Category: Everything else

Ambiguity and over-communication

Leverage, the verb – using something to maximum advantage, is key to operating with effectiveness. A useful way to generate leverage is to invest energy in activities that produce disproportionate return. And, a reliable way to do that is to find causes and effects with exponential relationships. For example, one such relationship is that between a project’s level of ambiguity and the degree of communication required.

ambiguity-communication

Highly ambiguous projects benefit disproportionately from over-communication. If there’s inherent uncertainty and a lack of clarity in how you are trying to solve a problem, the team benefits greatly from regular check ins, status updates, and forums in which they can communicate. In such projects, we would do well to encourage the stupid question or redundant comment as they often help us understand sentiment, concerns, and may even show us the way forward.

At the other end of the curve is the reason why most folks complain about weekly status meetings. Most projects don’t have the level of ambiguity required to justify a weekly status meeting. The early stages may have justified a regular check in – but, the costs far exceed the benefits as time passes.

All this leads to the question this curve inspires – on the projects you are working on, does the intensity and frequency of communication match the level of ambiguity?

Replacing guys with folks

My go-to greeting to address a group of people has been “guys” for the past decade. It isn’t gender neutral and it definitely isn’t the most inclusive.

I conducted an informal poll among a few colleagues looking for potential replacements. We concluded that the two best candidates were “y’all” and “folks.” As saying “y’all” was not going to work for me, I decided to get to work on changing my default greeting to “folks.”

A few weeks in, I’m pleased to report some progress. I’ve probably replaced “guys” with “folks” 50% of the time. The rest is a mixed bag between catching myself after the fact and not.

I’m shooting for a 100% replacement by June.

Here’s to that.

The Hatch Baby Rest example

A good friend gifted us a white noise machine called “Hatch Baby Rest” after we had our second baby. It was a timely gift and one we’ve been very grateful for. For the uninitiated, a white noise machine generates ambient noise to ensure kids are less disturbed during their naps/sleep. This device also doubles up as a night light.

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve noticed a small issue with the manual controls on the Rest. However, since we can still control it via the app, we’ve managed just fine. There wasn’t time or bandwidth to troubleshoot further.

Then, we saw this unprompted email from the Hatch Baby team this morning.

Hey there,

Nap time, bed time, and night time can be some of the most crucial (and trying!) times with kids. We get it – we totally know how important your sleep routine is – so we wanted to check in about your Hatch Baby Rest.

When your Hatch Baby Rest app connects to Rest, it runs a quick diagnostics check to make sure everything is working correctly. When running this routine check on your Rest named “Hatch Rest”, we were alerted to a problem with the sound on your device.

You may not have even noticed it – but we’d like to send you a free replacement. It’s so important to us that your family’s sleep routine stays on track. Please enter your shipping information on the form below and we will send a replacement Rest ASAP.

You can keep your current Rest and continue using it, if you’d like. If the sound does have a problem, the night light function will continue to work properly. Please accept our sincere apologies; we want your Rest to work perfectly every time you use it.

We’re also sending a big thank you for being a Hatch Baby customer. Our goal – always – is to make life easier for parents. We love to hear your feedback and are constantly trying to improve. If you have any suggestions along the way, let us know!

If you’ve already received this email or believe you have received it in error, please disregard!

The power of great customer service is that it creates experiences that live on for a long time. Thank you, Hatch Baby team, for setting an inspiring example.

Long term games with long term people

Investor Naval Ravikant had a great tweet storm on “How to get rich” (his notes on extrinsic success) a few months back. He has since been publishing a great series expanding on the various ideas he tweeted about on his blog. And, yesterday’s post resonated deeply as it contains powerful life advice – “Play long term games with long term people.”

The summary –

(1) Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people. Long-term players make each other rich. Short-term players make themselves rich.

(2) All returns in life come from compound interest over many turns of long-term games—and they usually come at the end.

(3) People do right by each other when they know they’ll be around for the next turn of the game. And friction goes down, so you can do bigger and bigger things together.

I think the implication of his first point – “Long term players make other rich” – is key and extends well beyond money. When we are in relationships for the long term, we end up investing deeply in the richness of the lives of those around us. Thanks to the way compounding works, those investments pay off incredibly well the long term for everyone involved.

So, become someone who thinks and plays long term games. Then, find partners, friends, and colleagues who are in it with you. It is a powerful combination.

Self talk – taking note of what our good looks like

We all remember days when we did a poor job / failed / got feedback about something we needed to fix. These sorts of moments typically get stuck in our heads – they have a visceral quality.

While these can be helpful in preventing mistakes from time to time, a better approach to shifting our performance up is to take note of what good looks like. What were days when we thought we did well? What did we sound like in those presentations and meetings? How did we feel post-facto?

Once we know what these look like for us, we can both use it to understand how we’re doing at the present moment while also using it to understand what we need to do to level up and set a new bar for ourselves.

Self talk that says – “Don’t do that – remember the last time you failed miserably?” – is limiting. We get more traction when we replace it with – “You were off your best game yesterday. What were a couple of things that didn’t work? How can we do better today?”

While the former inspires fear, the latter inspires forward motion.

Retirement and identity

Semi-retired Harvard Business School professor Theresa Ambile interviewed 120 newly retired professionals on retirement and emerged with an appreciation for the impact years in the workplace has on all of us. For most folks, work doesn’t just become what they do, it becomes who they are.

She found that the single biggest challenge with retirement was bridging someone’s identity from what they did to how they wanted to see themselves in retirement. And, she also found that the things that made them happiest in retirement were not using an alarm clock, not needing to commute, the ability to pursue a hobby, and the flexibility to spend time with family.

2 reflections – first, “Retire early” is a fantasy for a non-trivial section of the workforce. But, as Theresa’s research re-affirms, it isn’t a catch-all solution to all the problems we get rid of at work.

And, second, imagine if we structured our work such that we got the sleep we needed, lived close to work, had the time to pursue a hobby, and spend more time with family? Would we have the best of both worlds?

As our life spans become longer, understanding how to deal with the concept of retirement will be increasingly important. Such research is a great start to doing that.

Fixing typos and email friendships

Over these years, I’ve been fortunate to get to know some of you via email. Some of you write in with feedback and counter points, some share ideas for future posts, and others write in with notes of appreciation and encouragement. These are my favorite kind of email.

Many of your notes give me ideas for future post and help me articulate what I’m learning better. Over the past months, however, I’ve been receiving a special variant. John from the screenshot below (email redacted) writes in from time to time with a link to the post in the subject and a list of the typos I need to fix.

The email above is a recent example with just one. I have, however, received notes with 8-10 typos and grammatical errors that John thoughtfully helps me fix.

With a 2.5 year old and ~1 year old, getting these blog posts out is nearly always a rush job these days. That, in turn, means I make more of these mistakes than I did before. So, a big thank you to John for making these better for all of us.

And, on that note, thank you to the many of you who share your notes and reflections with me from time to time. Your notes add so much positive energy to my life – they mean a lot. I really couldn’t be more grateful for your time, attention, and thoughtfulness.

Nursery rhyme and lullaby messages

We’ve spent a lot of time listening to lullabies and nursery rhymes in the last 2 years. Amazon Music’s Lisa Loeb nursery rhyme collection alone ensures we’re daily active users of our Echo.
But, while I love the simply melodies, I’ve come to despise the lyrics of most rhymes and lullabies. If “despise” sounds too strong, check out this link for the creepy backstories behind some of our favorite nursery rhymes.
And, for a recent example that is currently trending in our households, below are the lyrics of a melodious Southern American lullaby called “Hush Little Baby.”
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.
Papa’s going to buy you a mocking bird.
And if that mocking bird don’t sing,
Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.
And if that diamond ring is brass,
Papa’s going to buy you a looking glass.
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Papa’s going to buy you a billy goat.
And if that billy goat don’t pull,
Papa’s going to you a cart and bull.
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Papa’s going to buy a dog called Rover.
And if that dog called Rover don’t bark,
Papa’s going to buy you a horse and cart.
And if that horse and cart turn round,
You’ll still be the sweetest little babe in town.
Or, don’t worry – your dad’s going to buy you whatever you want and solve your problems. Exactly the message we want to send our kids.
There has to be a better nursery rhyme solution. Maybe we keep the same melodies and replace the lyrics?

On making friends and building community

I’ve become a fan of Jenny Anderson’s articles on Quartz of late. She covers topics like life, parenting, and happiness and her notes on all of these resonate. The piece I enjoyed today (here) was on making friends, building community, and the metric of success that both matters and is ignored. I hope you find time to read it. Here’s a powerful bit at the end –

I used to think that community was as simple as having friends who bring a lasagna when things fall apart and champagne when things go well. Who pick up your kids from school when you can’t. But I think community is also an insurance policy against life’s cruelty; a kind of immunity against loss and disappointment and rage. My community will be here for my family if I cannot be. And if I die, my kids will be surrounded people who know and love them, quirks and warts and oddities and all.

In future-proofing my life, I have made every day richer. A problem shared is a problem halved, my kids were taught at school. Communities do that too. I arrived in my version of the soulless suburbs, and it turns out they are not soulless at all.

Warren Buffett, a friend of Gates, says that his measure of success comes down to one question: “Do the people you care about love you back?”

“I think that is about as good a metric as you will find,” wrote Gates.

I’d concur. Keep connecting with people, and in time, you will have a community.

Wishing you nice, connection filled, weekend.

A long PS: A follow up on the LinkedIn Premium post – a couple of you wrote in asking if you could be “picked.” That made me cringe as I was hoping to avoid any such connotation. I wish I’d been more thoughtful about how I’d phrased what I wrote.  The intent was to help anyone who was searching for a job in a small way – job searches are hard. The good news is that I reached out to a few of my colleagues for help yesterday and many of them have generously offered their subscription gifts. So, we should hopefully have enough for all those of you going through an active search within the next few days.

And, related, I just started work on the team working on job seeking at LinkedIn. As you might have gathered from my many posts on the topic, this is a problem I’m grateful to be working on. We know there is plenty that needs to be better in our product and are working hard at it. All feedback on what is working and what is not working would be helpful and appreciated. Thank you. :)

Stopping shoplifting

Bloomberg shared the story of the company behind the product that claims to be able to detect shoplifters by monitoring fidgeting, restlessness, and other suspicious body language. The goal is prevention – if the person is approached, the chances are high that the crime never happens.

On the one hand, this is awesome. If we can use technology to stop folks from committing crimes, that is a win.

On the other hand, it does make me wonder where this road will take us.

For example, will the data about the identified shoplifters go to a centralized database? Will that database be shared with other retailers to stop crime together? Will law enforcement make a case that the data should be shared with them? Will we then use the data in the database to move beyond behavioral signals to demographic signals?

It isn’t hard to envision why these steps wouldn’t logically follow the first. What happens to someone who makes a bad decision to steal a loaf of bread because he’s going through a tough time? Given how quickly he will be identified and caught, how hard will it be for him to pick himself back up after he commits that first crime?

Many questions. No simple answers.