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January 11 - February 6, 2024
“time kills all deals.”
Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants.
“What's the real cost of something free that doesn't do the job properly?
Incrementalism is about avoiding risk by building on whatever has already been achieved as a stable foundation.
Rather than seeking incremental progress from the current state, try thinking about the future state you want to reach and then work backward to the present.
Don't try to steer the ship by looking at its wake!
There is usually more performance and efficiency to be gained from your existing staff, before you take the path of least resistance—unplanned, incremental growth, leading to mediocrity and waste.
“No strategy is better than its execution.”
Strategy can't really be mastered until you know how to execute well.
When we promote inexperienced managers to senior roles, chaos ensues. It becomes the blind leading the blind. Organizations cannot scale and mature around inexperienced management staff.
Develop confidence in your own authority, not somebody else's. Great operators live, breathe, and own their strategies.
If you can't trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, all the consultants in the world can't fix that problem.
great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant
in an amped up company, execution is king.
They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from both themselves and others. They exude energy, urgency, ambition, even boldness. Faced with a challenge, they usually say, “Why not” rather than “That's impossible.”
Celebrate people who own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and seek to move the dial.
“How do I know if I'm a driver or a passenger?”
evident. If you can't answer the question in an overwhelmingly positive manner, you are probably too much of a passenger.
Don't surrender to the temptation to go into wait‐and‐see mode, hoping that time will reveal everyone's true value.
You need to make things happen, not wait around and hope for the best.
If you don't act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no prayer of changing the overall trajectory.
you need to change things fast, which can only happen by switching out the people whose skills no longer fit the mission
If you can't find the backbone to make necessary changes, you are holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential.
This process of systematically upgrading the talent at each key role is called “topgrading,”
Leaders are expected to have well‐developed networks, the ability to recruit, and the sharp critical eye to judge talent.
we want to always have a list of prioritized candidates for each critical role.
You will only see the active job seekers, who are unlikely to be the candidates you really want.
So you must staff ahead of need. Recruiting never stops.
Ultimately, leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with. Once you get good at both hiring and firing, you are well on your way to great results and a thriving career.
the dominant and persistent patterns of behaviors, beliefs, norms, and values of a workplace community.
Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose.
When not much is done to drive a cohesive, consistent culture across the organization, you end up with an amalgamation of different value systems across functions and geographies.
Your competitors can gain access to capital, hire away your talent, and steal your ideas, but they almost certainly can't replicate your culture.
Like children and pets, they learn from consequences and the lack thereof. If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clearly defined consequences, day in and day out.
More broadly, it's about always engaging with people in a genuine manner. Be interested, be responsive, be helpful whenever possible. Never ignore someone who reaches out to you from a different part of the company. Don't sit on a colleague's email for days or weeks. Respect also includes vigilance against any discrimination or harassment on gender, racial, or ethnic grounds.
you have to work at pursuing excellence every day.
We don't have any reason to exist without our customers.
Integrity means that all our stakeholders could believe what we said and trust our commitments, with no exceptions.
Trust is the first victim of integrity violations, which set off a chain reaction of negative consequences.
Confronting a lack of performance is never fun, but has to be done at all levels of the organization—based on data and facts, not negative emotions.
Good enough is never good enough.
Any weakness in execution is often treated as merely a reason to revisit the strategy.
It's hard to beat a well‐executing organization, even if the strategy isn't perfect.
It happens when most of the organization is willing to defend and promote those values and call out deviations on a day‐to‐day basis.
You only get the culture you desire if you actively pursue and enforce compliance.
Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences.
People get good at managing up and down the org chart of a single silo but flounder when problems require cooperation across silos.
My role as CEO is to facilitate their initiative and encourage them to reach creative solutions, not simply to tell them what to do.
Trust is foundational to team effectiveness—it's impossible to overstate how important it is.
Organizations where most people trust each other have a much higher quality of life than those who do not.
