One of the weirder experiences most of us can relate to is being in a meeting where nearly all of the participants disagree with the decision being made, but the power dynamics keep anyone in the room from objecting. It’s never a great feeling, and it seems to happen for a few different reasons
I'm not one to extol the virtues of failure. I get annoyed whenever people talk about “celebrating failure.” That said, there are some benefits to getting your ass handed to you every once in a blue moon.
Investing time, money and energy into a strategy, only to have the market not respond is like taking a punch. You might not get knocked out, but the effect of multiple blows can take a toll on your confidence and enthusiasm.
I nearly scrapped this column, because they’re not bad ideas per se. Both are still in fashion today, especially in the startup-o-sphere, and like many popular ideas there's more than a grain of truth to them. But these two ideas have run themselves ragged, and I see them doing more harm than good when I encounter them.
I’ll say this about bad bosses: they perform a vital role in the economy. By repelling people like Adam who want better for themselves, they inadvertently send talented people out to pollinate other teams, companies, and industries with their brainpower. From a macro perspective, bad bosses may be a net benefit to the ecosystem. Of course, that matters not a bit to the individuals who have to work for bad bosses and the companies that suffer as a result of their presence...
I've boiled my thoughts down to two reasons why it's so important to master basic skills of working with raw data:
One of the things I’ve found most surprising over the years is how little understanding most employees have of their company’s own data. Forget about having enough data scientists, most of the companies I’ve come across have shockingly few people who are capable of analyzing their data in the most basic ways. For instance, I recently spoke at length with a marketing manager at a major hotel group who confided that, “maybe two or three people in the company,” understood the business and the internal systems well enough to analyze the company’s raw (i.e. non-aggregated) booking and sales data...
Recently, I found myself in an impromptu meeting at my desk with several colleagues in the midst of a debate over how to implement a new software feature. We needed to reach a decision so that the engineers could get on with their work, but our available options each had drawbacks to consider. As the product manager, I had the final say over how the software should behave, but I couldn’t see a clear winner no matter which way I looked at my choices. The answer was that I didn’t know the answer. Even better, I realized didn’t care because it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the big picture. So I let them figure it out...
After its share of delays and author procrastination, my book finally went live on Amazon yesterday. Since it’s not every day that I get to cross off a bucket list item, I want to tell you a little bit about what’s in it and why...
Usually, what we fear in a heated debate is not so much our feelings our feelings getting hurt but rather our professional credibility and stature being challenged. I find that Idea conflicts are best understood along two dimensions: the relative seniority of the debating parties and their relative expertise. In any idea conflict in which you find yourself engaged, you can categorize the person you engage as having more, less, or equal seniority as you and whether their domain expertise is the same, different, or partially overlapping your own...
After watching Tony Robbins’ TED Talk, I watched a few other clips of him speaking. One thing you notice quickly about Robbins, which Guy Raz also brought up in the TED Radio Hour on NPR, is how frequently he relies on numbered lists to break out a concept. He rapidly introduces topics like the “four kinds of love”, or “six human needs”, or “five steps to financial independence” before breaking out each sub-category. It’s kind of an unusual structured way of talking to an audience, especially compared with how politicians and comedians meander across topics and dive into stories when they address big groups...
Every now and then we all have to break bad news to our superiors, our customers, our investors, or whatever audience to whom we ultimately answer. As it was, is now, and forever shall be, Adam’s advice to young employees holds true: the farther out you can spot potential trouble and let your manager know, the better chance there is that you can prevent it from becoming a larger issue. But we all know that things we can’t always do this. What do you do when the opportunity to nip a problem in the bud is long, long past?
Communicating with your superiors like peers is a subtler extension of the same practice of thinking like a manager from the outset. By interacting with your managers on their level, you encourage them to treat you like a peer as opposed to someone whose experience and judgment pales in comparison to their own. By communicating with them the way their peers do, you encourage their communication “muscle memory” to take over so they don’t think to adapt their style....
Once you become a manager, you are always accountable in two directions: upward to your bosses for your team’s output, and downward to your direct reports who require feedback and coaching. If you have an office with a door, it can be tempting to keep it closed all day just so you can get some work done before six o’clock in the evening. But that’s not the job.
Smart, young apprentice talent is foundational to how most large organizations get work done. Worker bees at the bottom stay heads-down accomplishing tasks; Middle managers make sure the tasks fit into cohesive projects; Senior managers makes sure all the projects come together to accomplish a business plan. As a worker bee, the formula for career advancement can seem straightforward: outwork everyone. Before long however, that formula breaks down. Assuming they advance to the next stage, the people exiting the apprenticeship stage who don’t realize that the determinants of success are about to change can be in for a rough adjustment...
There is a simple but effective process I like to use to quickly speed up the learning curve in a new company. It’s called a “positioning map”, and it is a means of plotting your company visually against its competitors based on the strategies that each are pursuing. The graphic is simple; the effort lies in distilling your competitors’ strategies well enough to group them along strategic dimensions.
Big ideas usually are not accepted right away – at least not by everyone whom you need on board. Most of us have our own versions of my terrible meeting story, and the moral is always the same. You might feel confident to the point of certainty about an idea, but getting your audience to feel as confident as you do is often a slog. It takes cleverness, persistence, and plain old hustle to get a big idea across the goal line.
