Rishad Tobaccowala's Blog, page 18
June 12, 2022
Six Keys to Change.
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
Change sucks.
It requires one to step into the unknown.
To twist and turn into a new transformed self, team or firm. To leave the safety of the known path. Lift anchor and sail into a foggy horizon with no guarantee of safe harbor.
Difficult as it is…
Irrelevance is worse.
Individuals, teams and companies that wish to transform must endure change.
Successful change requires six steps:
Strategy.
Acquisition of new skills/M&A.
New organizational design.
Buy-in.
Aligned incentives
Education and training.
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
1. Strategy.
Strategy is “future competitive advantage”.
Specifically, what will people (customers, consumers etc.) want and need in the future?
People’s expectations constantly change and grow and optimizing for today’s needs assumes a steady state when demographic, technological and other changes are re-wiring needs.
What will a competitive set look like in the future?
The biggest opportunities and threats to any company often comes from outside it’s category. The greatest wealth creation and change drivers to the auto industry did not come from VW, GM, Toyota, BMW, Ford, Honda or Mercedes but from outside specifically Tesla which focused on software and electric and Uber who focused on replacing the car.
What advantage will you provide against those future needs and future competitive sets?
Gillette and Schick which thrived by charging increasingly higher prices for constantly improving quality razors sold through retail and advertised on tv and magazines had no advantage versus a Dollar-Shave-Club who sold good quality, low-priced razors through the mail using You-Tube and social media for awareness and sampling.
In addition, many young men were no longer fixated on being clean shaven a trend that the company refused to believe for a while.
Gillette was forced to take an 8 billion dollar write down.
Not moving to tomorrow when you should in order to protect today is always very costly.
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
2. Acquisition of new skills/ M&A.To meet new needs of people and fend off a different competitive set, companies need to acquire people, channels or technologies from outside.
Too many companies waste huge amounts of money and time trying to cover their nakedness of next generation skills by hauling out some in-house assemblage on which they slap some weird name and then roll out accompanied by a bombastic press release.
Buyers are increasingly sophisticated and servicing existing customers with people who are still learning with their training wheels showing does not engender confidence or signal commitment.
Do it right. Get top notch people and buy firms that bring credibility and skills even if it involves re-allocating capital and resources from today. Funding yesterday at the cost of tomorrow is like starving one’s children so one can fund flowers for an ancestor’s grave.
3. New organizational design.The future does not fit in the containers of the past.
Most organizations are designed for yesterday or today and not tomorrow.
If strategy changes and new people and companies are hired the biggest mistake that many make is tucking in tomorrow under today or yesterday.
Which defeats the purpose of the acquisition and dilutes all the strategic thinking.
New strategy requires new approaches on how a company is organized.
Principles that drive re-organization should be focused on maximizing customer benefit, ensuring friction-free collaboration that minimize duplication and aligning decision making with the right incentives.
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
4. Buy-in.Too many firms after the first three steps of strategy, M&A and Re-organization believe their work is done and bring out the balloons and the posters and press releases.
Michael Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”.
Boards and leadership of firms come quickly to the realization that everything is easy until people get in the way.
Telling people that change is good, threatening them with job loss if they do not change or creating communication materials and slogans to goad them into a cult like devotion to the new dear leader or the way forward rarely works in the short run and will likely fail after the threat of flagellation fades.
Because if there is nothing in it for them, people will out-wit, out-wait, out-pretend, and out-maneuver “management”. Until then they will fill the time genuflecting and bowing and going through the monitored motions of attending the right meetings, muttering the motivational mantras and stating the slogans required.
If one wants an organization or team to grow and change, we will need to deliver answers to three questions:
Why are the recommended changes good for them?
How can it help them grow?
How do these changes impact their compensation?
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
5. Aligned Incentives.Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago in his book “Freakonomics” stated that if you want to know if a company’s strategy will work ask to see their incentive programs.
Over a decade ago magazine and newspaper publishers saw the emerging threat from digital technology and wrote grand strategy documents but few made it to the other side. Not because they were not smart but because they continued to incentivize the selling of pages and the old ways of doing the business. Power, promotions and pounds/dollars were paid to those who controlled today’s client relationships and today’s budgets.
If the fish rots from the top, then change only happens when seismic shifts in compensation and power happen at the top.
Everyone watches this because people will do what they are rewarded to do and not what some change agent or “Vision 20XX” encourages them to do.
It is hard enough to change and totally stupid to go through the pain of change when one gets rewarded to stay the same!
Graphic by interdisciplinary contemporary artist Martha Haversham
6. Education and training.T.S. Eliot wrote “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.
In companies this shadow between where they are and where they want to be is known as lack of skills or know-how.
If you want people to behave differently, think differently, work differently in addition to communicating why it is good for them and incentivizing them to do so, companies must also provide ways for them to learn and grow the new skills and capabilities that will be needed.
Whether it be rotating into new groups, secondments or other strategies they must all be accompanied by some combination of self-serve, guided and enabled training.
The single biggest ROI in most companies in time will be the ability to upgrade the mental and emotional operating skills of their talent.
Upgrading skills is more cost effective, humane and culturally positive than laying off people and bringing in new teams and will be increasingly key as we enter the Third Connected Age of Blockchain, AI, AR/VR, and 5G.
It is imperative that companies have a significant commitment to learning and development agendas with senior management committed to it and members of the talent leadership being included in the highest echelons of power.
No company can grow unless its people grow.
And the day one stops learning one stops growing.
June 5, 2022
Looking Back. Looking Ahead.
Spliced imagery by Won Seoung Won
This past week in an interview by Kenneth Hein, the U.S. Editor of “The Drum” was asked to look back at what the keys to a successful career might be and then look ahead to what may come.
It was a short interview, but feedback indicates it resonated.
Have edited it down to the parts others may find useful while adding some summary points. Th entire piece can be found here.
Spliced imagery by Won Seoung Won
Looking back. Advice to the next generation on careers.The first piece of advice is that successful careers are built on a combination of luck, mentorship and aligning with the right trend.
And yes, hard work is important, but everybody works hard.
For mentorship the key is to find the best bosses or best people you can find to guide you.
In the case of aligning with the trend, try to understand something that will grow over the next 10-15 years.
And about luck, the way to maximize luck is say yes to as many opportunities as you can, even if they seem a stretch.
The second piece of advice is to never stop learning.
The day you stop being a student is the beginning of the end of your career.
It doesn’t matter how senior you are or how powerful you are. The world is changing so much that even at this stage I spend an hour-and-a-half a day learning. Invest in continuous learning and education, because otherwise you will find yourself growing increasingly irrelevant.
The third piece of advice is that eventually when you become truly successful, your success will be built on a very benign form of a Ponzi scheme.
You will be successful because the people around you are successful. And you will basically be given some sort of credit for the people around you. Therefore, make sure that you really, really invest in the people around you because that is investing in yourself in everything, from training to relationships to looking after them and helping them along with their careers. You can’t succeed, especially as you get more responsibility, unless you do that.The last thing is never taken yourself too seriously.
Be humble.
Laugh at yourself and when people say you’re full of shit, you probably are.
Spliced imagery by Won Seoung Won
Looking ahead. The state of things to come.An intense optimism about where we are relative to the state of two things.
The state of technology is one. Broadly, we’re at the cusp of one of the most radical and positive changes in technology. And it isn’t necessarily just digital technology – it’s everything from biotechnology to all the rest.
The second one is that I believe that all of us are good people, more than the newspapers claim we are. Especially if you look at the younger generations. They have the right set of values. Take those combined with the next generation of technologies and I believe we’re going to have a step change.
Two broad predictions.
One is that the next 10 years will be good for people all over the world. Not for every single person, but the world will be better off in the next 10 years than it is today because of a combination of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and the next generation of the internet – which is everything from blockchain to AR to VR to 5G.
Second is that we will look back at the way we used to be working in 2019 and in 2029 wonder how anybody worked that way. We’re about to see the most radical rethinking of work, workers and workspaces ever. And this is going to unleash more options for more people and enable many powerful ways to combine the benefits of in-person interaction and the flexibility and cost benefits of distributed work.
In sum, 1) find mentors, 2) raise your hand/take risks, 3) align with trends, 4) keep learning, 5) invest in people, 6) remember to not take oneself too seriously and 7) have a positive/optimistic attitude.
These fundamentals tend to work in every industry, every country and across all levels.
For a deeper look at career management check out Career Tools!
For more on what lies ahead see 10 predictions for the next decade.
May 29, 2022
On Understanding.
Photography by Richard Beaven
How does one understand other people?
How does one understand the world?
How does one understand oneself?
Photography by Richard Beaven
Understanding people.How do you take a measure of a person? Is it possible to understand a person?
Here are some lines from literature that say it is difficult and may be impossible
“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”
From American Pastoral by Philip Roth
And let us say we get a person right which person of the many identities and moods of that person did we just get right?
“We cannot live with only one identity. We all have many identities, they are liquid”
Olga Tokarczuk. Polish Author and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.
And as many writers state it is sometimes hard enough to know our selves.
“Sometimes you don’t know who you are till you put on a mask”
Alexander Chee in the Short Story “Girl” written in 2015
And do any of us want to be profiled and boxed and put into clusters? None of us wants to hear that somebody has our “number”. The poet TS Eliot best verbalizes this in a stanza from one of my favorite poems “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
TS Eliot, “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”
We do not want other people to impose their stories on our lives.
Photography by Richard Beaven
Understanding others.Emotional Intelligence can help in understand our selves and others. It can bring meaning to an age of math and reduce the “algos” which in Latin means “pain” in the algorithmically tuned streams that colonize our minds.
In the book “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls through Seven transitions into Adulthood” is one of the best definitions of Emotional Intelligence I have come across:
“Seeing yourself from the outside and seeing others from the inside”
Empathy is another term we often use.
The deepest empathy maybe to understand that we can never completely really understand another person.
Photography by Richard Beaven
Understanding the world.“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are” - Anonymous
In many ways what makes us “us”, in addition to our genetics and experiences, is what we put into our minds which include the books, movies, tv shows, music, social media streams, magazines and much more that we ingest as well as the people we meet and places we visit.
Today, the people we meet and the places we visit are very constrained and our portals to the world increasingly are screen based whether they be television, phone, tablet computer or Amazon Echo, Google Home and the ironically named Facebook Portal.
What are your portals to the world? And how do you make sure that you find ways to control them rather than have engagement and attention maximizing algorithms control them?
This is important because of the value we add and the way we make sense of the world incorporate three steps. 1) Curation. 2) Cogitation. 3) Communication.
Curation requires us to ingest a lot of information and then distill them down to parts we want to use and think about. We then cogitate and connect the dots and build a story, a thesis, and a point of view. We then find the best ways to communicate them.
But if the curation was not wide enough, deep enough, or mindful enough all the cogitating and communicating may have us following and promoting the wrong point of view.
Photography by Richard Beaven
Understanding through diversity.To understand deeply one must explore widely:
a) Diversity of media types: The best thinking, ideas and expressions of people tend to span a spectrum of media types. Some people are comfortable expressing and sharing in long form writing like books or essays while others use music, film, or some other communication form. Spend time with the written word, film, interactive media, music and more. Today with the Internet there is no excuse not to look and learn far and wide.
b) Diversity of points of view: Incestuous inputs leads to still-born thinking. Unless one exposes oneself to different points of view one could end up being very surprised by the outside world. Look outside of our comfort zone, category, industry, or political and economic biases.
c) Diversity across time: History matters. Some folks like Ray Dalio of Bridgewater and many great investors and businesspeople are aware of and learn from patterns over time. The past is never the past but beats like a second heart inside each of us and within the DNA of any expertise, industry, or art form.
d) Diversity of people: Different people both provide support and push back on one’s perspectives and thinking and the cross-fertilization of ideas benefits from having different people interact. Companies and cultures that have melded the talents of different types have tended to do better than those that have not.
Photography by Richard Beaven
Understanding oneself.A person in a different mood is sometimes more different than two different people.
Does a person stay the same or change over time?
Some of the best writing is about internal journeys of understanding and change over time.
Here from a variety of writers are some perspectives on understanding oneself:
“It’s not that we want to find who we are but exploring as to what we can be”
“But is the self we are always looking for or trying to escape”
“We are often trying on other lives… after all this is America where you can swap out the parts of yourselves that do not work”
“She was not what she had been”
Every person is an act of creation.
Re-inventing, re-imagining, and practicing a daily resurrection.
Maybe that is all one needs to understand.
Photography by Richard Beaven (a long time colleague and now a world class photographer among other things)
Photography by Richard Beaven
May 22, 2022
Omnipresence! Omniverse!
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
Omnipresence: The fact of being present or having an effect everywhere at the same time. (Cambridge Dictionary)
In The First Connected Age that began in 1993 with the World Wide Web we connected to discover and connected to transact which we now call Search and E-Commerce.
In 2007 building on what had gone before we entered The Second Connected Age where we connected to everybody, and we connected all the time which we now call Social and Mobile.
As the mobile device has become the key portal even these terms of E-commerce, Search, Mobile and Social have dissolved into goo. If you buy a product while watching a video on Tik-Tok that played after a search for a product or person is that mobile or social or search or e-commerce?
It’s all of them mixed up into a goo.
The era of Digital Leakage.
As we move forward in The Third Connected Age powered by data connecting to data (AI), much faster and persistent connections (5G), new ways of connecting (Voice/AR/VR) and new trust connections (Blockchain) we will enter an era of Omnipresence.
We will not just grapple with cross-media and omni-channel but need to figure and how to live, market and engage in a world of Omnipresence.
And Omniverses.
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
Omnipresence and Communication Technology.Starting from the printing press, communication technology has allowed individuals and ideas to be scaled across distance and time.
First there were newspaper and books that allowed people to project ideas primarily with words.
Photography allowed us to project image and photographs in magazines to scale those projections.
Radio and the phonograph allowed the projection of not just words but also sound.
Movies and television enabled a projection of a replica of life first in black and white and then color and then in high definition.
Search enabled us to find what we were looking for and e-commerce projected stores and bazaars into our home and let us be stores and bazaars of our own.
Social and mobile allowed us to project ourselves in all sorts of ways to everybody we wanted to at little to no cost. We could add filters and aliases and become many people and project many looks and feels.
The state of the art of all these technologies consolidated in the Gaming Industry which is bigger than the television, music, and movie industries and where individuals spend over 100 billion dollars a year to arm, dress and equip their characters and alter egos in increasingly realistic worlds.
There is a reason the 3D computer graphics game engine developed first in 1998 from Epic is called “The Unreal Engine”. We are now in the fifth version of Unreal Engine and to see its power watch this short medley of 20 renditions by AMATEURS using HOME PC’s
Impressed?
We have not seen anything yet as we take a quantum leap ahead in the next 1000 days (yes less than 3 years) driven by the technologies of The Third Connected Age.
We will be able create “multiple” versions of ourselves or edit and change elements, characters and scenes in audio and video.
Here are some “humans” and another character created with Unreal Engine.
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
We will take shape and conjure up ourselves as many avatars with many voices.
We can live in the physical world, overlay data and filters into the physical world with AR or create a simulacrum of increasingly realistic worlds using Virtual Reality.
All of us who want to do so will be able to do so.
Easily and cost-effectively.
We will become omnipresent.
And will integrate a spectrum of physical, digital and virtual ways of living to create customized omniverses.
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
Omnipresence and Humans.Many of you might be skeptical that even if the technology progress so rapidly will anybody but a small minority of people leverage these technologies to become omnipresent.
A guess is most of us will for three reasons.
First, Humans want to have God-Like power.
The companies that enable us to cross distance and time such as Google which allows us to find anything with Search or visit places with Google Earth, or Apple that allows us to connect everywhere projecting our images and videos or Meta that enables us to connect for free or Amazon that brings the worlds bazaars to us have become the most valuable companies in the world.
At one time it was the railroad companies and oil companies and telephone companies that allowed us bridge distance and time. Pharmaceutical and medical companies allow us to live longer lives.
These new Third Connected Age technologies will give us amazing powers and we will gravitate towards them just as we have in the past.
Second, they allow of us have multiple identities.
Our minds are imagination machines, and it has far outstripped the physical carrier of our bodies. Avatars and virtual worlds allow us to be a range of us and constantly re-invent and try on new lives and live in multiple worlds.
Third, we are about to see the greatest unleashing of human creativity as more and more people have access to new ways to express themselves, to project and share themselves and to monetize their work.
Today DALL. · E 2 (named after Salvador Dali and Pixar’s Wall-E) a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Yes type in words and art and images is rendered. Watch this for what is possible:
The future of the Internet will be increasingly owned by creators and people who consume their creation (Web 3), with new operating systems that span the physical and digital worlds (AR/VR =Metaverse), orchestrated using new trust currencies (tokens) and operated in increasingly new collaborative approaches (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) all turbocharged with AI.
This future is being developed by millions of talented people with hundreds of billions of dollars of investment from VC’s, Private Equity, and juggernauts like Google (big on Voice and AR), Meta (VR), Apple and Microsoft (Voice, AR, and VR) and so do not be distracted by the up and down prices of cryptos or NFT’s.
In 2001 the Nasdaq crashed but broadband penetration began to take quantum jumps.
The rest is history.
It’s that time again.
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
Omnipresence and Marketing.Marketers have had to grapple with digital leakage blurring the boundaries between the ways they were organized.
In 2022 why are some companies still organized by above or below the line, analog or digital, social, mobile, e-commerce or search?
Digital is hydrochloric acid that burns through the barriers of the containers of the past and omni-channel behavior versus different channels is how advanced marketers are organized reflecting the polygamous shopping and return behavior and expectations of people.
As more and more people search with Voice (in India more voice searches than text searches) and modern devices become so small that voice will be the only interface every smart marketer needs to ensure that they can provide services and expand their brand presence to the world of voice.
And as gaming and meta-verses (AR/VR) become increasingly powerful and utilized by more and more people, companies need to ensure their Brands, their sponsorships (Music acts have really begun to scale in the metaverse), Out of Home, customer service and other marketing investments need to factor in omnipresence.
There is a very good possibility that wallets that hold tokens today will become the new forms of identity and log-in replacing email and Facebook and Apple log-ins.
NFT’s and other tokens (defi, governance etc.) will not just be about art but their underlying capabilities of currency, membership, status and governance will be the building the blocks of the next generation of Customer Relationship Management (think of airline miles 2.0).
It maybe early today but analog organizations take a lot of time to adapt to the pace of digital technology which is leaping ahead so getting started early to adapt, learn, and prepare makes sense. Every person in a company particularly senior decision makers need to be familiar to both understand the challenges but also begin to understand the possibilities so they can time their investments correctly. (In the near term do not to imagine that any of this will have business impact or not be filled with mistakes).
This is the time to measure ROL not ROI.
Return on Learning and not Return on Investment.
Learn, make mistakes, build partnerships, identify opportunities today versus three years from now.
Companies that moved early with aggressive senior management attention came to benefit greatly in The First and The Second Connected Ages.
Art rendered using Unreal Engine 5.
Omnipresence and Society.Mobile, Social, Search and E-Commerce have the changed the contours of society in ways good and bad but the positives have been greater than the negatives.
Without a doubt from a breakdown in trust, increased polarization, inequality and challenges to mental health particularly of younger people have been significant and need to be addressed but few people would give up the magical powers of the last two decades of advances.
In anticipation of the potential downsides which will be surely many it will be important that industry, government and society in general anticipate, monitor and find ways to minimize the risks while retaining the benefits.
Omnipresence and Work.Work, workplaces, and workers are likely to change significantly in the next five to ten years.
Covid-19 underlined that while some in-person interaction can help relationships, learning and meaning of work the days of four or five days in an office are likely to be limited to dentists and hardware engineers.
The momentum of melding in-person and distributed work will allow companies to attract and retain world class and diverse talent while managing their costs and it will allow talent to pursue multiple opportunities and optimizing a mix of work and non-work life to shifting needs and conditions.
Regardless of their occasional limitations distributed work today is enabled by mobile and computing technology and software like Teams, Zoom, and Slack.
Augmented Reality will enable workers to be more productive and powerful and Virtual Reality in time (again see the progress in Unreal Engine over the years) will create new workplaces and interaction opportunities.
Today Facebook with Horizon Work (Oculus Quest 2) headsets is taking the first steps in the area and a range of companies including Accenture which uses the term Extended Reality to describe the blend of physical and virtual reality are beginning to on-board new employee in part using the new technologies (Nth Floor).
But while these may get the news it’s nothing compared to the range of what is possible for business, graphics, design and manufacturing. Go to Nvidia’s Omniverse and click on the solution tab to see the range of what business is doing today!
Omnipresence is here and will grow enabled by breakthrough technologies, alignment with human needs and desires, the creative genius of millions and an increase in business and workplace solutions.
It’s time to be present for Omnipresence and be awake to the possibilities of the Omniverse!
May 15, 2022
Culture.
It has been written that culture eats strategy for breakfast and that culture is a great differentiator among companies.
If you query Google on “What is a good company culture?” you will get billions of results (6, 250,000,000!) and if you clicked on the links of the results on the first page you would have a list of over 100 different keys to culture.
Purpose, values, mission, respect, freedom, quality of leadership, great compensation, high growth, flexibility, diversity, multi-stakeholder capitalism and on and on the list goes.
Today as firms struggle with attracting and retaining workers they worry about culture.
A reason to get people back to the office is to make sure that there is no loss of “culture”.
But what exactly makes for a good company culture?
Study firm after firm and analysis after analysis and if one looks carefully there are four keys to culture.
A commitment to excellence.
A growth mindset.
Clarity of communication.
Connectedness.
Photography by Whitney Lewis- Smith
A Commitment to excellence.Successful companies are committed to excelling in three areas above all:
a) Superior products and services.
b) Industry beating financial results on an enduring basis.
c) World class talent.
These three are both inputs and outcomes of superior cultures and deeply interconnected.
Great people often create superior products and services that delight clients and customers driving amazing financial results.
Superior financial results allow one to create benefit packages that hire the best people and create great products and services.
Excellent products and services, success in attracting world class talent and financial results are what defines every leading company that make the list of companies that are the best places to work for or are known for their culture.
A focus on excellence makes for excellent cultures and not the other way around.
Photography by Whitney Lewis- Smith
A Growth Mindset.One of the key reasons that Microsoft came out of a decade long slumber in the five years that Satya Nadella took over as CEO was his insistence that the company evolve from “a know-it-all mindset” to a “growth mindset” inspired by Carol Dweck’s book “Growth Mindset”
The keys to a growth mindset are a focus on setting goals and learning by adapting from setbacks and progress towards the goals, working to improve oneself versus blaming others, a focus on the outside and not just the inside (e.g., stop looking at the world through “Windows”).
Companies that invest in education, learning and continuous improvement tend to rapidly iterate and adapt to market conditions.
To grow a company, one must grow minds.
Growth of skill sets, and future career potential are also key to attracting and retaining talent.
Photography by Whitney Lewis- Smith
Clarity of Communication.Companies that thrive ensure that their employees, customers and in some cases other stakeholders are constantly aware and apprised of the answer to three questions:
a) Where are we going? This is ensuring that everyone understands the strategy and vision of the company.
b) What just happened? Transparency about both good and bad happenings so that people feel fully informed of the current situation.
c) What now? Gossip and rumor love a vacuum and more information even if it is “we are figuring it out” ensures that people are as informed as possible.
Trust is at the heart of many cultures, but trust is earned by clearness of intent and transparency.
Intent is being clear of what the company, team or individual is trying to do, and transparency is explaining how one is trying to do the thing.
This way people can question and interrogate or disagree and therefore improve what one is trying to do or by knowing how one is trying to achieve the outcome individuals can suggest ways to do it better.
If one does not share intention or fail to be transparent about the path to achieving the intention, people may become suspicious or feel disrespected about not being informed or asked for input.
Photography by Whitney Lewis- Smith
Connectedness.In great company cultures one finds connectedness.
Connectedness of collaboration between units and teams: This is usually achieved by constant communication of what each unit does and trying to find common language, creating opportunities to build relationships and importantly incentive systems that reward how a team or country do versus an individual or unit.
Connectedness to reality/facts/truth: Great companies can run into trouble when people fail to call out the “turd on the table”, deliver bad news quickly and get people to recognize shifts in industry dynamics and trends. When “a way” or “if you speak up you will be punished” environments cause companies to miss warning signals both due to integrity issues or new competition or dis-satisfied clients.
Connectedness to something greater than the company: Some call this purpose or a belief in multi-stakeholder capitalism or ESG. The key is that companies cannot succeed in the long run without profits but also profits are not enough and everything from a dedication to the long-term well-being of their community and the ups and downs of life and talent matter.
Connectedness is not just about getting along but diversity of voices and not just faces, connecting multiple goals and combining skill sets.
Photography by Whitney Lewis- Smith
Excellence. Growth mindset. Clarity of communication. Connectedness.You do not have to run a unit or a group or a company to have an impact on its culture.
Even if your team is just you and two other folks you can improve your micro-culture by focusing on excellence, learning, communication, and connection.
And your firm is nothing, but a re-aggregation of the micro-cultures so why not drive your company culture by upgrading the culture you have an influence on?
After all the future comes from the slime and not the heavens.
May 8, 2022
Decisions!
At work and in life we are called upon to make many decisions.
Here are some thoughts on the topic.
“The difficulty in life is the choice”
The author George Moore used this phrase to describe the challenges of making a demanding decision.
Certain big choices can define a person’s character or destroy everything they stand for. The choice can lead to a life of happiness or the fall of an individual.
Similarly in business companies often find themselves in a “bet the farm” decision that could determine the trajectory of their future success.
Many decisions are difficult.
Even sometimes what seem to be inconsequential ones.
The Paradox of Choice
In 2005 Barry Schwartz wrote a seminal book called “The Paradox of Choice “whose basic insight was that industry is built on giving us more choices, but people want fewer choices.
More choices freeze people in being unable to decide what they should choose. Then after they choose, they wonder whether the other choice was better. Or they are often asked to choose without having the ability to make the right decision (like a doctor providing the risks and benefits of two or three different treatments and then instead of deciding which one makes sense delegating the decision to the patient).
If you have 15 minutes watch this seminal talk (or read the transcript) by Barry Schwartz at TED. It holds true nearly 20 years later as we have many more choices.
All financial decisions if perfection is the goal are always very wrong.
In hindsight every financial choice one makes will prove to be in some range of wrong.
A stock should not have been sold so early or why did not one sell it as soon as it went into decline? Why did we buy so little or why did we buy so much?
Time will reveal every allocation between different asset classes was far less than optimum. Either one was too diversified or too concentrated.
From deciding to buy a home, to locking in an interest rate time will prove us that all of us were wrong if perfection or optimization was the goal.
Instead of goals of profit maximization, perfect mix and zero regret it may make more sense to aim for “enough”, “do not risk going broke” and remembering that money is what gives us options in life but is not life itself.
If only we had made a different choice!
In “Summer Storm” a short poem by Dana Gioia the protagonist recalls a meeting two decades ago at a wedding reception with someone they connected with for a few minutes and never saw again.
Why does that evening’s memory
Return with this night’s storm —
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?
There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.
And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.
Imaginary Choices.
Moments in time that we believe were decision points but really are nothing but moments in our memory that are decisive and reverberate for the rest of our lives like …that girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane…
The Speed of Choice: High Tea or Espresso Coffee?
There are two styles of decision-making High Tea and Espresso Coffee.
Most companies and people utilize both styles depending on the situation.
The High Tea style of decision making is one of percolation and process. It takes time and many people are involved, and it goes up and down an organization.
The Espresso Coffee style is fast and focused with a bias for action.
Depending on what is being decided, the financial implication of a right or wrong decision and the ability to change one’s mind should determine which beverage preparation style is being used.
Decisions of strategy that will impact many people and cost a lot and be hard to walk back probably needs some High Tea approach. Decisions that are not interconnected to large parts of the organization, cost a little, can be stopped or reversed quickly should probably be espresso style.
Too many organizations unfortunately treat espresso decisions as high tea decisions.
Oddly as the world accelerates, we often see a great percolation where too many decisions are being group groped and slow marched.
What is fascinating is that so many small decisions are requiring so much time and people input that the human and time capital spent in evaluating the decision is many multiples of the cost or the risk of the decision being taken.
Let’s pick the right beverage style makes sense when deciding to decide.
May 1, 2022
Time Passages
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives wrote Anne Dillard.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? asked Mary Oliver
Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning.
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time as an edge.Successful firms and people use time as an edge.
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, but if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details” Jeff Bezos
Three behaviors/beliefs that are common to most successful individuals and firms:
The Power of Compound Interest/Compound Improvement: The most powerful concept in gaining wealth or knowledge is continuous growth over a sustained time.
See early what others see late: Almost every successful person or company recognized a trend when it was a little stream rather than a gushing river and then committed to align with it.
Persistence: They just keep on going through adversity and setback and they remember Queen Elizabeth the First who said “Time dissolves more problems than man solves”
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time and ProductivityFive ways to make time productive.
1. Eliminate: Many people recognizing the limitations of time tend to try to do as much as possible. They multi-task and run around in a frenzy. Usually all they achieve is more multi-tasking and more frenzy. Doing more stuff is not the same as achievement. Activity is not productivity. Showing how busy you are does not show how important you are.
2. Focus: The key to doing less is to focus. Two key filters
a) Comparative Advantage: Spend your time doing things that you can do better than most people. Some focus areas are easy like being a spouse or a parent, since you should be able to do this better than other folks. However, for many of the errands you run and the assignments you take on at work, it is important to ask if you can outsource or delegate or find a colleague who is better than you.
b) Positive Outcome: Where you can choose you should only do things which give you a positive outcome. Either you 1) earn a financial reward, 2) learn something new, 3) help someone else or the team get better or 4) experience feels good. If it is not one of those four outcomes and it is avoidable, why are you doing it?
3. Scale: You can scale yourself and your impact and therefore save time. Two ways to do this is to use “leverage” and “momentum”.
Much of what we do as white-collar workers is to listen, think, create, communicate and sell. Basically with a few exceptions our success is based on how we are as communicators and sellers of ideas and points of view in building and motivating people and teams.
a) Leverage: Today technology and scheduling allow people to leverage. You can use social media, good writing and speaking skills to reach many people that you need to communicate and sell your thinking to. You are not limited to small meetings and groups. You can decide if you are senior to gather folks at the right conference or meeting versus repeating yourself again and again.
b) Momentum: The trend is your friend. To not waste your time, you need to understand the underlying trend that is driving your firm or your business and, in most cases, align with it. The world is going global. The world is going digital. Every company has a built in DNA. If you are going to go against the flow prepare for much loss of time and grief.
4. Do new things: The essence of life is new experiences. Often what we remember, and which gives time certain elongation and depth are new experiences. These do not just have to be travels or new relationships and new jobs but could be as simple as walking down a new street, eating at a new place and going to a new cultural event. If there is a way to tattoo the moment into your memory you should try too.
5. Give you time to others: One of the best ways to use your time is to use it not on yourself but on others. Nothing is as rewarding as helping other people, mentoring younger people, and forgetting about yourself in your time equation.
And in the end, it is the time that you do not measure that is the most meaningful and possibly productive of all.
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time and SuccessA definition of success is the ability to spend time the way you want to spend it or gives you joy.
To be free to use your time to pay attention to what matters and what matters to you.
Or as the late David Foster Wallace said in his mind shifting talk This is Water:
“The important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time and loss.If there are three realities to life they are learning, love and loss. Not everybody succeeds at learning or love, but everybody gets a graduate degree in loss and a doctorate when people very close die.
Joan Didion wrote two books on the loss of her husband “The Year of Magical Thinking” and her daughter “Blue Nights” which are read by many dealing with loss.
She wrote of the fragility of life noting that her husband died while eating dinner: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends” and the loneliness afterwards: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
And as time moves forward and people, places and hopes come and go people are shaped by what is no more.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day is not at all”
But in the end Didion notes we go on by forging new stories and finding new places and begin forgetting.
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
But one must forge ahead…
“Do not whine...Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
And to college graduates a few years ago she made the case for living deeply…
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time and LifeFranz Kafka wrote “The meaning of life is that it stops”
And most of us can calculate the robust and healthy days left if we are lucky by subtracting our age from 80 (around which much begins to go wrong physically and sometimes also one may see a diminishment in mental faculties leading to a much more constrained life) and multiplying it by 365 days.
If you are 60 you have less than 7500 days. If you are 40 you have 15,000 days.
So, when someone asks you to do things without some form of fair compensation (it does not have to be money but could be learning, experience or the joy of helping) or does not respect your time, do remember you are the one paying for their dis-respect and their cheap valuation of your life!
Photography by Teruyasu Kitayama
Time and “ordinary day”.In the future the ritual of the ordinary day will be special, just as we have come to realize after months of a new way of living that the simple pleasures of free movement, meeting friends, sitting in a crowded bar, and watching a sports game were so special.
Life does not have to be lived forward and understood backward if we decide to pay attention.
Be aware of the fading moments of now.
Look around you. Watch the special quality of light or listen to the hiss of the air duct. Treasure the conversations and even the repetition and lack of differentiation of day after day.
Because one day it will not be so…
In memory of an advertising great, a Chicagoan, a friend to many, a husband and father of seven, Sean Finnegan who passed away suddenly and much too soon on Friday evening.
April 24, 2022
Self-Defeat!
Illustration by Don Martin
Two of the biggest macro-stories last week were the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and expanded lockdown across more than 30 cities in China due to Covid-19.
Two of the bigger micro-stories last week were the shutting down of CNN+ just 32 days after launch and the 40 percent plunge in Netflix stock.
Though each was different they shared a common trait which is a surprising reversal of fortune!
Defeat seemed to be snatched from the jaws of victory!
Illustration by Don Martin
Self-Defeat.
A case can be made that most successful individuals, institutions and nations are rarely defeated by others but find ways to defeat or weaken themselves to enable their own withering and dissolving.
In almost every case the same four indicators have been flashing for a while, but no one was paying attention.
The four symptoms of SDD (Self-Defeating Disease) are:
Incestuous thinking: A smaller and smaller group of decision makers with similar backgrounds and long tenure in the same place.
Cult replacing Culture: A cult either around a leader, a “way”, a fashionable financial market meme (“everything as a service”, “data driven everything”, “streaming is the only way”, or some other weird dogmas parroted and echoed by a fawning press chasing page views, trending stories and personalities).
Fear: Fear of speaking up, fear of change, fear of opposing the leader or “the way”!
Overreach: Letting recent success and fawning make one lose perspective that much success is driven by luck and trends that can turn and therefore overreaching too far or moving too soon.
Illustration by Don Martin
The symptoms at play.
Russia: The long table that Putin sits at the very end of reveals his self-isolation, fear and cult mongering which has led to one of the greatest (and tragically bloodiest) strategic miscalculations in decades. Regardless of whether Russia ‘wins” the citizens of a civilization that gave the world Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky has been led backward rather than forward. Truth has a habit of breaking in and facts are stubborn things. Sooner or later gravity has its way with initial upward floating balloons of baloney. And Russia and Russians will find in time their own leader defeated them and pushed them back a generation. If time is all we, have he robbed a nation’s proud citizens of years of their lives.
China: A little over one year ago China appeared to be unstoppable. Their economy was soaring. They had Covid under control. Their next generation technology companies from Alibaba to Tencent were growing and innovating.
Then overreach.
The leadership determined that it was time to not let any opposing forces rise thus they set about attacking their technology firms destroying nearly a trillion in value and stalling innovation. Soon this began to slow the economy and, in a world, where software, talent and change will determine the future they froze people with fear.
They thought that they could control Nature, but Covid morphed and their internal belief in second-rate home-grown vaccines now have country at great risk. Now the “way” of zero covid tolerance has tied their hands to playing a potentially losing game stirring resistance greater than ever before.
Finally, since overreach loves company, they decided to forge a great fusion with Mr. Putin badly hurting their reputation and “soft-power”.
China is a great country and the Chinese a great civilization that will recover but their recent setbacks are all self-inflicted due to a cult like leader, incestuous thinking, fear, and overreach.
Netflix: In hindsight it is so clear that Netflix no longer has a significant edge in technology or data or programming (the edge they still have for the moment is international sourcing of programming). They had started as David taking on Goliath but now are increasingly feared and are regarded as bullies. Their “keeper” philosophy of upgrading talent had dissolved from a great idea to pure drivel and so much of their data and talent propaganda is Kool-Aid that even their talent only tolerated due to a soaring stock price. Now the entire company is perceived differently internally and externally and in a world of omni-channel, omni-presence and omni-everything being streaming only is not that omni-potent. Their leadership is brilliant and have created an amazing company but somewhere they tripped into the light fantastic.
CNN+: Very few people watch CNN most days. In February average prime time audience among people 25 to 54 was less than 150,000 people! And CNN is not specifically paid for (it is bundled as part of a cable package) and covers actual news. CNN viewership rarely ever reaches a million and that is when there is massive breaking news. So now create a non-news streaming channel that costs $5.99 per month, and you must be high or believe a Mckinsey analysis that you paid for to anticipate 2 million sign ups the first year. (After a month of heavy promotion and cut- rate pricing of $2.99 a month for life just over 100,000 people signed up and daily viewership was about 10,000 people which is less than half the number of people who read this post today!).
CNN+ was not about the future of CNN. It was about hurt feelings, about the future of its personalities, about leaders making a mark and earning a stripe for launching things or being aligned with the coolness of streaming. Mostly it was a massive self-induced hypnotic trance among some of the smartest and most accomplished people in the business who spent too much time watching CNN.
Three hundred million dollars later the field of dream has led to a war of recrimination, a sullied brand, a set-back to a merger and tragically lots of junior people without jobs and world class talent with egg on their face.
Illustration by Don Martin
How to avoid self-defeat.
Russia will evolve. China will thrive. Netflix will try expanding to gaming and remain one among a handful of leaders and CNN will be one additional reason the new “HBODiscoveryMaximus” service will be worth paying for. None of these players are going away but they need not have suffered these completely avoidable setbacks.
These were not the setbacks that come with trends turning, the uncertainties of innovation or the win and lose of daily business or strategic competition.
These were the setbacks of self-defeat.
Since the best of talent and the best of companies can defeat themselves, we need to be wary when we spot the four symptoms of Incestuous thinking, cults, fear, and overreach.
And we must ensure that organizations and individuals can access remedies for curing SDD (Self-Defeating Disease):
Diversity: Diversity of backgrounds and thinking particularly in leadership teams are critical. If everybody thinks the same way, it can be dangerous. Disagreement and challenging points of view is what boards, external perspectives and independently successful people bring to a company or to a person.
Building a case for the opposite: Whenever a key decision needs to be made a team or individual should be charged with building a case for the exact opposite of what you as an individual, a leader or board are considering. This provides two benefits. First it allows one to make sure that group think does not disconnect us from reality since there is a reminder that we may be wrong. Second it helps us correct gaps in the thinking of our original recommendation. It is like stress testing our proposition.
A blank piece of paper approach: Many times, individuals and companies find themselves in self-defeating positions because of a way of doing, a historic momentum, legacy costs, or structures and fixating on current category dynamics. What if one was to launch a company or initiative with a blank sheet of paper with only three constraints. A legal one (whatever one does has to be legal), technological (it must be possible today) and economic (some breakeven or other financial constraint) what would one do to anticipate or meet a customer need?
The future comes from the slime and not the heavens: There are many benefits of being a leader, working at a very successful company and being on the top of the world. Everybody wants to meet with you or think you are cool because of the fame and reputation of your company. The press fawns and friends’ gush. It gives us all a great rush. Important that we do not get too high on our fumes and begin to believe our flatulence smells like Chanel 5. T
The future usually does not emerge from the gatherings at Davos, The Allen Conference or at TED but where no one is looking or visiting. The Auto companies were looking at each other and they missed Tesla and Uber. Procter and Gamble missed Dollar Shave Club. IBM missed Microsoft. And today Tik Tok has more engagement than every Facebook property combined (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). So, let’s meet the crazy folks who have an idea, go off the beaten path and not take ourselves too seriously.
Or let us remember just one characteristic to minimize self-defeat.
Humility.
April 17, 2022
Management Next!
Illustrations by Rob Hodgson.
It is a difficult time to be a manager whether one is managing a tiny team or a large global organization.
Several challenges from a) business model disruption caused by technological shifts which also makes managers question their own relevance b) distributed and unbundled work, c) the expectations and sensitivities of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, d) the rapid pace of change, e) a multi-generational and multi-ethnic workforce and f) the need to balance multiple stakeholder objectives from markets to purpose and values are causing stress, burn-out and self-doubt among many.
Management and leadership remain important in organizations of most sizes and the utopian belief of holarcracy (self-management), or a hive mind form of distributed management has not yet taken the world by storm. Many of these theories collapse and crumble in the rough and tough world of people and market competition.
Managers and management are not going away.
Rather the best managers grow themselves and adapt to new challenges via a threefold path:
a) A focus on deliverables.
b) Optimizing via feedback.
c) Growing leadership and not just management skills.
Illustrations by Rob Hodgson.
A focus on deliverables.Organizations exist to satisfy a customers stated or un-stated needs with some combination of product (hardware or software) and service.
Across all industries around the world, one sees the same eight customer/client needs.
Four of these expectations are focused on the what which is the quality of the product or service and four of them focus on the how which are about excellence of delivery.
The What/Outputs: 1) Quality product whether it be a piece of hardware, a tube of toothpaste or an advertising campaign is job one, 2) Insights about the customer or the client’s customer that makes them see things differently and identify new markets and opportunities, 3) Inspirational Design/ Ideas because differentiation usually happens here and 4) Value which is not just about price competitiveness, but the quality of output and outcome given the level of input.
The How/Process: 1) Collaboration with the customer’s other suppliers as every firm works in a world that is both connected and businesses need to match and mix the best of breed partners with minimum friction and drama, 2) Continuous improvement to keep up with new changes, trends and consumer needs, 3) Operating discipline in making deliveries on time and on budget, and 4) Values of the company including purpose, DEI and other quality of culture variables.
Amidst the tidal waves of changes and pressures confronting managers these customer/client needs are stars to steer and manage by.
Without customers and clients everything else is moot.
And since increasingly customers care about how talent is treated and the purpose of the company many of the key planks of purpose, values and DEI gain greater traction through this lens.
Illustrations by Rob Hodgson.
Optimizing via feedback.To grow one needs to continuously improve.
A key ingredient to improvement is feedback.
Feedback however is both difficult to give and receive.
Feedback challenges are even more pronounced these days due to three factors:
a) Covid: an increasingly sensitive workforce emerging from a year of Covid-19 driven challenges with heightened emotions and changed mindsets.
b) DEI: a concern that criticism may be taken as a form of insensitivity or discrimination as companies rightly focus on ensuring Diversity, Inclusion and Equality.
c) Polarization: a polarized social and political environment.
The six steps to giving better feedback.Best practices suggest that there are six approaches that can help people give and accept feedback in ways that recognize these and other realities.
1. Focus on how the task or the process could have been improved rather than criticize the person: By focusing on how an assignment could be done better the emphasis is in on the product and not the person.
2. Compare the shortfalls to a higher standard that might have been met on another project or another time: By recalling assignments or times where the individual or team did a great job, one re-enforces to the person or team that they are capable of having done better. The emphasis is on what was less than ideal on this occasion versus rather than believing the individual or team is incapable of doing a good job.
3. Make yourself sensitive and aware of extenuating circumstances: We all have bad days and many times these are a result of something else distracting us or worrying us in our lives. It may be illness, family issues or other challenges. By empathizing with an individual via wondering if there is a reason quality has slipped indicates both concern and humanity.
4. Provide input as specific as possible as to what could be done better: Pointing out what went wrong or was less than optimal is only one half of feedback. The more important half is showing or teaching or guiding on how one can improve. Identify either steps or training or changes that need to be made.
5. Identify the next opportunity or project for a do-over or try another take: By showing both how one can improve and then identifying an upcoming opportunity to put the feedback to work concentrates the mind and channels emotions to action and the possibility of correcting the shortfall.
6. Provide personal help and perspective: If feedback is provided in the context of what others have struggled with over the years or what you may have learned and improved it lets people know that mistakes, mess-ups, and other shortfalls are par for the course in career growth. By also asking how you can help re-enforces that you are on the persons side and are committed to try to make them improve.
In addition to giving feedback, it is important for managers to get feedback.
Three ways of ensuring one is getting feedback1. Scan for signals: People are constantly providing feedback even if they are not vocalizing it. In some instances, you may gauge it in numerical signals from how well your writing is read, reacted to, or shared or whether you are invited to key meetings. Other times it is to watch facial and body language. You learn a lot by reading a room or a Zoom gallery.
2. Ask for feedback on a regular basis: One can do this with three simple questions which by the way they are framed ensure people are comfortable helping you since they are positive in tone:
a. What worked well?
b. If/when I do this next time what could be better?
c. Who do you think does what I need to do well and where can I learn more?
3. End of Day or Week Self Review: Most people know in their gut what worked or went well and what did not. Many successful individuals end the day or week with some variation of a quick review:
a. The Work: What went well with my work product that I feel proud signing it and what could have gone better?
b. The Team: What felt good and productive in the way I interacted with people and where could I have been better in some ways in handling my or someone else’s emotions?
c. The Improvement: What little improvement did I manage to make today or this week? A new habit. Learning a new approach. Strengthening a relationship.
Illustrations by Rob Hodgson.
Growing leadership and not just management skills.A manager is not the same as a leader.
Every single person can be a leader.
Leader is not a title that is bestowed but a role that is lived.
Leader does not mean boss.
One can be a leader with zero minions or reporting staff.
People are assigned to bosses.
They follow leaders.
The six traits of leaders.Everyone can learn and build the traits of a leader if they wish to and are disciplined about it.
Becoming a leader does not entail anyone else allowing it, awarding it or being able to take it away.
The six traits are 1) Competence, 2) Time Management, 3) Integrity, 4) Empathy, 5) Vulnerability and 6) Inspiration.
They are all internally driven and with discipline and time can be honed and sculpted.
1. Competence: If one’s skills are not current or up to date it is very hard to manage or lead other people. This is a key reason why every manager must set time aside to learn and keep current.
2. Time Management: Great managers do not waste their time or other people’s time by calling for useless check-ins and meetings. They also learn to balance the urgent and the important by allocating their own and other peoples time to projects that are key to operating today while also remaining competitive tomorrow.
3. Integrity: Trust is speed.
Trusted people rarely have the need to pull out multi-paged power point decks to convince their teammates, bosses, and clients about what they are recommending.
If one is not trusted, it is hard to be a leader.
Trust can be earned by placing a primacy on facts, being clear about one’s intentions and transparent about how one is making decisions.
4. Empathy: Leaders bring about change and achieve goals by bringing other people along with them.
To do so it is key to understand where people are coming from. What their fears, concerns, challenges as well as hopes, desires and dreams are.
5. Vulnerability: Vulnerability is strength and not a weakness.
By speaking about things, one worries about, one reveals humanity and comes off as believable.
It makes other people step up to try to help and offset your concerns or lack of competence with their or other people’s complimentary skills.
But as importantly it gives people the room to also speak up and point out other weaknesses that may exist not just with you but on projects that you are working on.
6. Inspiration: As Blaise Pascal wrote “We choose with our hearts, and we use numbers to justify what we did”.
After the facts and the data, after the PowerPoints and the spreadsheets we often remain unconvinced, dis-believing, and hesitant.
Yes, we are living in a data driven, silicon based, computing world but all of us are story driven, carbon based, feeling individuals!
Joan Didion wrote “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” and thus storytelling and examples bring a vivid reality to get people to rise to another level.
Learn to communicate through words, stories, art, and example.
April 10, 2022
Career Tools.
Here are four tools that may help on a career journey.
They are a map, a telescope, a compass and a first aid kit.
A map.A working life will last four or five decades and will span three broad phases. An early, middle, and late stage.
It is important to know where you are and what are the guideposts that matter at each stage.
Early in the journey.
A life of work is a decades long adventure.
A marathon not a sprint.
During the early years it is important to align with the long-term trends that can serve as a tail wind. Every era has its growth industry and secular forces. Being in the right industries or the right areas in an industry can help you be successful. Conversely, regardless of how good you are and how hard you work, it will be hard to sell typewriters in an age of word processors.
Another key in the early years is not to be discouraged when the landscape or weather turns difficult. Even the best jobs in the early years suck for a third of the time. One should not turn back, stop moving forward or give up. Time dissolves more problems than man or woman solves.
Finally, keep your eyes on the horizon and not fixated on other travelers. You are trying to improve and get better towards a goal versus trying to stop others or getting to the goal faster than others. Improving versus your past self is the only true measure. Competing with others is not beneficial and you may need their help when you hit setbacks and you need others to carry you forward.
Middle of the journey.
It is at this stage where extra-ordinary career trajectories are enabled by finding the right sherpas and focusing on the movement and paths that serve you well.
Find a great boss or mentor and start to focus on what you excel at and gives you joy.
A large part of anybody’s success is driven by who they report to. The right manager and leader not only mentors and teaches but also delegates and promotes. Often these skills not only allow you to thrive, but it enables your manager to progress in the organization paving a path for your own forward momentum.
A decade or two into a career most people begin to understand what they are good at and what gives them joy. It is imperative that one now focusses on these key strengths and not allow your company to try to make you a “well-rounded player” or spend time addressing your weaknesses. Yes, it is important to understand how different components of an organization work and to be collaborative but companies and markets reward expertise, competency, and skills and not some mish mash goo of generalities.
Late in the journey.
Three decades or more into a career one still has a decade or two ahead and there are two keys to ensure that these decades are productive, impactful, and meaning filled.
First, you must check to see if the map you are using remains valid. Just as anyone looking at a map of a world from decades ago would not recognize the names of countries or boundaries today, the same holds true for expertise. It is time to unlearn parts of what you know, transform your way of operating, and potentially re-invent yourself to align with a different terrain.
Second, this is where you need to determine if it makes sense to take a different road or trajectory as you continue your journey. Exits are as important as entrances. Every career in a company has a midnight hour, and the smart ones leave at five to twelve. This is not just elegant but can extend and amplify one’s career and impact.
To read more about the different career phases please read 12 Career Lessons.
A telescope.As one progresses in a career it is important to look ahead and try to prepare for what may come.
The future of work is unlikely to be what it is today, and it is key that one adapt and align and skill up for what lies ahead.
Due to globalization, demographic shifts and technology change, the world of work will look very different a decade from now in at least four significant ways.
a) Gigs: Larger portions of the work force will be gig workers/free agents even if we work for long periods of time in the same company. Work has become unbundled into component parts and distributed across geographies and time zones. Cloud based and other technologies allow companies to combine and re-aggregate talent and expertise while the same technologies enable people all over the world to access opportunities they did not have. This has been true for many well-paid professions from consulting to the entertainment industry and is not just about Uber drivers and Task Rabbits.
b) Technology enabled and measured: Everything that can be digitized or technologically enabled will be. Most jobs will require us to work in tandem with machines and technology. Increasingly, work will be quantified and measured as it already has in many industries like sales where we measure the number of leads a tele-marketer close per hour or when we calibrate the cost per mile and accident-free driving skills of truckers.
c) Third Connected Age: Just as search, e-commerce, mobile and social changed business we are going to see AI, 5G, AR/VR and Blockchain sculpt new contours into what work is, how it is done, how value and ownership rights are determined and much more. The price of crypto or NFT’s or brands in the “metaverse” are the cosmetic layer of real dramatic change taking place underneath.
d) Older and more diverse workforces: Except for Africa and to a certain extent India the world is aging fast, and people are living longer while population is declining. For a variety of reasons from economic need to delayed pensions to decades of healthy life after sixty, to the desperate need for employees. the workforce is going to grow older and as a result truly multi-generational with employees spanning nearly six decades! This will be in addition to continued diversity in ethnicity and gender.
This view of the future will require us to a) create true competencies and expertise, b) build reputations and networks, c) learn to work with technology while building skills that computers cannot easily replicate and d) be ready to work with a far more diverse work force than ever before
For more clarity on the future of work please read How to Thrive in the Modern Workplace. The Fractionalized Employee. and The Age of the Seasoned.
A Compass.In a world buffeted by change where a working life lasts decades what star does one steer by?
Find alignment with what you excel at and what makes you grow.
To frame yourself so people understand what you are at good at and at the same time continue to hone and grow your skills it is important to understand your niche, your voice, and your story.
Niche allows you to build expertise and position yourself.
Voice reflects the reality that people do not follow titles, but they follow people and want to know who you are and what you believe in.
Story gives people reason to believe and clarity on how you became who you are. We are all stories, and we need to make sure we know and can narrate ours.
To help you reveal your niche, voice and story come up with three words for each. Three words that describe what you do best at or are expert in, three words that describe who you are and three words that describe the story of your career.
These nine words can help you not only frame yourself but also filter opportunities and has been used with great success by thousands of talented people.
To understand and see the exercise please read Career Turbocharging.
While the Nine Word Exercise serves as a compass that allows you to find and point to your true north, what about a compass that can help you decide which path to take when you come to a fork in your career? When you come to ask yourself or are forced to ask, “should I stay, or should I go?”
We often make the mistake of deciding to stay or go by using the criteria of money, fame, and power as the key decision variables. Leaving one job for another for more money, fame, and power while understandable is not the main framing criteria especially once you are mid-career and relatively successful. The questions to ask are more about freedom, story and growth.
Will you have the freedom and flexibility you need that gives you satisfaction ? Do you have to suppress your story and make it a supporting actor to the story of the company or does your career and company re-enforce the story of your life ? And growth. Can you keep learning and growing as a person and professional?
How best to decide to stay or go? Please read Should I stay, or should I go?
A First-Aid Kit.Work is important to us all. In addition to making a living, work gives many of us identity, purpose, meaning, and connections.
But work is often filled with stress, pressure, shocks, and challenges. Industries swirl, bosses change, clients pressurize, markets go haywire. Key pitches are lost, opportunities disappear, and mistakes are made. And rest of life does not stop either. Family issues arise, health fluctuates, wars and pandemics break out.
As a result, all of us at some stage or the other find ourselves stressed, angry, depressed, disappointed, lost or more.
All over the world smart companies and leaders recognize that they need to help people take care of their physical, mental and emotional operating systems.
We cannot be productive if we are spent, swirling, emotionally raw and running on fumes.
It is imperative that we find ways to feel better, to repair and to be better.
Sometimes the best thing one can do for one’s career is to focus on oneself and not on the company or the career . A physically diminished and emotionally impoverished you does not serve anyone well.
Feeling and being better is often a combination of small steps that enable compound improvement and focus on filling in gaps. It involves looking at things with new mindsets that embrace openness and improvisation. Finally, one recognizes and aligns with the reality that life combines loss, love, and learning.
Opportunities to repair and heal can be found everywhere and every day and often does not require major cost or time investments and could be found in gardens, bodies of water or in a book of poems.
A distilled compilation of how to look after yourself and others can be found in Repair and Six Ways to Feel and Be Better.
May you thrive!
Here is a list of all the pieces noted in this post for easy navigation.
