Author: alearningaday

Marcus Rashford, a former Manchester United player who was transferred to Barcelona, recently shared in an interview that he felt the club was stuck in no man’s land.

It’s easy to dismiss criticism from a player who grew up at the club and was eventually forced out by the latest in the string of managers he’s played under. But there was truth in what he said.

The real issue he pointed to is one of instability. Managers have been cycled in and out so quickly that none have been given the 4–5 years typically needed to mould a team in their philosophy. No manager in the past decade has lasted longer than three years.

In retrospect, the club lurched from one short-term and ill thought out managerial decision to the next.

That’s why Rashford’s point resonates.

Too much change creates chaos and prevents long-term progress.

Too little change – especially when results are consistently poor with no line of sight to improvement – is equally ruinous.

Sustainable success, whether in football or in organizations, lies in knowing when to persist and when to pivot.

As always, the magic is in balance.

The goal of the first attempt is to learn. We do that when we give ourselves the space to understand what we’re up against.

On our first day in a new place, we’re going to make mistakes. If we’re a tourist, we’ll have to keep that sheepish tourist grin handy as we figure stuff out.

If we’re operating a machine for the first time or trying out a new process, we’re not going to figure out the optimal approach till we try it once or twice.

Best to approach the first time with a gentle reminder to cut ourselves some slack when we’re attempting something for the first time.

Focus on the learning. There’ll be plenty of opportunities to optimize later.

I was fascinated by Bloomberg’s story about Hampton Inn. A centerpiece of the story is the free waffles available at breakfast.

The key constant is the tub of Hampton’s malted vanilla waffle batter. In a now-familiar ritual, guests push a plastic tab to extrude the mix into a paper cup, drizzle it over a waffle iron, then flip the handle and watch the seconds tick down on a digital timer. As with almost everything at Hampton, the process has been rigorously engineered. Those little paper cups of batter are what peak hotel performance looks like.

Last year, Hampton Inns around the world cooked up more than 2 million gallons of batter, or about 30 million waffles. With all due respect, they’re not great. Nor is the coffee or the orange juice, the bananas or the convection-oven eggs. What all these things are, crucially, is free to lodgers. It costs a US Hampton franchisee less than $5 per occupied room to furnish this cornucopia, but to a family of four, the perceived value is closer to $50, or roughly one-third of the average cost of a nightly stay. That math has helped power Hampton Inn’s unlikely rise to become the world’s largest lodging brand, with almost 350,000 rooms spread across 43 countries. Hampton sold almost 90 million room nights last year, according to Bloomberg estimates, a few million more than its closest competitor, Holiday Inn Express. That helped it generate nearly $12 billion in room revenue, dwarfing that of the industry’s luxury leaders.

Those are impressive numbers. There’s more about the waffles though.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, waffles are just for kids,’” s“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, waffles are just for kids,’” says Buckley. “It’s surprising how many men in suits will pretend nobody’s looking and grab their little waffle.” The self-serve aspect of the experience is also a plus: Hilton toyed with the idea of using machines that dispensed waffles with the press of a button before deciding that pour-and-flip made for a homier experience.

I enjoyed reading this because we’ve stayed Hampton Inn for a few nights over the years. And I can attest to both the popularity of these waffles and how much we enjoyed them.

I now have more appreciation for the rigorously engineered processes that make such experiences possible.

On his 75th birthday, there was some discussion in the Slashdot forum about how Steve Wozniak made a bad decision to sell his Apple stock back in the day.

The man himself jumped into the comments to add his 2 cents –

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Classy and wise.

One of the most dependable levers to align behavior is to align the incentive.

A colleague recently reflected on some feedback she’d gotten and described it as “a painful lesson, but a necessary one.”

As I thought about her reflection, I realized that the presence of pain is just a sign that the lesson is likely to stick.

Pain + Reflection = Progress.

Or put simply, no pain, no gain.

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.” | Heidi Priebe

I came across this quote in James Clear’s newsletter and I thought it was beautifully put.

It resonated.

Running a project involving a lot of people is a lesson in chemistry.

You have to know which elements will combine beautifully, which ones will repel each other, and which ones will simply lead to explosions.

And as is often the case with complexity, some of this is science and the rest is just art.

The key is often just a willingness to improvise.

More than a decade ago, I went go-karting with a few colleagues as part of a work event.

We did two rounds of racing. At the end of the first round, we had a clear winner.

We all had another go at improving our times in the second round. Again, the same colleague won.

As we sat down after the races, this colleague asked the rest of us a question – how many of us had focused on beating him in our 2nd round?

Nearly all of us raced our hands.

He followed up with another question – how many of us thought about beating our own time instead?

No one raced their hand.

He wisely reminded us that we’d all have been better off focusing on improving our own time instead of attempting to beat him. We don’t control how everyone else does – but we do control our own performance.

I think of that incident from time to time.

Especially when thinking about any form of external success. There are always a host of people in our view who’ve made significantly more money, gotten promoted into more prestigious roles, “made it” at more successful companies, and so on.

Any time spent in such comparisons is a sure-fire way to be unhappy. Someone always has the bigger home and there’s no point counting someone else’s money.

Best to focus on our performance and our attitude. It is what we control.

The Farnam Street blog shared two stories about Sol Price – the godfather of retail whose innovations inspired the likes of Costco and Walmart.

Fiduciary duty. When Safeway sold sugar below cost, Sol did something insane. He put up signs in FedMart: “Sugar is cheaper at Safeway this week. Go buy it there.”  His managers thought he’d lost it. Sol’s view? “I have a fiduciary duty to my members, like a lawyer to clients.” That radical honesty created something powerful. People drove 200 miles round-trip from San Diego to shop at his LA store. When you treat customers like clients, not targets, trust becomes your greatest asset.

Remove tables and chairs: Sol’s company culture always involved employees eating together. Texas law in 1957 required separate facilities by race. Sol’s San Antonio solution? Remove every table and chair from the lunch counter. If everyone had to stand, everyone could eat together.

Both stories made me smile because they were turned problems into opportunities for Sol to demonstrate his values.

We don’t control what happens.

But, as Sol demonstrated, we have a tremendous amount of agency in deciding how we respond.