The non-existent popularity contest

One of the follies of new leadership is attempting to win a non-existent popularity contest.

Leaders have one job – to make the decisions that help the team win. This often means making tough, sometimes unpopular, decisions.

It is so tempting to just try to be liked and to make everyone happy. But that’s a road to nowhere.

The only antidote is to take charge when you’re in charge, to do everything you can to help the team win, and to treat everything else as noise.

Ironically, that’s the best way to win that non-existent popularity contest – at least among the crowd that counts.

Took 12 years

A wise friend shared an experience teaching a class of graduate students recently. He is a professional investor and shared some of the lessons he learnt – covering concepts like funding rounds and managing a board.

A student came up to him after the class and remarked that they found the content “rudimentary.”

This friend asked the student about their background and learnt that the student had done a 3 month internship at a venture capital firm.

“You learnt all this in that internship” – he enquired

“Yes” – said the student.

“That’s something. This took me 12 years to learn.”

The exchange made me chuckle.

It is a beautiful illustration of the idea that “words are containers.” This student might have known the words. But the containers weren’t anywhere as deep as that of a practitioner who’s been at it over a decade.

In other words, don’t confuse exposure for knowledge… and certainly not for wisdom.

Momentum can deceive

I’ve been thinking about this chart ever since I saw it earlier this week (H/T: Azeem’s Exponential View). It is just fascinating to see BlackBerry’s revenue trajectory even as the iPhone launched and began to take share.

Of course, these charts happen all the time with major shifts. In every one of these cases, the leaders involved attempted to cling on to the old reality and refused to accept the new one.

There are many versions of this chart playing out right now as we transition into the AI era.

And the game right now for everyone building technology is to learn from these and embrace the new reality.

Either you get it.. or it gets you.

Control and arguments

“While there are many factors that determine if a romantic relationship succeeds or flounders, one key factor is whether makes the people in it feel more in control of their happiness or less in control of their happiness.” | Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (paraphrased)

In detailed examinations of conversations among unhappy couples, researchers found that the partners tended to focus on trying to control the other person. For example, they might say “don’t go there” or “don’t use your voice against me” or “you always do this all that.”

Happy couples instead focused either on controlling themselves or the environment. For example, they’d talk slower and make sure that they kept that cool. The key with happy couples was focusing on things that they could control together and ensuring that they kept an argument as small as possible, instead of letting it expand into other areas and throwing “the kitchen sink” at each other.

Of course, these lessons apply to all kinds of arguments/disagreements.

That stretch of highway

There’s a stretch of highway on the way to work that had been under construction for about 9 months.

In the first 6 months of construction, I kept hoping the end was near.

Around that time, I was in a conversation in a public place with a colleague who was complaining about that stretch. A friendly stranger overheard the conversation and said – “Hey, I’ve been here since the 1970s. We’ve never gone more than 2 years between large sections of that highway under construction. How do you think we went from 2 lanes to 6?”

It made me chuckle.

I had fallen prey to a “I’ll be happy when” scenario.

Those don’t work.

It helped me make peace with that bit of construction for the most part.

I’m glad I did because, 20 months later, it’s still not done. :-)

The Trial of Miles

“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.” — John L. Parker, Once a Runner

Beautifully put. It resonated.

Back up capacity and optimization

If you want to have back up capacity, you have to be okay with not optimizing every bit of your current capacity.

So, if you want to be ten minutes ahead of time for every appointment, you have to be at peace with the fact that you will often not make the best use of those ten minutes at hand.

Similarly, if you have a back up battery at home that you also use every evening during peak hours, you have to make peace with not utilizing every bit of available capacity if you want to save it for an outage.

On the flip side, if you want to optimize your time till the last minute, you will have to make peace with being late from time to time.

Or, in the case of that back up battery, you have to be okay with the refrigerator losing power on a day where you’ve used up all that safety capacity. That’s just the cost of not having a back up.

You can’t have it both ways.

The key then is to invest in back up capacity for high stakes scenarios. And, in all others, to make peace with the consequences of not having back up capacity.

Again, you can’t have it both ways.