Author: alearningaday

Tim Duncan and Hurricane Hugo

Tim Duncan, then a kid in the Virgin Islands, dreamed of becoming a swimmer on the 1992 US Olympic swim team and emulate his sister. His mother instilled an incredible work ethic in him and he became a nationally ranked swimmer by age 13 in 1989.

But, hurricane Hugo swept through the Virgin Islands in 1989 and destroyed the only Olympic size pool in his home island of St Croix. Now, the only remaining place to practice swimming was the Carribean sea and this dented Tim’s enthusiasm as he was afraid of sharks. Following that, his mother died from breast cancer taking away his desire to swim.

While the Virgin Islands might have lost many a talented swimmer then, Tim began focusing on basketball thanks to encouragement from his brother-in-law. While there are few are blessed with Tim’s prodigious athletic ability, he only started playing basketball in his 9th grade – considered late by every standard. However, thanks to that work ethic and a constructive response to a tough situation, he went on to win 5 NBA championships and is often named the greatest power forward of all times.

It is safe to say that went well.

If it wasn’t for hurricane Hugo, we might perhaps have never seen Tim Duncan, the legendary basketball player. However, given his work ethic, we’d likely have seen or heard about Tim Duncan, the great swimmer.

There is no human being on the planet who doesn’t face challenges. Very few, however, respond like Tim and simply rise above them.

Thanks Tim – for showing the way, and for reminding us that it isn’t what happens to us that matters. It all comes down to how we respond.

This will come of use again

Often, the biggest reason for shoddy work is the belief that what we’re learning or doing will never come of use. We don’t like it, we perceive it useless and we try to do the minimum and move on.

I’ve found, however, that the world conspires (with unerring consistency) to make sure you have to do it again. I have so many comical instances where I put in the minimum required effort to get something done with the belief that I’ll never have to do so again and then found myself having to re-do it properly a few days/months down the line.

The enlightened approach to this is to just do things well. That is easier said than done, of course. Applying yourself to everything you do requires a consistency of effort and a commitment to focus and discipline that is unusual.

But, the benefit of doing things well is that, if and when you need to do them again (and you will) at a later time, you will remember the Steve Jobs line and say ‘Ah, the dots do connect.’

Because they do.

The Sandwich Strategy – MBA Learnings

Federal Express or FedEx was created to compete an overnight delivery with the United States Postal Service or USPS. Responding to FedEx’s entry and early success, USPS created a product called Express Mail priced at $8.95 as compared to FedEx’s $12.

FedEx, had it been like most companies, would have reduced price and gone to war with the USPS. But, price is not just a number. It is a way of signaling value and FedEx understood that. So, they responded by redefining their market.

FedEx’s existing Overnight Delivery” did not specify what time the delivery would arrive. So, FedEx introduced precision not only in terms of the delivery day, but also in terms of the delivery time. They then included two deliveries – one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. They then labeled the service as “Priority” and “Standard”. For firms dealing with customers, “Priority” sent a powerful message about how they valued their customer’s business. Firms like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase were happy to pay for this service distinction. Besides, if a mail marked “priority” showed up tomorrow morning with a dozen other envelopes, what do you think a person picked up to read?

FedEx sandwich

And, the kicker – FedEx increased the price of its Priority service to $13. It kept the lower end Standard service at $9 effectively “sandwich”-ing USPS between its premium and value offerings. In one move, it changed the nature of the competition from one on price to one on brand and value. It also backed the decision with technology investment in tracking parcels that provided additional benefit for customers.

The lesson? When faced with adversity, don’t just react with what comes intuitively. Take some time off and think about how you could respond by doing what’s counter intuitive. And, if you’re feeling stuck or hopeless, remember the time FedEx raised its prices when being attacked by a huge competitor.

Building teams that innovate – learning from history

I am reading “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks” Created the Digital Revolution.” I realized I didn’t know much about the early history of the digital age and have, so far, found it fascinating. I’m still only 25% into the book and am beginning to see a trend in how innovative teams that shaped the digital age were built.

1. Multi-disciplinary teams. Great technology breakthroughs were not made by a group of computer scientists working together. Instead, they involved groups of theoretical physicists, chemists and programmers who came together. This was the case in the creation of the early computers at University of Penn and in the case of the semiconductor at Bell Labs.

Bell Labs was a great example of a place that was simply bustling with innovative ideas. Its DNA was built on the fact that it kept exposing scientists to others with different expertise. Steve Jobs was so inspired by Bell Labs that he designed the Pixar headquarters (and, perhaps, Apple, too?) to mimic Bell Labs. At the Pixar headquarters, you are forced to bump into others from different parts of the organization at the large Atrium. It is, as Jobs described it, a place that “promoted promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations.”

2. An intersection of science and the arts. Ada Lovelace, John von Neumann, Steve Jobs were examples of people who brought together two seemingly unconnected disciplines. This is, in some ways, related to point 1 but still worth a separate call out. All 3 were credited with visionary thinking that shaped the digital age and, perhaps, it was only made possible by their position at that intersection.

3. Teams that combined individual genius and great team spirit. We like building tales of the individual inventor. But, great inventions were largely built by teams. What is distinctive about nearly every one of these teams is that they combined individual genius (often one or two within the group) and great team spirit from working really well together. Not all these times lasted long because of recurring issues around ego, but when they did, they worked fantastic.

This point is a great guide to anyone looking to build a great team. You want to encourage individual genius in your team and, at the same time, do your best to foster team spirit. It always feels safer to just bring people whose egos don’t clash. But, then, you lose edge. And, edge is often what make teams great.

The email tool

Email has been around for 30+ years now. And, despite its ubiquity, it still polarizes. Email has also been declared dead many a time in these 21 years but still manages to stick on. If you read Cal Newport’s excellent blog, you will likely see regular posts telling you – it’s okay to be bad at email. There are tons of productivity blogs who’ve written about inbox zero, the 2 minute rule, etc., etc. So, which is the truth?

Here’s how I think of email –

1. Email is a near-ubiquitous communication tool. It is important to think of it as a communication tool and not a getting-things-done tool or productivity tool. Email just helps get messages across.

2. This leads us to the question – where is email most useful? Email is most useful in any work that requires connection because, well, it helps connect people. “Duh” – you might say. Forgive me for stating the obvious.

3. So, for researchers who need to spend more time reading and digesting complex scientific paper, Cal is absolutely right. Email isn’t a necessity.

4. However, if you work in the “connection” economy, I believe it is essential you learn how to use the tool. If you lead a team of really busy people or a team of people at different locations (increasingly the norm), for instance, being bad at email is really not an option. A CEO who doesn’t do email well can repeatedly stall an entire organization.

5. Did we communicate well before email? Sure, we did. We survived just fine without computers too. While we could argue about whether our quality of lives have improved, the fact is – things have changed. As things stand now, email is the norm for a tool of communication. Figure out a way to deal with it.

6. Notice, my message isn’t to respond to every email. Just figure out a way to deal with it – set expectations on how you respond and help folks who work with you understand what to expect. This may become easier as you become more busy/sought after/important as people understand you have a lot on your plate. But, I’d argue that it probably never gets much easier.

7. You can definitely choose to view email as a necessary evil. But, given many of us spent at least 30 minutes to an hour on our inbox in our working lives, I’d imagine that view isn’t doing us much good. Every once in a while, I get a completely serendipitous email from someone I haven’t heard from in a long time and I feel really thankful for the awesomeness that is email. If you aren’t getting such emails, be that someone and send someone you are thinking about a nice personal note..

8. Also, email can be incredibly helpful in making connections with people you have never met. I’ve been fortunate to meet some really cool people after some persistent emailing. So, if you haven’t gotten around to using the email tool for that, well, it is about time..

Email is a tool we’re going to have live with. I’d recommend the following – Take some time really think about how you plan to work with it, learn to use it to your advantage (it is definitely a skill) and love it. Love is a verb, after all.

Invented divisions

The recent events in Paris have brought to light many tensions to the surface. Religion is a touchy and emotional subject. As a result, it makes for a difficult topic to write about. Everyone has an opinion that seems perfectly right and legitimate from their point of view.

The thought that repeatedly crosses my mind when I see these issues is that these divisions weren’t meant to be divisions at all. They have often been perpetuated by humans like you and me for purposes like power and wealth. And, we definitely have the choice to rise above them.

As the world becomes more global, we’re increasingly going to have relationships with customers, co-workers, and other stakeholders who have different beliefs and ways of thinking. What we need is more understanding, more patience and more openness to differences.

Different isn’t necessarily good or bad. It is just different. We can choose to have a discussion. And, we can choose to ignore these divisions. If they are invented anyway, we might as well invent something that increases our happiness.

Lines give us confidence, not dots

One of the ideas that has helped me understand the nature of confidence is that it is lines that give us confidence, not dots.  So, a single incredible game does not make anyone a great player. Greatness and confidence come from enduring consistency over a long period of time.

One powerful implication of this idea is that we should abandon the ‘one big win’ mentality. Many build careers around the assumption that a stint at a prestigious firm or business school will mean they’ve “made it.” Similarly, many try to build companies and become crest fallen when a prestigious venture capital firm turns down.

While all of these undoubtedly help, they are, at the end of the day, just dots. You don’t become a great presenter by giving one big speech. Instead, you notch a thousand speeches that build your confidence. So, in our search for confidence in what we do, it is critical we approach it as a long process where our focus is on notching small wins. It follows that making a big difference in our lifetime isn’t about making one big choice or one big turning point – it is often a result of many many small wins over the course of a lifetime.

This, then, leads to my key takeaway from the “lines, not dots” principle – true confidence comes from a great process. Great inventors and thinkers across time had a phenomenal learning process. Think Richard Feynman, Benjamin Franklin among many others.

And, similarly, true self confidence comes from a great life process. Great habits, a great process and a purpose driven approach to life, for example, are the dots that, when joined together, provide the foundation for self confidence. Mastery in one aspect isn’t enough. It is all about lines, not dots.

Introduce people by sharing what they mean to you

We often introduce friends and co-workers to others. There are many ways to do this – you can emphasize what is most amazing about them, you can share their official ‘bio’, you can explain how you met, etc.

An idea that I’m implementing more over the past couple of years is to introduce them by sharing what they mean to you. These days, if I have to introduce someone to an audience, I have begun doing an “official” version that I gloss over and an “unofficial” version where I share my ‘personal experience’ of the person and what they’ve meant to me.

The bio approach approaches every person as a collection of achievements. The meaning approach does tend to skip an achievement or two but hugely personalizes the process and, I think, leads to more impact.

After all, people don’t remember what you say or do as well as they remember how you made them feel.

 

Hat tip: Lifehacker for bringing this idea together in my head

Wish and want

We often spend parts of our days and lives wishing for things. “I wish.. this happened/that happened/I got this/I got that.”

As the quote goes from “Into the Woods” – ‘are you certain what you wish is what you want?’ Because what we wish isn’t necessarily what we want. And, what we want isn’t necessarily what we need.

Maybe the other approach is not to spend any time wishing. Just keep making decisions on the process, keep plugging away, and ignore wishes altogether. We all wish for good days (largely). But, who knows if a good day now will really be a good day in retrospect?

The enlightened approach is to not bother with wishes and wants and other proxies for results. I can see why it is the enlightened approach – it keeps us focused on the present, mindful about what is happening, and helps us get a tremendous amount done. We can’t all flip the switch to pursue the enlightened approach of course. But, perhaps, we could aim for a little more of it.

And, maybe, just maybe, when we catch ourselves wishing, we could ask ourselves  – “Are you certain what you wish is what you want?”

Why MBA – MBA Learnings

Since it is the new year, I thought I’d tackle the big question – “Why bother with an MBA?” At any given time, there is a fair amount of opinion in the press on the MBA. Some say it is useless, others warn us about possible pitfalls and a few dare to be bullish.

My view is that the truth, like most things, in life is somewhere in between. So, here are a collection of my thoughts based on what I’ve seen and learnt –

1. The biggest trouble with an MBA is that there is no single consistent academic experience. Most Masters in Computer Engineering programs teach the same core concepts. Yes, you sort of do that with an MBA. But, then again, not really. You have a lot of freedom and flexibility to learn things you care about. Then, the next problem is that practically every university has an MBA program. That’s where the rankings come in.

2. The rankings have all sorts of faults. Most of them don’t measure what a school should actually be measured on simply because the data isn’t easily available (or the publications just couldn’t bother). But, if you aggregate them together, there are consistent patterns in the schools that show up in the top ten, the top twenty and so on. This distinction matters for calculations on return-on-investment.

3. I know this seems like a really mercenary way to approach this. But, I’d like to get it out of the way because return-on-investment matters (ROI) a lot. Students spend roughly $200,000 in the two years and a lot more in the opportunity costs of missing out on two years worth of earnings. They’re also doing so in a high-growth phase of their careers. For a large proportion, this is an opportunity to level up and move to a career that’ll give them more opportunities and/or more income. ROI matters. I’m not clear what the ROI numbers are – but what I am clear about is that the degree is, unfortunately, not equal. Just as a Masters in Engineering at an MIT will always be valued much higher than most other places, similarly, being lucky and skilled enough to be able to get into a top school changes a lot.

4. Once we’ve got the financials out of the question, what is the experience really worth? We interviewed venture capitalist Brad Feld over Skype yesterday and one of my classmates asked him a similar question. He reflected on his own experience at MIT-Sloan and said – “An MBA is a nice two year vacation from reality. And, in many cases, such a vacation is very useful.” And, he went on to talk about the ability we have to think about our long term careers, switch career tracks, and make decisions that can alter the course of the life. And, it is true. It is not always we’re presented with opportunities to do that with so many options.

5. The other idea I will pick is a recent post from Seth’s blog. This post was shared by our Professor in our introductory Microeconomics class just two days ago.

Doing calculus with Roman numerals

Quick, what’s XIV squared?

You can’t do advanced math without the zero. And you can’t write precise prose without a well-developed vocabulary.

The magic of the alphabet is that twenty-six letters are all you need to spell every word. The beauty of Lego blocks is that you don’t need very many to build something extraordinary.

Imagine how hard it would be to get anything done, though, if you only knew 17 letters.

In most fields your work is hindered if you only have a few of the most basic tools. Understanding more of the building blocks of finance, or marketing or technology are essential if you want to get something important done.

Here’s my advice: Every time you hear an expert use a word or concept you don’t understand, stop her and ask to be taught. Every time. After just a few interactions, you’ll have a huge advantage over those who didn’t ask.

The way I see it – the bold-ed bit is what an MBA gives you. It doesn’t do enough in terms of explaining the building blocks of technology as yet. But, there’s already a fair bit of choice in many schools and it is on the rise. It always takes education a few years to catch up with change.

6. Does that mean everyone needs an MBA? Absolutely not. There are so many ways to get this sort of knowledge on the internet and in books. So, if you really wanted to get the knowledge, you can (you can just just follow Seth’s excellent advice). My view is the following – if you value learning about business (academics), if you value/need taking some time out to think about what you really want to do (career), and if you value working with, getting to know, and building relationships with peers from many different backgrounds,  many of whom also tend to have similar hopes and dreams as you, then I think you’ll really enjoy the MBA experience.

7. There are many reasons MBA grads get flak from employers – too much entitlement, not enough value added, etc. And, I daresay there are always going to be a few who will give others a bad name. But, on the whole, I do feel there is a lot of value the education brings. In my first quarter alone, I feel like I have gained insights that would have been very helpful in my jobs over the past few years. The nice thing about this learning is that it is all connected and reinforces each other. Accounting inter links with finance which inter links nicely with building companies which requires marketing and so on. I think it’ll help future entrepreneurs and business owners avoid a few fundamental mistakes and it’ll help anyone working in a company make better decisions (if they paid attention in class). And, who knows, maybe avoiding a mistake in giving out equity could save you half a million dollars as your business scales. That’s already the cost of the degree and more..

8. As you can tell, this is clearly a collection of my unstructured thoughts on the subject. I am, of course, biased. I can’t say much about whether this investment will lead to x or y result in 20 years. I honestly don’t care that much. I am here because I really wanted to learn, to think about what I really want to do, and to meet, work with and build relationships with some very interesting people. And, so far, the experience has stretched me, made me think, and given me an incredible amount of learning opportunity. And, the sheer intensity has kept me on my toes. In short, I’m loving it.

9. I do, however, think it helps keep perspective that this is just a wonderful way to spend 2 years of my life. It is learning geek paradise in some respects. It is not practical for many and definitely not a necessity. For this, I will go back to Hunter Walk’s brilliant post on “It’s fine to get an MBA, don’t be an MBA.” If you haven’t read it, please do. Here’s my favorite bit.

Getting an MBA means you’re curious to learn broadly about theories and explore how these techniques can be applied to various businesses. Being an MBA means you think you’re getting taught the one right answer to problems – to a hammer everything is a nail – and that only MBAs know these dark arts.
Getting an MBA means offering your perspectives and experiences to your classmates. Being an MBA means looking at your peers as networking targets.
Getting an MBA means thinking about your degree as just another attribute of who you are – I have brown hair, a wife, work at Google, enjoy citrus fruits and possess a Stanford degree. Being an MBA means you are “Hunter Walk, Stanford MBA,” elevating the matriculation to a level of undeserving primacy.

Getting an MBA means you shoot out of school wanting to prove yourself and see what you can contribute to others. Being an MBA means thinking the world owes you something and that your value 10x’ed just from spending two years on a campus.

At the end of the day, just be who you are, which is a collection of skills, abilities, successes, failures, fears, dreams and hopes. The most important degree you possess is Human University.

This, of course, applies to any accomplishment. Results happen to us due to good processes and a fair dose of luck (e.g. in this case, being born in the right place) – don’t let them define you. It is the same deal with this degree – if you think it’ll add value, it will. If you want to make it meaningful, it will be. Don’t do it for the tag. Do it because you’ll learn and get better. And, if you don’t do it, that’s okay too.

In either case, we’re on this planet for a short period of time, at least in the giant scheme of things. Let’s just focus on making it meaningful, making it count.