic" debt. Yes, we managed somehow, but we could have done a lot better and faster. At home, on individual level, the shareholder value creation crunch effects left little room for thinking or discussion about what my partner and I would like to do with our lives. Default was always "more of the same". Just felt familiar and a lot less risky. Especially with two children at home. A few decades back, being kids ourselves, we learned what living in a low income household feels like. It makes you sensitive on the subject. Almost not worthy of thinking about strategy or life's purpose. We either stop and make room for the big questions steering our personal and business lives or become a victim of passivity keeping our fingers crossed hoping someone steers it for us.
It's important to share a personal distinction between three types of roles of responsibility: - Leader - needed when the problem is not fully defined; the goal is to define problems and functions to solve them - Manager - needed to run a defined function; the goal is to keep the function running smoothly - Dictator - needed when there's a crisis; the goal is to contain the crisis and retreat when it's over Being a manager will be complex, but still defined. Breaking complex problems into components always helps. When reality kicks in, of course, it will occasionally shift us to a leader or dictator role, at least for a while. Most of the time, though, the manager will "simply" be a manager. I hope not to forget how uncomfortable I felt becoming a manager. As opposed to the previous day, I was suddenly responsible for directing, developing, motivating and caring for other people, not losing money for the company and dealing with a whole new level of stress. What I'm sure I will never forget is a slide at a management training which broke the role down perfectly for my compulsively analytical self. I keep coming back to it worrying if all the bases are covered. The bases, practice has shown, are as easy to neglect, as they are to be understood - in theory. The components of the manager function are: - Business - vision, strategy, process, platform, etc. - People - performance and satisfaction - Self - mind, body and spirit Depending on personality and context we are inclined towards one or the other. The key is to cycle through all of them regularly, which means daily. This practice helps control the controllables and inspires a positive cross-component feedback loop. If done right. Neglecting a component will inevitably have a detrimental effect on every one of them. The ultimate goal? Build a business function which your team can take run as you move on hungry and ready for the next challenge. So, yes - I agree that the manager's job is to make him or herself obsolete. Only then will you prove a good manager covering all the bases.
Ignoring a problem doesn't make it disappear. It only spreads and grows until addressed. Only one remedy to an elephant in the room exists: pointing it out. The act does not automatically dissolve the elephant, but it will certainly disempower it. The cost of facing a problem head on is often high, but it's the best deal we will get, so we may as well take it. Sometimes the ignored problem returns in unexpected ways. If you postpone the visit to the gym or checking in on a friend - sure, it's exercise and a catch-up you will eventually get to. But problems change shape. In this case, it could be reduced confidence or quality of a relationship. Or a consequence you will never be aware of. For example, the price of letting a person get away with toxic behaviour could be paid by someone we've never even heard of. Still the worst type of resistance is not coming to terms with your own traumas. An episode where as a child I heard my parents fighting with one of them being overly aggressive and I chose not to intervene. The episode apparently stuck in my unconscious and ultimately led to years of struggle with anxiety and fear of lack of control. Does this mean that as a child I should have acted differently? Probably not. But the fact remains that not acting in the moment and not acting on the unrealized trauma for decades only exacerbated the issue effectively redefining my identity and mental health. More importantly, becoming aware and no longer resisting a resolution of the trauma was the only healthy path forward. We do not have the resources to fight all the battles, all the time. However, we can choose our battles consciously as opposed to leaving it on autopilot.
Protecting your ego is one of our strongest insticts. We do not want to seem naive, unsociable, or useless. Not in front of yourself, but especially others not in front of others. As a result, in a room full of people we tend to be conformative, less critical, less vocal. This is a big mistake. The entire room becomes less potent because of this instinct - the notorious "groupthink". The antidote to this sometimes deadly (see: NASA's Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986) ego protection practice is speaking up ignoring the risk of being perceived as an asshole. Being part of the Student Government granted me the opportunity to learn this. There was a senator who would always go against the grain, always challenging the status quo. None of us liked them at the time. We would be so close to reaching a decision, but end up debating instead. After a while and certainly looking back from today's standpoint, I appreciated the "asshole" being part of the group. They were the key reason for keeping us honest, critical, under healthy stress and making better decisions. What the motivation behind their behaviour was we would have to ask them, but this doesn't change the fact that it helped. Every well-meaning opinion counts. If there's no "critic" in the group, let that be the bat-signal to become one. In a healthy group, getting over the self-preservation instinct is not only necessary, but welcome. Choose groups that welcome assholes. As Marcus Aurelius put it: "A straightforward honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room with him, you will know it." The added bonus is that long-term it even helps your ego. Turning a risk factor into an opportunity.
Two topics dominate the list of requested "soft skills" trainings: communication and time management. Time management can be boiled down to the following sub-skills: managing interruptions, grouping tasks, timeboxing and prioritization. Without prioritization, others will make very little difference. Not taking control of our attention is extremely costly. We pay twice whenever we switch between tasks: wasting resources required to stop-start and not producing a result as we switch before completion. Falling into the trap of believing we can accomplish everything without the need of planning is common. Especially as we begin accumulating responsibilities. We mistake activity for achievement. Without prioritization we get lost and burn out - without accomplishing much. So, we need to take control of our focus. We should also learn how to translate mid- and long-term goals into daily tasks. Develop, test and revise your own definition of what's urgent and important. If everything seems urgent and important - the criteria are wrong. The answer is not to simply work harder. The rule-of-thumb I followed was to have three tasks which I knew I could start and finish within a day. Same for the week, month and year - just at different scale. Checking these against each other - day-to-year and year-to-day - helps keep your eyes on the prize. As a function leader I tried to help everyone on the team understand why they're doing what they're doing. The reason is setting priorities. Once the team were clear on priorities improving performance and satisfaction (always linked) was easy. We performed in an environment everyone will find familiar. We had to cover more bases than the team was designed for. Every time we would come close to figuring it out - earthshattering change came knocking. E.g. acquisition, which basically doubled the work. Prioritization became a nightmare and backs were bending. Only way through was dropping tasks with intent. First we put integration into the new business on hold. We read early (buyers and sellers, both) that though integration was advertised as a top priority - we weren't ready for it just yet. Too many questions of "how" were still unanswered before we could translated them into "what" for the team. When integration was ready, some of the business as usual had to drop. Another example is not to have all your eggs in one basket. E.g. having 30%, 40%, or 70% of your revenue coming from a single client account. You also don't want to have too many baskets. The ratio generally believed right is 10 clients with 10% revenue each. This never happens, of course. There's pilot projects who start as 2-3% but have the potential to become that perfect 10/10 match. Or an existing 10/10 client may grow - it doesn't make sense to drop them. What is under management's control is alignment on the north star and prioritizing. Getting a hold of our attention, balancing the criteria, and aiming for a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day is a solid foundation for a fulfilled and meaningful life.
The effort necessary to implement an idea is higher than perceived. We tend to underestimate tasks due to optimism or overconfidence preventing us from recognizing the obstacles. Remember the countless brilliant ideas at dinner or party conversations? Trips, businesses, bands and charities - how many ended then and there? Creating is hard. It doesn't happen often. Ideas, on the other hand, are easy. As such they are abundant and carry low intrinsic value. Getting up from the toilet seat and making that idea happen carries high value. During the mobile app gold rush, every day a "killer app" idea sprung up from soneone on the team. Around the world thousands of apps were filling the app stores. A vast majority very poorly executed. More than we will ever know were likely executed perfectly, but lacked proper marketing. Ours, too. Ideas aren't hard. Getting something out is hard. Executing well is harder. Getting it in people's hands is extremely hard. So, let's not lose sleep over someone stealing our idea. Let's instead worry about diligent implementation and maximizing reach. Ever heard of Hotels4D? Exactly. It was our Trivago before Trivago (once valued at over $3B). Thousands of hours invested in production. Marketing hours - barely in the hundreds. Eight our of nine of our senior managers were focused on products. Less than 10% of our revenue came from products. We had to stop the distraction of too many incoming ideas. We introduced a simple idea submission form. It required nothing out of the ordinary: competition research, USP definition, estimate, and a business case. Raising the bar reduced the number of considered proposals by 90%. The quality, however, was incomparable. The prerequisite of basic effort created a tight filter. Giving an app a meaningful chance on the market required it. And we did make it (e.g. top-ranked travel app), at least for a while. In any setting the same process happens regularly. It doesn't have to be a product company. We propose initiatives and optimizations, but time and willpower are limited. We end up with a lot of talking and few results. Learning to recognize signal from the noise is key. Two possible strategies for mitigating the risk: Introducing criteria for "good enough" and mandatory pairing of a suggestion with commitment to partake in its execution. These will enable consideration of obstacles and mix some realism into the inescapable optimism.
Getting a task done is hard, because we are poor at defining them. One simple rule doesn't guarantee executing the task won't fail, but it significantly improves our chances of knowing why. A defined task requires three pieces of information: 1) Who is responsible for getting it done; 2) What needs to be done; 3) When it needs to be done. If one or more are missing, the likelihood of it getting done drops significantly. While this is still fresh in your mind, here are a few statements in which you will immediately figure out, not just where the risk is, but how to improve: - Let's pick up the plates and load the dishwasher. - We need some sort of plan by Feb 15th. - The two of us need to figure out how to get the window fixed. Can you feel that, too? The missing parts swallowing the task definition attempts from within? Unless someone steps up to ask the right question there is bound to be disappointment. We should be careful to neither accept, nor request vaguely defined tasks. Again, there's still no guarantee we won't be disappointed in the end, but at least not for a self-inflicted reasons. Our band meetings are pleasurable affairs. Good friends chatting, throwing around song ideas, capturing moments for social media posts, planning merch orders, imagining equipment upgrades... People make promises, but approximately 20-30% of the commitments are honored. We have assigned specific responsibility areas and have built up a routine for most types of tasks. The What and the Who are typically defined. However, where we accomplished the most is when being pushed into a corner by a deadline (gig, release date, etc.). Meaning that the When was also clear, and non-negotiable. In semi-formal environments like this one we may afford to lower our guard now and again. But in formal, critical contexts there is no good excuse or reason to forget the rule.
The time of mythologized lone inventors and maverick entrepreneurs is gone. If it ever even existed. Even if we generate an original concept and are somehow capable to build it on our own, would we have the time and the skills to market it? Grow and support it from a local to a global success? We need colleagues, mentors, partners, clients, investors... We must be trusting and be trustworthy. Empathetic and empathized with. Developed and developing. We need people skills - communication, compassion, teamwork, delegation, management. We need to set our ego aside. Learn how not to hold others to the same standards as we do ourselves. We are not giving anything up in the process, only gaining. Find the right partner(s). It may turn out that the partnership itself was the prize we were after. Imagine coming up with an innovative scientifc theory or an original music score. There is no way we haven't used the theories of Newton, Maxwell or Bohr. Or the musical foundations set by Bach, Davis or Sabbath. Whether we know it or not, we all step on shoulders of giants. Hence, we should respect and recognize those who came before us. Just as we pave the way for people we'll never get a chance to meet. That's why it sounds funny when someone says "I built this with my own two hands". There's a moving video of Benjamin Zander, Boston Philharmonic conductor, tutoring an already accomplished young celloist. She's playing, he's sitting next to her. Passionately conducting as if pulling invisible strings between his fingers and the celloist. The celloist, however, remains focused on the instrument and her playing. Benjamin interrupts the performance: "Don't manage alone. Ever. Use everyone around you." Also pointing to the audience in the room. In the next try, her eyes locked on Benjamin. Surely enough, the next try is poignant. What others can give us is beyond favors, advice, and resources. We should indeed use everyone around us.
The best metaphor for perfectionism I've encountered is “insecurity with lipstick”. We can be obsessed with being judged or making a mistake. We tie in our self-worth with the work we do or how other's may perceive it. A lot of effort goes into avoiding gut punches to the ego. We fool ourselves we can get someplace that doesn't exits. The answer is only we can and should determine how we feel about our work. Work that is never completed, but working on it must finish at some point. I had the privilege of working with brilliant people. Many set an extremely high bar for themselves. And often others, too. Frustration was inevitable. For any undertaking we are obliged to choose two out of the following three: quality, time, and cost. Perfectionism locks in quality. With perfectionist approach once we lock in time or cost - the dependent third variable goes off the chart. "Take all the time you need and money is not a issue" said a client never. "We need best quality at the lowest cost possible, but we need it done yesterday", said almost every client ever. Reasoning with client and team is part of the job. The sooner we do it, the better. The antidote to perfectionism is an agreed upon "good enough". No reasonable person will expect or argue for perfect. Including a perfectionist. We call it "perfectionism" but in fact the problem comes long before perfect. The problems arise even at "better than necessary" or "too good for resources available". Not being able to define "good enough" means you will be better off in a different client-team combination. We talk about clients, but the same issue happens at home. Co-owning a home teaches us acceptance. Either one will have to accept an imperfect kitchen, or the other will have to accept kitchen renovation taking forever. It happens in bands, trip planning with friends, and doing homework with kids. There's no better option between the two types of acceptance. The better option is doing it consciously and living with the decision. The British engineer, Robert Watson-Watt, credited with creating the "cult of the imperfect" has a brilliant quote on "good enough". Robert was part of the team working on the long range radar intended to detect incoming German bombers in WW2. The famous quote attributed to him explains it clearly: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes." Learn to understand your impulses and control them, rather than the opposite.
Do you want to show you're taking something seriously, to others and to yourself? Write it down: a birthday gift idea before falling asleep, an important business insight at a dinner, or takeaways from a key meeting. A common tragedy is forgetting something so striking that we thought would be impossible to forget. Notetaking is a habit with one of the highest returns. If I may claim from personal experience, developing the habit draws the line between doers and talkers. How can we develop the notetaking habit? The first step is admitting we're not machines and that relying on anyone but ourselves is no more than a bet. The second is setting up a default notetaking option - for any situation. Pick whatever, but pick at least one: voice recorder or note app, pocket notebook, dedicated device (e.g. Remarkable). Mark events in the calendar. Learn not to trust your future self any more than the present. Share invites with family, friends, colleagues and bandmates. Chris Cornell famously came up with "Black Hole Sun" while driving, but I'm willing to bet most legendary compositions weren't created from memory. That's why notes were invented. In fact, that's why writing was invented. With some worthwhile effort everyone can become that reliable notetaker in their organization. The person others ask for information and direction. These are my favorite folks - the finishers. The forward thinkers sacrificing today's comfort for tomorrow's achievements. I want to be on their team. Our frontman and vocalists is unshakeable when it comes to capturing song ideas. An invaluable component for our bands prolificacy. As a civilization we must have lost countless genius ideas because we couldn't record them on a piece of papyrus or a voice message.
John Locke's Labor theory of property was part of our undergraduate political science courses. Seemed as nothing more than a theory at the time. Now I find it applicable in a number of contexts. A quote from Locke's "Two Treatises of Government": "The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." Only that in which we invest our own work - physical, intellectual, energy, etc. - can potentially be considered our property or co-property. Feeling we deserve something comes through work. Work brings a sense of ownership because we have given a part of ourselves. In turn, having a sense of ownership raises the level of engagement. Once we are engaged, we invest. A few examples to illustrate how it works in the real world: - You buy a new guitar. It's yours now. But only once you've fiddled with it and invested time in making it sound right does it start feeling like yours. Once it feels yours, you are more likely to take care of it. - An investor feels much more as a part of the team only once they have actively contributed through work, not just financially. Passive investing doesn't build a sense of ownership. Additional investment, therefore, doesn't happen for any other reason than a return, not the purpose or the mission. - The apartment building's backyard starts feeling like home once a weekend or two are spent fixing it up. Once it's part of home, we are more likely to clean it again. - Kids at play see us as their equal once we've immersed in their scenario. We're also more likely to play with the kids, once we've already felt the enjoyment of being part of their play. - Our coworkers will see us differently depending on whether we come to corporate parties or not. Taking part in fun activities is part of the relationship. Relationships are part of work. Perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for many. We will never be "one of the guys" by not partaking in the fun. The theory helps explain not just how we perceive our stake, but also how others will perceive us. I believe it directs the logic behind all our relationships. Meritocratic systems are sustainable and efficient in the long term because of the corelation between privileges and effort. Doubt is eliminated, and so is the need to challenge the status quo. Hopefully this offers insight into not really feeling like a part of something. Or not accepting another as an equal in something you co-own. We signed the social contract millennia ago. Now it's leverage to get people engaged - give them a small task and build up their sense of ownership.
Delegating a task does not delegate accountability. If I ask my 8-year-old to hold my 5kg Gibson Les Paul guitar and I'm accountable if they drop it. I didn't provide the resources required to complete the task. At the same time, if we never relinquish responsibility (different from accountability) - we are not creating opportunities to develop skills and confidence. Hence, delegation is not about sharing accountability. It's not about cutting corners. With the correct level of challenge, delegation is an instrument of empowerment. Some pointers on delegating well: - Be clear on the purpose. Create a vision of the long-term gains over immediate benefits of task completion. - Provide the necessary resources: skills, information, time, budget, energy, etc. Everything else is a lose-lose scenario. - Respect the best practices for task definition. Clearly state and agree on who should do what and by when. - Delegating the interesting tasks. We will be more likely to track and support the progress. Moreover, engaging task boosts motivation. Delegation demands pause and consideration for ourselves and others. We need to understand both sides of the coin. Keep in mind the bottom-up and the top-down view. Not forgetting the different perspectives are the markings of the true servant leaders.
The frontman of one of my favorite bands invited the audience at a live show to crouch before the most energetic part of the song. Pointing to someone in the crowd, the singer said: "If you think you're special - trust me, you're not." I was also conflicted. I'm not into following the herd. At the same time, I like contributing to something bigger than myself. Do I meld into the collective? I decided not to overthink and get into the moment. Most of the people had already crouched, so peer pressure was piling up. We all go through the similar thought process in different contexts. Sometimes we comply, others we don't. But no one always chooses to be the black sheep or compliant. It's all statistics, including our opinions and emotions. They don't call it "normal distribution" for nothing. It's normal. None of us our special, most of the time. Group consensus will not come organically. What we usually end up with is roughly 10-15% enthusiasts, 10-15% nay-sayers, and 70-80% of the in-between. Exact percentages depend on how polarizing the issue is. In an election, it could be 30-40-30. In a "where do we go next weekend" dinner conversation it could be 5-90-5. Listening to extreme opinions helps us adjust, but it shouldn't lead us. Nay-sayers will almost certainly be asking for too much. Examining the situation, though, should be about getting the balance right. This means caring and doing the right thing for the 80% in the middle. Getting 100% regardless of what you're trying to achieve won't be an option. Making the correct judgement and commanding the crowd's respect with a show of decisiveness will elicit understanding, potentially forgiveness, or even gratitude further down the road. Everything worth doing will make someone unhappy. This is what makes decision-making hard. Including a perk in the benefits package, choosing an office location, moving the salary update by one or three months, or deciding on whether to kill a product line - the same rule applies. And who's to say whether the decision was right or wrong? The world answers, we can only do our best to make the best guess for the biggest number of people.
I remember vividly what our city was like 20 years ago. The traffic, the pollution, the clunky sidewalks, the rude waiters... Some of that remains still. But objectively and despite shameless corruption, the overall quality of life has improved significantly. There's a metro system, sporadic practical bicycle lanes, a walkable sidewalk, most cars don't exhaust black smoke, and decent (albeit overpriced) restaurants are abundant. Still some way to go to becoming a top livable city, but considerably better than in the early '00s. It's bad, but also better. Most functioning systems from employee experience at work to global wealth distribution aren't that much different. Yes, we absolutely have wars, famine, terrorism, fascism, etc. In certain places and periods we stumble backwards. The key is not giving into sensationalist news vying for nothing more than profitting from a desensitized audience by feeding our innate negativity bias. They hold us back from acting, because we start believing we're either powerless or the situation is out of control. We should recognize the betterments, even the small stuff. Grant them due visibility and propel them forward. This is quite different from keeping our eyes closed - on the contrary. Every improvement is action against a wrong. We cannot realistically expect to eliminate all of them. Or even any of them, as they do tend to re-emerge. But we can reduce them. In my humble opinion, this is what most of us are doing on a daily basis when not depleted. We just don't give ourselves, or others, the credit. A must-read for anyone looking to preserve their sanity by way of pragmatic optimism is "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. He passed away, but his kids carry on the legacy. The book is full of real stories of how our negativity bias misleads us. It's more than a book, because it's also a much wider movement. Take the test at www.gapminder.org and familiarize yourself with a worldview that will lift you upward and onward.
This can be very difficult in practice. In theory, just about every rational person would agree. We all believe our decisions are based on data and information. The default case, however, is making our minds up first and only seriously considering the data confirming our preconceived beliefs. A favorite quote offers one of the more poetic criticisms of the approach: "Using data as a drunken man uses a lamp post. For support, rather than illumination." With time, data - even good data - becomes easily attainable. The hard part is treating and analyzing it without bias. We have an ego to protect around the clock. Wihtout a doubt data can never offer all nuances. Especially when it's people-related. When collected and structured properly, data remains our best bet and extremely fertile ground for strong hypotheses, evidence to support them and reasonable enough decisions to follow. Data doesn't reveal the whole truth. It's a compass pointing a likely way out of countless possible directions ahead. Our management team’s discussions on salary updates were mostly enjoyable. One check of the suggested company-wide plan was analyzing which team received the biggest slice of the pie. What could be observed was that the analysis turned out to be used not as a check, but as a cause for an excuse for decisions already made. Protecting the interests of one's team is natural. So is protecting one's integrity by justifying the decisions. But in situations like these, it took extra guts for someone to stand up for data and objectivity. Because apart from being a social risk, it likely lead to revised, often unpleasantly so, updates. Having data on our side is not enough. It's a frustrating battle, especially when pusing against an affirmed status quo. Often we would think it's enough, but we forget that we're not dealing with automatons, but humans. The whole of them - emotions, thoughts, beliefs, values. Knowing this before we start the battle equips us for the marathon that it is bound to be, rather than forcing us to quit after the initial sprint and labeling people as unreasonable. However, building a culture of careful data collection and interpretation will invite reciprocity. In small, operational groups this is a realistic expectation to have and an effort worth making.
When saying fish have on way of knowing they're swimming in water we tend to look down on them. The truth is we aren't that much more aware of our own constraints for the better part of our lives. It's not the default option to have clear judgement after a heated discussion, an objective view of own team's culture, or a fresh perspective on an idea obsessing us for months. The reason is overwhelming amounts of information, aka "curse of knowledge", fogging the view. Gaining the benefit of distance goes a long way fanning the fog away. Here's a few ways how we can achieve it: - Asking an outsider for an opinion (these are typically easy to get) and be open to anything - Involving diverse members on the team - cultural background, level of expertise, tenure, etc. - Stepping away from operational work and finding time to evaluate decisions, process, or purpose from a strategist's eye view - Stopping to breathe when stuck on a task. Coming back to it tomorrow may solve it immediately or even allows dreaming up a solution. It does happen. At work, I would try to maximize the benefits of each new team member's outisder perspective. Getting a newcomer to speak up critically is a worthy and appropriate challenge, but also an opportunity we're given once per employee. Whatever glimpses of truth get through the social filter keyhole always prove invaluable. A colleague once said: "You need a woman's touch in the management group." Never before did we stop and realize that half a dozen or so men had always run the company. The comment lifted a curtain. We immediately identified issues and acted on them.
Anything can be hidden behind a selected average brazenly highlighted in large font on a slide. Any experienced person will know not to trust it. A good rule to remember is that a single number on its own means nothing. It only becomes a meaningful measure once adequately compared. As a lyric asks: "How much is two?" Always question single numbers. What was the measured value in the previous period (wekk, quarter, year, etc.)? How does the measurement compare to that of a different team, company, or country? Hiring a person at $100K annual salary may sound acceptable, until the realization that the same quality can be found one or two time zones away at half price. It took US and western EU markets decades to realize the potential of East Europe. But once the word spread and reached their clients it took less than a decade to overflow the small SEE markets with company offices. For quite some time 30 streams/day will sound impressive. Once a few zeros are added, we won't settle for less ever again. A discounted price of a phone sounds enticing from the mouth of a craft salesman, until we see a 20% lower price in the store nextdoor. Another question worth being annoying in asking: what unit is the number counting? The 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter mission failed because Lockheed Martin's engineering team used imperial units while NASA expected metric units for thruster data. This mismatch of a factor of 4.45 caused the orbiter to enter the atmosphere too low and burn up.
A snapshot measure meant can be misleading. Imagine monitoring unit sales numbers of an app. The daily result may be above the annual average - however, simultaneously it's possible the numbers have been going down for two weeks. Or a new daily low may occur even in the middle of a three-month upward climb. An individual number mean nothing unless compared to another. We should make it habit of requesting trend data along with any snapshot reading. The problem is that even if we remember providing snapshot and trend data - identifying trends is still tricky. For example, we're prone to pick the period to prove a point. We settle on a hypothesis first, and only then pick the data. Doing the opposite is crucial. Getting the right data is difficult enough without the additional burden of unwelcome biases. Confirmation bias is at the basis of a whole family of cognitive fallacies. Another one is the Straight Line Fallacy. It teaches us that we tend to take a measured trend and extend it as a straight line endlessly into the future. The reality is everything plateaus at some point. Plateauing isn't necessarily bad. A dip is sometimes necessary to gain momentum. For almost a hundred years we're reminded every 15-20 years or so that crashes happen. No trend is forever. Change of a change rate is as constant as change itself. Why would one change be constant and the change of change inconsistent? Anyhow, as tricky as trends are decisions have to be made and actions should follow, otherwise a downward trend is guaranteed. In the spirit of "good enough" what we can do is use snapshots and trends with minimal bias. This keeps us a few laps ahead of the snapshot-worshipping crowd.
Why do we decide to trust someone? Or stop trusting them? How can we help others trust us? Everyone can give an intuitive answer. But breaking down what factors into the unconscious decision of trust can be extremely practical. The reason we need trust broken down is two-fold - to measure and influence it. We need this as individuals taking on roles of parents, spouses, friends, colleagues, etc. But also as organizations, whether we're interacting with the end consumer or a partnering business. The same need for the ability to quantify and improve levels of trust stands in all of these cases. I've encountered two formulas that work: 1) Trust = Empathy + Reliability 2) Trust = Empathy + Logic + Authenticity The second one may be slightly more precise, but the overall rationale is the same in both. In real life practice the first formula has proven to produce good enough results faster. It's simpler and easier to remember, too. Hence, I believe it's a practical breakdown. Empathy isn't necessarily measurable, but as opposed to trust there are observable behaviors that can be used to judge one's level of empathy or prove our empathy towards another. Reliability can even be directly measured and being reliable can certainly be converted into actionable goals (i.e. being on time). Imagine being a representative of a government agency responsible for helping an individual and charged with increasing trust in the said agency. For example, an administrative staff member issuing a passport for a baby. A key tricky step will be taking the photo. How can you show empathy? In many ways. Recognize the parent's predicament with keeping the baby still and putting it through the ordeal of administrative processing. Use an appropriate tone of voice. Ensure the family efforts will be made to make the process as quick and hassle-free as possible. What about reliability? Share tips based on relevant previous experience. Guide the family through the process step-by-step. Be prepared to take the photo quickly. Produce the passport on time with the correct data. What we did in this example is to convert a "wicked" problem (fostering trust) to actionable "kind" problems, i.e. actionable goals for showing empathy and reliability. Will this gain the client's complete trust in the state administration? Not likely. It does, however, lay the right foundation. Trust is both non-binary and context-dependent. But making an effort to improve it is just another good example of how things can be bad and better at the same time. And the formula shows us an actionable way forward.
They are merely short-term feelings of greatness or insufficiency, and some memories to keep. Both are inevitable and the important part is simply doing better next time. There's nothing intrinsically good or bad about them - it's just feelings and lessons. Both of which are under your control. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to win - that's part of the experience that you shouldn't miss. Here's some other things to focus on when competing: - Making each other better - Using the common experience to build a community - Understanding that when a tide comes in - it raises all the ships - Promote healthy competition for everyone's sake - Enjoy the process, because you want to live through a meaning-providing experience like marking an achievement or overcoming an adversity. It took me too long to start enjoying playing sports fully. I found joy in being on the basketball court alone and learning my body to perform a shot in unison. I also didn't care if it went in (although it did start going in more than ever before). I didn't care if I lost a game or won it, it was about the experience of playing with others. The final score didn't make me more or less of a player, learning new things did. It also teaches you how to reach the "flow state". I learned that when shooting the basketball I am more successful when focusing on the movement (the process) than getting the ball inside the hoop. My personal best of 31 free throws in a row happened exactly like that. Today, I am less enthusiastic about the number than I am of actually being able to achieve that state - that's the real triumph.
Whether it's cleaning up communication, fixing a problem, getting into the right mindset or starting a big change - rather than blaming circumstance or others, starting with yourself. As they say, best direction to point that finger is at your forehead. What's great about making this a habit is not only that it gets you to a tangible result the quickest but also does so in the least frustrating way. And only because it depends on you, your biggest ally (instead of adversary). If there's one thing I'd like my kids to internalize it's to place the locus of responsibility within the borders of their own self. This prevents turning yourself into a victim or an agressor. It's also the safest way to resolution or acceptance.
Whatever you’re doing, at some point there was a reason why you started. You felt a sense of purpose, a benefit for someone or something. There was a very specific problem you were trying to fix. Since your journey started a lot of noise and baggage accumulated around you. You got sidetracked by "side quests", someone's feelings, or starting a different journey all-together. Put that aside and return to your original purpose. We knew why we agreed to get acquired. When integration commenced it became clear early on where we needed to align people, platforms, process. But then came the "details" - cultural differences effect on policies and communication, key team interests for autonomy and/or remit, balancing between profitability and employee interests. Then the unknown unknowns started appearing - forgotten skeletons in the closet, market changes (new buyers), etc. So why had we agreed to join forces? Oh right - to broaden opportunities for employees by moving from a regional to a global business. Mass communication got flooded with details. Slides and promises got bigger and fancier, while substance got left behind. It became clear that a lot of it had to stop. We needed to (and I love the word we came up for it) - "dewankify" the messaging and the ever-growing to-do lists and focus on the purpose. Had we remembered the "why" earlier and more regularly, we probably would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. What inspired you to take your job? What is your team's mission/purpose? What problem was your company intended to solve? What brings you a sense of fulfilment and joy?
You need them both. Analytics and imagination. Dreaming big and planning a realistic next step. Illusion of grandeur and sensible idea of capabilities. Idealist worldview and pragmatic choices. Lifetime aspirations and humble, everyday actions. Money makes the world go around, but art makes it worth all the spinning. Try to give enough time in your life - every day, every week. They inform, support and inspire each other. Some skills are acquired faster when dealing with one or the other. For example, teamwork is an immediate takeaway in theatre. But having no rehearsal schedule you won't ever get to the stage. Play with your kids, let your imagination go loose and learn to let go, but no presentation you ever improvise will be as good as it can be without sweating out the research and extracting the essence through multiple revisions. We don't have two halves of the brain by accident. Wonders happen just before you fall asleep or wake up when both work in unison.
In the beginning, to visit a different office all you needed was to get an OK from the boss, collect your receipts and get reimbursed. Fast-forward two decades and now you needed to have it planned and approved months in advance as part of the budget, get approval from the People & Culture team, local Managing Director and Finance Director, same from the host location, fill out a form for travel, for transportation and accommodation arrangements, and for temporarily working from a different location, and ideally sign a legal disclaimer (which doesn't hold up in court). And all you wanted was to spend some much-needed facetime with the team. Now, these process components are there for a reason - keeping costs in check, informing relevant parties, abiding by local legislation and mitigating any libel risk. So, it's not pointless. However, the cumulative cost of the process overhead ends up outweighing the benefits it's meant to provide. This is when good things happening become unlikely. By the time everyone's had their way with a process - it becomes unmanageable. Costly to set up, explain and maintain. So, something's got to give, and it may very well be keeping the process as is and the "give" ends up being the benefit you're trying to offer. Just try to be sure that it’s a conscious decision rather than the consequence of your inability to manage. What's the answer? Clarify process ownership and hand it to someone whose interest aligns with the benefits it's meant to provide. Make it clear to all stakeholders their role is to be informed, consulted or to support the process rather than co-own it. A painful realization. Establish balance and trust between stakeholders by building a system of processes where everyone owns part, understands the difference between an owner or a consultant and has a clear point of escalation. Set up annual checks for your process (cost/platforms/roles) for optimizations. Challenge your past decisions and expectations. Challenge others' current decisions and expectations. Remind yourself of the "why". Worst case is a giant "python of process" that will suffocate your organization and everyone within it, ultimately making any fixes, let alone bigger maneuvers nearly impossible. Best case is to avoid having a process at all, if you can afford it. For that to happen you need to be able to tolerate mistakes, trust no bad actors will get involved and count on optimizations to happen regardless. I think this is absolutely possible in small, well-synchronized and experienced teams.
In music there are no wrong notes. If you play the right note after a wrong note - you turn the wrong note into a right note. Life is the same. If you play your cards right after you've made a mistake - you'll have made the best out of it. Over 99% of people wouldn't turn back the worst experience of their lifetime. Why? Because of what it helped them learn, the people it helped them become. Test it out yourself? Now, what you can certainly do is keep repeating the same mistake. Go to meetings unprepared, hold your emotions locked deep inside, take crap from your boss... But it's the repeating of it that makes it wrong - nothing else. Instead of fearing them, believe in the power of mistakes. Remember - they're the only reason we've evolved, i.e. copying mistakes during the genetic material transfer between parents and offspring. Same happens as you're learning a skill, establishing rules and processes, or growing up and maturing as a person (a lifelong process to be sure). The bad mistakes are the ones that are left undiscovered or unchallenged. The ones you haven't respected enough by granting them due attention. A favorite example is the story of how the Greek translators chose to interpret the Hebrew word usually used for a young, unmarried woman (almah) as "virgin" even though the commonly used word for that would have been "bethulah". So that's how a deity ended up impregnating a young lady and starting quite a bit of a kerfuffle. A mistake that billions refuse to challenge millennia later.
Top-down is informed by experiences from the past that guide plans and actions. Bottom-up is current experience asking for actions that don't care about relevant former experiences. Top-down thinks about the future. Bottom-up cares about the now. Top-down talks and loses sleep over the big picture that propels us all forward. Bottom-up talks and loses sleep over immediate impacts on its experience which could break things now. Top-down can be management, parents, teachers, and leaders. Bottom-up is employees, kids, students, and followers. It's obvious now that top-down and bottom-up need to talk. It's obvious one cannot do without the other. Yet, how often is that line broken because we're preoccupied with our own thoughts and views. Ideally you will have experienced being both. If you're a natural leader - try to be a follower once. If you've been a follower most of your life - take responsibility for something and follow it through. Then don't forget where you came from and have compassion for the other. Where it became clear to me is the integration process. Both sides were trying their best, but the real battle was to keep them connected and with a common understanding. We didn't do a perfect job, but we gave it a chance and slowly it started working. The second integration, bigger size, less contact, less connection - an unnecessary failure.
Hiding our emotions happens for so many reasons: fear of being perceived as weak, not wanting to burden others with our troubles, believing our emotions aren't important, etc. But sometimes showing a bit of your own humanity can go a long way. I'm not advocating radical or uncontrolled emotional reactions - those aren't helpful. But sharing genuine emotions that show understanding or vulnerability can lower tension, inspire honesty and compassion, as they add a whole new dimension of how we perceive each other. Showing emotions isn't weakness. To be done mindfully it takes quite a lot of strength and courage. Moreover, communicating negative emotions de-escalates them, sharing positive emotions multiplies them. In those moments you are basically realizing that you matter, but also you open yourself to others' being just as important. I bet that the conversations you will always remember were the ones where a friend displayed a vulnerability or decided to let you in on their sorrow. Or the presentation where you could see the speakers’ lower jaw trembling with sadness, eyes watering up. A top sportsperson breaking down at the end of a high-stake competition, hugging their family. It's all about seeing a fuller version of a human being, forgetting about their role or persona they'd decided to put on previously. In these moments special things happen, and you shouldn't lock yourself of from gifting them to others.
Becoming a manager of any operation, you have one job - to make it run without your involvement. And move on. A manager needs to take care of three things: the business, the team and themselves. You should optimize the processes end-to-end making it flexible and scalable, develop a growth mindset and necessary skills in your team, and get yourself ready for the next level challenge as a human and a professional, if possible. Once these are done, you will naturally make room for the business, your team and yourself to grow. Outstaying your welcome, on the other hand, by grabbing hold of your position and comfort, making it your mission to preserve rather than develop is a lose-lose scenario. There came a time in our business when the entire management team after two cascading acquisitions realized it's time to move on. The first impulse was to believe that things will fall apart given that "the core" of the business will be moving out of the company. However, lo and behold, the next generation of leaders emerged to carry the baton and bring an energy and a perspective which the "old guard" simply couldn't. The good news is that this granted the "old guard" solace, because now they finally knew their job was done and done well. They were obsolete and all the conditions were there for the business to move on without them.
I talk a lot about mistakes and the value of mistakes. But this one really is about an attitude that you can make part of your identity. Loving the bomb comes from improvisational theatre, it's not related to the Dr. Strangelove love for the bomb. It's about not simply feeling comfortable with things going wrong - but actually relishing it. Making it a habit is like unlocking a superpower. You replace paralysis with invigoration. Panic with optimism. Problems with solutions. And you'll enjoy every second of it. It's the ultimate "Yes, and..." approach. Making something beautiful when provided with nothing but junk. In performing arts you can experience and learn this the fastest. That's why I'd always recommend doing it, especially live performances. Wrong guitar tuning while warming up for one of the biggest bands ever, canceling a gig on the spot as the venue's value system clashes with that of the band, forgetting lines in front of a full theatre... Only through experience do you learn to enjoy these moments. Recognizing them quickly and shifting the mindset from panic to creative mode. Laughing about it as the first step. Trusting and empowering a supportive, "all for one, one for all" team with the same mindset. Looking back, learning and truly cherishing the growth it gave you is the final wrapping. In business it can be perceived as more difficult to achieve, but I would always choose and/or build an environment where it's not. Because why wouldn't it be? Same goes for dealing with family, friends, personal issues... Just love the bomb.
When everything runs smoothly it's easy being a partner whether it's in business, marriage, friendship or any type of relationship. On the other hand, a person may seem disengaged or disinterested. But only when things go ballistic do you get to see one's true level of dedication to your common goals. Are they going above and beyond to solve the issue and acting compassionately for the common cause? If so, you've found the right partner. In our company, when things went awry on a client project we always opted for honesty as the best policy. Sometimes it would hurt in the short-term (admitting a mistake), but in the long-term we established ourselves as a trusted partner. Trust that all parties' share common values. If not, then you've eliminated an incompatible long-term partner. And almost always you will have gained one - in our case, people on our team. It doesn't always have to be a crisis. You can draw the same conclusions with "micro crisis" or in environments where the level of emergency is perceived as high, although the actual stakes aren't that big. For example, when playing sports (always teaching you tons about a person's character), a simulation at a professional training course or a piece of office equipment gone missing. Another good application is to ask a candidate at a job interview about a situation where things went wrong. Don't ask immediately how they handled it - the answer to that will almost always be sugarcoated. But the way they describe and relive the situation will give off enough information. The main thing is not to rush to conclusions in times of peace (whether positive or negative) and to pay attention to behavioral patterns in crises.
Most have by now heard the story of the Andon Cord in the Toyota Production System. Basically, any worker at any point can stop production to notify everyone of a problem. It's an empowering principle enabling continuous improvement regardless of whether it starts bottom-up or top-down. What I would do to extend this within the team was to invite people to notify about issues not just in their area of responsibility, but any area. The idea of sharing responsibility for any part of our work was essential. Statements like "that's not my problem/not a part of my job description" were very unwelcome. Again, the value of "I am because we are" needs to be clear and present. Surely it wasn't automatic. Especially when applied across teams where members of different teams (production, marketing, management, etc.) would inevitably butt heads. But the way out of those situations was always providing full transparency into why a decision has been made and setting egos aside to make room for constructive feedback. This is where culture helped - everyone's priority being not the protection of their interest or, even more disastrously, their position in the company, but the good and the betterment of the whole. Be it on team or company level. Same applies to bands, sports teams, families, etc. Hence Pull the Cord is just as much about process, as it is about the values, mindset and culture.
Our shared responsibility is to rediscover the all-but-lost of art of differing opinions not standing in the way of civility and friendship. A big challenge given the increasingly diverse spectrum of beliefs coming from unprecedented exposure to ideas. Yet, we don't have much choice but to compromise as puritan and inflexible leads to even more rigid, unforgiving systems where ultimately choices do become binary. Latest example is corruption and captured states becoming common around the world because of people retreating from debates and tiring of compromises. I do believe in consensus. Most of us share common goals and values, with notable exceptions. But in most cases, you don't have the luxury of time and the clarity of an outsider's perspective for a "Twelve Angry Men" reenactment. So, consensus needs to be replaced by compromise. You see it every day in traffic as drivers change lanes. You go, then I go - or we all stop. It's instinctive and usually challenged not because you're an asshole, but because circumstances made you less tolerant on a given day. After being acquired as a business and being thrown into the lower circles of change management, "disagree and commit" became a daily phrase. The pressure of time and ongoing parallel processes needing to merge before considerable damage was done dictated to it. And we sure did disagree, and sometimes we even committed. And although individual battles were often lost, because of our aligned values and bidirectional willingness to compromise in the long term we all won. A few years later, after the second acquisition, we saw the other scenario at work - misaligned values leading to disagreement, committing and quitting. Practice shows that it's not about winning arguments, it's about finding the common values. And if you can't - you change business, bands or marriage partners. Compromises and hard work are all that's guaranteed.
Starting any task has a high initial cost. Much like in physics: static friction is generally higher than kinetic friction. Meaning that starting is costly. Then there is an ongoing maintenance cost as tasks typically turn into continuous parts of regular process. A few examples: deciding to go to the gym, introducing a benefit for the employees, measuring sales performance, opening a social media page, etc. Each initiative started without a clear intention and option to finish or, more commonly, maintaining it turns into a waste of time and effort. Logic dictates that you will only be able to properly complete a few tasks. As it's finishing a task that really makes a difference, you should become more conservative in starting them and once committed - finishing them. A few useful questions to ask yourself: - Is it necessary and why? - What will the initial and running cost be and can we afford it? Is the total expected cost lower than the expected gain? - What is the definition of done, i.e. how will we know we have successfully completed our goal? - Can we clearly define the task owner and the deadline? As these continuous efforts accumulate - you need to either optimize, delegate or kill them. All legitimate options which should not only be on the table, but part of your regular conversations. We're creatures of habit and stick to what we do and how we do it largely without thinking. Again, this is where "assholes" asking uncomfortable questions challening the status quo are invaluable. But the best way to win a war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Also known as "Rome wasn't built in a day". A statement as cliched as it is difficult to apply. I surely lose track of it on a regular basis as I wonder what incomparable, unforgettable miracle to create with a conservative one-time effort despite never having won the miracle lottery in close to half a century of life experience. For some reason, I often realize the truth behind this in retrospect. There are several accomplishments I take pride in which, as it turns out, all have come to be through consistent, daily baby steps - kids, marriage, friendships, business, band, communities, these rules as debatable as they are... Why then given the overwhelming evidence, is it difficult to find motivation on a zoomed in part of life’s timeline? Personally, often it’s losing sight of the larger purpose or identifiable prosaic causes like low dopamine levels. Whatever the cause, I believe it's one of life's important missions to push through the obstacles and keep moving forward. One sleepy, tired and self-resentful step through the door in morning cold weather at a time. These small wins against our worst, momentary selves are the secret to our proudest achievements.
In 2018 it became clear that the a C-level executive of our university was up to no good. Details aren't important. He had to go, but wasn't willing to do so voluntarily. It starting getting ugly. Quite a few university's trustees stood up for him. It even got political with embassies and media getting involved. Naturally, we grew very unfond of the CFO's person because he could have spared the university from all the damage by - right or wrong - putting the university before himself. Which he didn't, obviously. In the midst of all this chaos at a conversation with one of the "good" trustees, a seasoned entrepreneur, I heard and permanently learned a valuable piece of advice: "Do not focus on the person, focus on the process." The resolution ultimately came not from repeated, although valid examples of inconsiderate and egotistical behaviuor, but on how to establish a lasting process which would not only solve the specific conundrum, but prevent it from happening again. The board was reformed, processes set up and unsurprisingly - the university is thriving. And no one has to worry any longer about the personality or morals, just the process. The lesson was incredibly useful at work whether it was problems with clients or colleagues. A big bonus is that putting personality-related emotions aside clears your focus and saves a whole lot of energy for all the right reasons. If you have a strong instinct to look for someone or something to blame, I offer you this: in every situation there's you, me and the circumstances, sometimes circumstances are to blame. For example, in large corporations a lot of things are done a certain way "just because". A problem that cannot be fixed quickly or easily, or perhaps ever. People and teams silo away from each other. You worry and interests begin and end at your own part of the assembly line. You're priority is to keep your bosses happy to avoid friction. Hence, the system grinds to a self-perpetuating hold of little to no added value. The sick behemoth isn't your fault or mine. It's a set of circumstances that we can try to fix - a common enemy, for the fans of the approach.
Usually when we talk about Orwell's "Animal Farm" we discuss politicial systems, but I see it just as applicable for corporations or any type of organized community. I've always found Boxer's death (well, sending off to the slaughterhouse) due to overexhaustion as the most heartwrenching. A horse whose loyalty and devotion solely dictated his actions regardless of the social turmoil around him. Ultimately, a victim. A victim of the system, but also his own lack of self-preservation. I've seen this happen so often - the most loyal and hard-working members of the team getting squeezed in between a rock and a hard place. One on side, you have their managers delegating tasks indiscriminantly because they know that the shit will get done and get done well. On the other side, the employee's unfaltering will to prove themself and not disappoint. As colleagues, it is our job to notice and break this cycle for the sake of the employee, but also the company. The management needn't even be abusive. All that's necessary is just for them to be consistently too distracted with their own issues to notice - which is often a given. I've been in both situations. One ended with a nasty anxiety disorder. The other ended with a burnout episode and tears at least three days a week. Trust me, I preferred the former. The responsibility is shared and what's under our control should be each person's focus. That's the bottom line. Being diligent and responsibe doesn't imply being open 24/7 only because it makes us feel secure. Avoiding the issue of low performers only because it's a difficult conversation and there's a fluffy, trouble-free solution sitting at the adjacent desk is wrong. As most short-term comfortable ways forward usually are. Until it's too late.
A practice which significantly increases kids' knowledge retention in a class goes as follows: when the teacher asks a question they should let kids come up with an answer - wrong or right - before its revealed. The brain sifts through the information, absorbs it in as many ways as solution paths considered, and converts a passive observer into an active learner. It makes so much sense. Same principle applies anywhere, at work especially. Our CEO and I would hold onboarding meetings welcoming newcomers. There were two key messages we were determined get through all the "blah-blah" about company history, policies, values, etc. One was speaking up every time they see an issue. The other was when communicating the problem, they a solution, no matter how imperfect, should also be presented. The depth and breadth of consideration invested in both understanding and presenting the problem changes drastically. Simply by viewing it from different angles, because you'll have to if you wish to the argument compelling. This practice helps one not just make a stronger case, but also be perceived as an engaged problem-solver, rather than yet another grumbler. In the minds of others, but also their own. You're no longer the victim, but a part of the solution breaking the Drama Triangle. This is also the essence of an entrepreneurial mindset. Or rather identity. And this, as we know, is the level at which sustainable change happens. Applying the rule from as the one hearing about problems on a regular basis filters out the noise and helps prioritization. Someone putting their mind to it means they're prepared to get involved - and you will have found your first volunteer for the rescue expedition. It's an inclusive approach reflecting positively on psychological safety aspect of culture. I've been applying it in our apartment building, band and travel planning with friends. Works like a charm.
You put 32 pieces on an 8x8 chequered board, create six profiles for how they can move and attack, and get each set of pieces one move per turn and - voila! You've got a game that can play out in more ways than there are atoms in the universe which after 15 centuries of studies by the brightest minds (and AI) is still an intruiging, bottomless phenomenon. You put a few constants together, a few forces and a few dozen laws of physics to govern them - and you have an infinite cycle of endless universes. You create a set of values, a mission, a team of people and several key processes - and you could have a unicorn company established. Could you, similarly, lead a good, long life with a simple set of rules, as well? I think you probably could. The essence is that in order to create a complex working system, you don't necessarily need to come up with equally elaborate set of rules to govern it. Understanding all interdependencies and explaining every possible outcome within the system is a different matter. But for the most part you should be able to recognize if it's functioning sustainably with a decent degree of confidence in a relatively short time. You could also use those rules to simulate a fast-forwarded version, i.e. project outcomes. Which ever system your running, whether it's a group of people or a process, it's good to establish what are the rules that govern it. You will find many which you may not have known existed. Once you understand this, you can tweak and project possible outcomes with corresponding probabilities. You could borrow rules from analogous systems. In any case, this will simplify your problem space because instead of thinking in terms of and dealing with case-by-case events, you will be thinking in terms of processes which are long-lasting and replicable. About that good life? I would pick the following principles: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. Stoics came up with this one from before chess was invented. Still works.