| In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! If you like it, please share it on social networks! Share 💡JC's Newsletter
🔎 Some topics we will cover this week Insights to make better decisions The benefits of making decisions quickly and clearly How to close a deal How to deal with work overload
👉 Theodore Roosevelt: Address at the Sorbonne in Paris, France: “Citizenship in a Republic” (The American Presidency Project) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? The “average Alaner” should exemplify our leadership principles, and we need to have very high standards. “The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena” and not the one who criticizes without doing! I love how he describes well what it requires to achieve great things. The importance of being practical while having high ideals. The importance of aptitude over expertise.
High standards: In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
“ The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena”: The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Hire for aptitude: The education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that they ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize.
👉 [The Knowledge Project Ep. #144] Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions (Farnam Street) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? I loved the question about “the last mistakes you made” and also testing mental models. I think we should use the self-review and the review to assess the past decisions made during the last period and what the outcome was (but decorrelate decision quality with outcomes). How to share and tell good stories. I think we should do more pre-mortems. I loved the notion of the “zone of indifference.” Let us be self-aware and make quick decisions when we are in the zone.
Gaining insights: Organizations are mostly focused on the error reducing side versus the gaining insight side, and that’s the tension between these things? They don’t like variants. They don’t like things that are outside of the norm. Insights are disorganizing and disruptive. And so, that’s a major reason that organizations, without even intending to, block the insights that come their way.
How to be curious: You can’t be curious about everything because then you just waste tons of time, but you can be a little curious for a few seconds and say, “I wonder what that means?” And think about it and imagine it. And just get yourself into that kind of a mindset, of wondering and speculating rather than recoiling at something that’s unfamiliar. So that’s what you could do as an individual.
Evaluating decision making: How do you evaluate their decision making? You run them through a scenario, see what choices they make, find out what their rationale is, find out the reasons that they’re picking one thing over another, and use that to determine if you think that their mental model is rich enough. Another, I told you, is ask people, “Tell me about the last mistake you made.” A decision scorecard for an employee. I say, “Let’s go back in the previous year. What were some of the major decisions you made?” And I come to the meeting with what I think were the decisions, the employee comes with their decisions. Then we compare notes. And then, we look at the decisions and say which ones worked and which ones didn’t. Now, some decisions may have been good decisions that didn’t work through no fault of the employee. And some may have been bad decisions that worked because the employee got lucky. So you can’t just look at the outcome, but you have to look at what was the person thinking about when they made the decision. And what can we learn, whether it was a success or a failure. And my experience is that this decision scorecard method of evaluating people is much less stressful. And the employees and I enjoy it because we’re all learning a lot as we go through it.
Evaluating those decisions requires you to have knowledge of what you knew at the time, what you were thinking at the time, not retrospectively going back and trying to piece it together, because now you have new information.
What makes for an effective story? There’s got to be some sort of mystery about something happened that wasn’t expected. And then, the people listening to the story want to know how it wound up. Some people think they’re telling the story when they just give me a narrative, “This happened and that happened.” And we go through what happened, but there’s no story. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t evolve. There’s no transformation. And the good stories result in an insight.
Pre-mortems: Now, everybody around the table, you have a pad of paper in front of you and a pen, take the next two minutes and write down all the reasons why this project failed.” Now, some people have worried that maybe the confidence level got too low. So then, we added a last part of the exercise, “Look at everything on the whiteboard. Look at all of those items. Now, let’s take another two minutes and write down what each of us, what can I do personally to try to reduce the chance of some of these happening.” And then, people are writing down what they can do. And that’s a way of trying to reduce the risk.
Zone of indifference. The paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn’t matter which one we pick. And yet, we will spend days, weeks going around in a funk, “Which one am I going to choose?” Committees spend hours going over it. And if there’s anything that can be valuable and efficient in what I’m discussing, it’s this; when you think you’re in a zone of indifference, to recognize, “I’m in a zone of indifference. I’m never going to be able to tease them apart. So I’m just going to pick one and spend my time in more fruitful ways.” Even if it means flipping a coin.
👉 Steve Jobs negotiates Apple’s deal with Microsoft (Internal Tech Emails) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? When Steve called on Gates, he kept things simple. He explained that he would be willing to drop the patent litigation, but for a price. Not only did he want Microsoft to publicly announce a five-year commitment to provide Office for the Mac; he also wanted his powerful rival to publicly, and financially, make clear that this was an endorsement of Apple’s new direction by purchasing $150 million in nonvoting shares. In other words, Steve wasn’t asking for a loan, he was asking Bill to put his money where his mouth was.
“It was classic,” remembers Gates. “I’d been negotiating this deal with Amelio, and Gil wanted six things, most of which were not important. Gil was complicated, and I’d be calling him on the phone, faxing him stuff over the holidays. And then when Steve comes in, he looks at the deal and says, ‘Here are the two things I want, and here’s what you clearly want from us.’ And we had that deal done very quickly.”
👉 Avoiding Pain (Farnam Street) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (IBM): I’ve had a lot of experience turning around troubled companies, and one of the first things I learned was that whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why. Whether dwelling on a problem, hiding a problem, or dribbling out partial solutions to a problem while you wait for a high tide to raise your boat— dithering and delay almost always compound a negative situation. I believe in getting the problem behind me quickly and moving on.
👉 Meta Earnings, Meta Spending, AI Costs and Moats (Stratechery) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? This epitomizes some of Zuckerberg’s best qualities as a founder: when he realizes the error of his previous approach, he not only changes course, but goes all-in on the new direction. A decade ago this meant practically abandoning the desktop experience — including the Facebook Platform that he desperately wanted — for mobile; today it means abandoning the social graph as the core organizing feature of the Family of Apps experience (for the record, I called for a broadly similar shift in 2015, although I didn’t quite get the TikTok model yet).
👉 A Wall Street legend’s wisdom (ICONIQ Weekly) KKR co-founder and co-executive chairman Henry Kravis on 45+ years of investment innovation: Whatever you do, get up and be passionate about what you do. If you are not passionate, you’re going to get stale and not give it your best. If it’s just a job, maybe it’s time to change.
👉 Hamilton Jordan’s campaign strategy for Jimmy Carter (Memos) ❓ Why am I sharing this article? Interesting talk about not being overwhelmed by the task ahead, knowing to be focused on one big problem while keeping some small tasks in between that need to be done. The question is how you allocate your time, the moment you are the most energized to the A+ problem.
We are presently operating in what I describe as a period of fragmentation as most of the principals in your national effort have duties, responsibilities or interests in state government or politics which preclude their total attention and commitment to your national plans. But neither can we afford to neglect these other activities in which we are all involved as they contribute in a significant way to the total effort. The enormity of a Presidential campaign is almost overwhelming when considered as a whole. But, we cannot allow ourselves to become so intimidated by the mass of things to be done over the next 2 years that we fail to plan and organise.
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