A Learning a Day

I was in conversation with a friend who’s been around the block – and seen plenty of dysfunctional executive teams – about the most common types of dysfunctions. We landed on three.

(1) Solving for yourself or your people instead of the organization. The motivations are either selfish or tribal. These teams involve executives optimizing for their own position or protecting their team rather than doing what’s right for the whole.

(2) Inability to commit to a strategy with real trade-offs. Here, everything is important. Every initiative is a priority. The answer changes depending on which forum you’re in. A strategy without trade-offs, it turns out, isn’t a strategy.

(3) Inability to have hard conversations. Meetings end without clarity on decisions made and next steps taken. Forums for strategic conversations are used to discuss minutiae that doesn’t matter or to simply hear the sound of their own voice. Everyone leaves the room having said nothing of consequence.

The common thread: all three are forms of short-term comfort chosen over long-term health. And the cost is always paid by the organization.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

Funny and wise.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s quotes have all gotten me asking the same question – how often do I do this?

The answer is more often than I’d like to admit.

The Exponential View team pulled together a thought provoking interactive resource on the Solar supercycle.

You can see the impact of learning curve projections as you tweak assumptions. The trend so far alone is fascinating however – as solar capacity increases, it is becoming exponentially cheaper.

It is a self-reinforcing cycle. The same forces that shaped the computing flywheel and made it ubiquitous are at work here.

Cost reduction creates demand. Demand drives deployment. Deployment drives more learning curves and cost reduction.

It is fascinating to think about the impact of lower costs. Suddenly, technologies that were out of reach given how energy expensive they were – from desalination to sustainable aviation fuel – become possible.

Positive exponential changes are fascinating to behold. And as far as the solar supercycle goes, we’re just getting started.

Derek Thompson shared a few fascinating charts.

Teenagers in the US aren’t reading.

They (along with adults) aren’t partying either.

But everyone is watching more YouTube (and TikTok).

The link between spending time on TikTok and most brain functions – from attention to memory to reasoning to inhibitory control are all negative. TikTok is melting our brain.

We’re seeing more young adults dislocated from both the economy and society.

Jonathan Haidt unearthed a fascinating insight among 12th graders – finding that conservatism and religion helped reduce the impact of this dislocation.

His hypothesis is that conservatism and religion might offer a binding moral matrix that protects young people from a rapidly changing world. While progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to “create their own identities”, this freedom is likely causing anxiety.

Societal dislocation and the legalization of gambling presents a toxic combination.

And this one continues to blow my mind – leading to the largest measles outbreak in the US in 20 years.

Don shared a quote from Michaelangelo when he was 87 years ago – “Ancora Imparo.”

It means “I am still learning” in Italian.

This is the from the person who painted the Sistine Chapel, sculpted David, and had produced more than most people could dream of in several lifetimes.

Inspiring – a lovely note to carry around.

Ancora Imparo.

Every Saturday morning, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton gathered his team for the same ritual.

First, they’d review the week’s sales in detail. Then, they’d discuss one question: what is a competitor doing that we should be paying attention to?

Employees would share observations from visits to Kmart, Walgreens, Sears. There was one strict rule: you could only talk about what competitors were doing right. Things that were smart and well executed.

Walton didn’t care what they were doing wrong. That couldn’t hurt him. What he cared about was not letting any competitor get more than a week’s advantage on something innovative.

It’s a beautiful way to institutionalize curiosity. And to steer a room full of people away from the instinct to talk about why they’re better – toward the harder, more useful question of what they can learn.

If you haven’t made an expectation explicit, don’t expect it to be internalized or understood.

The gap between what we expect and what we communicate is where most relationship friction lives – at work, at home, everywhere.

From an old Warner & Swasey advertisement, quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanac: “The person who needs a new machine tool and hasn’t bought it is already paying for it.”

It got me thinking about the suite of incredible tools available to knowledge workers now – if you aren’t using them, you’re likely already paying for it.

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”| John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

I thought this’d be a good one as we start the week and contemplate the meetings we want to organize or attend. :-)

After 40 years of running experiments on the impact of diets on nutrition and health, Stanford University’s Christopher Gardner came to a simple conclusion – diet wars are a distraction.

I loved this distillation of the five lessons he shared –

(1) No single diet wins across the board. Low-carb, low-fat, vegan, and Mediterranean diets all produce similar average outcomes when matched for quality.

(2) Individual variation in response to diet is enormous – and mostly unexplained by genetics, insulin status, or any other single factor researchers have identified.

(3) Added sugar and refined grains are the dietary factors with the clearest, most consistent evidence for harm – and the ones most worth reducing regardless of which diet pattern you follow.

(4) The best diet for you is the one you can sustain. But that doesn’t mean the standard American diet – it means finding the highest-quality version of an eating pattern you can actually stick to long-term.

(5) There is more scientific consensus around the fundamentals of healthy eating than headlines suggest. Eat whole foods, plenty of vegetables, and legumes. Avoid added sugar and refined grains. Nearly every serious dietary framework agrees on this.