Starting ahead

I noticed something interesting in the way I approach the morning. If I’m up by around 5:30, I feel calm and ahead of the day. But, if I’m up around 6, I already feel behind and somewhat rushed.

I’ve been sensing this pattern of late but can definitely attest to it as of this morning. There’s a tipping point around the 5:30 mark that has a noticeable effect on my morning. And, it feels like a worthy enough tipping point to design around it, i.e., to make sure my alarms go off no later than 5:30. This, in turn, means being in bed by 9:30.

I find it fascinating to learn these little things about yourself.

This is also why I believe blanket productivity advice is useless. It is much better to explore productivity from a more overarching point of view – start from exploring what “the good life” means to you, understand what you value, what your ideal days would be like, how you’d like to work – and then work backwards to create an approach towards productivity. Once you have that baseline, it will still require a continuous chain of iterations as you reflect and learn more about yourself.

But, the fact remains that there is no productivity without a goal and there is no way you can approach the “how” behind productivity without understanding the psychology behind it. And, productivity goals and your mind’s psychology are uniquely yours. It helps to own it.

Art in human interactions

Art in human interactions is knowing when to ignore the science. There’s plenty of science out there that can tell you how to “win friends and influence people.” But, art is understanding what and when to ignore the science.

There are 3 pre-requisites that help us become artists –
1. An acceptance that universal popularity is a myth. This leads to a degree of comfort in just being ourselves.
2. Taking time to learn the science and understand human psychology and human behavior. Wisdom typically follows knowledge.
3. Developing the habit to be present when we interact and to take the time to reflect after interactions. That’s how we learn from our experiences.

There have been many great books written about influence and persuasion that have inspired courses in schools around the world. That’s great – it helps us understand the science. But, approaching human beings as scientific puzzles that need to be solved is one of the worst long term moves we can make. In the really long term, a purity of intent matters more than anything science can offer. That can only come with a genuine interest in understanding people and in building long term relationships.

Human interactions and relationship building isn’t a short term cash-and-carry game. There is a term for that game – networking. It doesn’t work in the long run.

The Dropbox peace-of-mind – MBA Learnings

If I had to summarize my learning on pricing from my Microeconomics classes, it would be -> avoid price competition like the plague. And, to do that – differentiate, differentiate, differentiate.

We discussed Dropbox’s move in August last year to lower prices to compete with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. The big question was whether this was going to be a race to the bottom in a future where storage would inevitably be free?

Now, Dropbox is one of my favorite products. I have been a user since the early days when they used to be hosted on “getdropbox.com” and their brand has nothing but positive associations. All my working files sit on my Dropbox folder and, ever since I did that 3 years ago, I’ve never had to fret about whether my working files will ever be lost.

So, I thought I’d put together 2 recommendations for Dropbox based on what I’ve learnt in Marketing and Microeconomics in the past few months. These recommendations are based on the principal that differentiation matters. If we make the argument (and we can) that most storage providers inherently offer a similar product, the game-changer will be Dropbox’s ability to horizontally differentiate, i.e., inspire great brand loyalty among its users. That, then, leads us to a marketing question – how can they do that? My line of thinking is to think around the traditional 4 P’s – product, price, promotion and place. And, my 2 recommendations are going to be based on promotion and price –

1. Target the peace-of-mind business. The question is – what can Dropbox do to differentiate? That leads me to – what is the market? The first answer seems to be storage. But, is it really storage? Or, put differently, do we want it to be storage?

When I look at why customers use Dropbox, collaboration is obviously a massive reason and is at the core of why they do what they do. They have understandably worked really hard at making collaboration easy. My recommendation would be to also target the peace-of-mind business. Every user who collaborates via Dropbox likely has many important files on it. Why not just move them all onto Dropbox and make it a full set?

I pay Crashplan a yearly fee to back up my photos. That could easily be Dropbox. I think Crashplan works fine but I don’t love Crashplan the same way and would be more than happy to pay a bit of a premium for that love and trust.

In short, I think the customer problem that Dropbox could look to solve is to remove the worry about files not being backed up. This needs an investment into customer education and a few tweaks into the way it is marketed. But, if done well, I think this could be a huge win.

2. Get creative with pricing. The current “band” approach to pricing from the storage providers is staid. The problem with bands is that it only feels like a good deal if you are near the edge of the next band. Why pay $10 for 1 terabyte if all you have is a 100 GB worth of content to store.

An approach that could be really impactful is Amazon Web Services-style “you-pay-for-what-you-use.” This could work well for 2 reasons –
1. Foot-in-the-door. Even if I’ve not fully made up my mind, I could put in 10 extra GB into my Dropbox folder and try it out for a month. Once I’m in and experience the peace of mind, it’ll be hard to get out.
2. Customer’s use will expand with time. It is much easier to get a customer paying $6 to pay $10 vs. one paying $0. This use expansion is part of the reason behind the fact that Dropbox and Netflix still use AWS for storage.

Dropbox has a strong edge when it comes to differentiation because its brand associations are all linked to storage. Amazon, for example, has begun offering photo back up for free for Amazon Prime members but I still haven’t checked it out because I don’t associate Amazon with photo storage (yet). It’ll be interesting to see how the storage wars play out. Good luck, Dropbox!

3 steps to approaching behavioral interviews

If you’ve interviewed for a professional role in the past few years, you’ve likely faced a “Tell me a time when..” question. There are lots of guides on how to answer these sorts of questions. I’ve found most of them to only be moderately useful. I’d like to share a 3 step process that I’ve come to use for these interviews.

Base line requirements. There are 2 base line requirements –
a) Create a behavioral matrix. Create a table with a few rows that list the various types of questions (typically – Leadership and Influence, Challenges, Failure, Success, Teamwork, and Approaching problems) and let the columns be Professional, Education and Personal. For each combination, list stories that fit the behavioral themes. The key here is not to miss important stories from various aspects of your life. While you are at it, also list the key starter questions – “Tell me about yourself,” “Why industry/company/role/you?” “What are 3 weaknesses?”

b) Really work on the main 5-8 stories. You will probably narrow down to a set of 2-3 super star stories and 3-4 good stories. Work hard on fleshing them out so they feel really concise. Flesh out the rest of the stories in bullet point fashion as well. Once you’ve fleshed them out, make sure you really know them by heart. There is no substitute to practice here.

Once you hit the base line requirements, you are ready for a behavioral interview. The 3 step process that needs to follow is –

1. Think deliberately about your strategy. The way to think about it is to ask yourself 2 questions – what is the one thing I’d like the interviewer to remember about me? And, what are three themes I’d love the interviewer to remember?

If your themes are wicked design skills, creativity and your ability to take initiative with the “wicked design skills” being the 1 thing you’d like the interviewer to remember, that needs to be woven in as a thread through the interview. Your “tell me about yourself” should have all 3 explicitly mentioned, your answers to “why role/why you?” should have them mentioned. Your weakness will probably be something along “think too much about design and not enough about implementation” since most great strengths moonlight as weaknesses.

The important thing is to start with your strategy and work it in through the stories. The best strategies will fit well with the company and role you are interviewing for. So, if you’re interviewing to be an interface designer, I would define what skills the best interface designer should have and see how your skills match. Great interviewees present a story that just makes sense. Deciding on a strategy and weaving it through is how you do that.

2.  Answer the question. The famous “STARL” framework (Situation-Task-Action-Result-Learning) is a good starting point for behavioral interviews. Using the STARL analogy, don’t spend more than 20 seconds on describing the situation. This is very hard to do because it feels like we need to give the other person a real taste for the complexity of the situation. Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. Just answer the question.

I’d recommend just paraphrasing the question and starting with a crisp situation before you dive into the details. Being succinct when you tell your stories is how you differentiate yourself.

3. Don’t just tell them what you did – explain your thought process. Let’s say you are asked a question – “Tell me about a time when you faced resistance to an idea you proposed.” You can pull off a great interview answer if you answer the question, weave your overall strategy in and talk about a time where you responded to the situation well and generated great results. That would work because that’s what most folks do.

Let’s think about the “why” behind behavioral interviews for a moment. They don’t exist because interviewers want to know what you did. They exist because they want to understand how you approach problems. So, make it easy for them. After succinctly describing the situation, explain how you think about it. An example would be – “Whenever I face resistance to one of my design ideas, I typically do 3 things – first, I speak one-on-one to the dissenter to understand the source of the dissent. Next, I take time to explain what my rationale and thought process was. Finally, if it is a easy fix, I make the change but, if I feel it compromises on the integrity of the design, I work to understand the decision criteria and see if we can bring an objective person to discuss it with us. I followed these steps when I was faced with this situation..”

In 20 seconds, you’ve explained how you think about dissent and then will have given him/her confidence that you’ve walked your talk before. Follow this process for each of your key stories and explain this thought process before you dive into the details – you’ll be golden.

I hope this helps.

No getting around focus

We’re all on a spectrum between obsessive compulsive and attention deficit. I am definitely firmly in the attention deficit side. We didn’t have too much testing for all of this when I was growing up in India so you just learnt to live with it. I am sure I’d have a dose of the hyperactive ‘H’ as well.

Ever since understanding this, I’ve designed my life around these characteristics. For instance, it used to really annoy me that I would never be able to hold my attention through an entire class when I’d observe friends around me do it with ease. It used to also annoy me that I could never get through an online tutorial or read a rule book. Now, I’m more tolerant to these quirks and don’t mind them as long as I’m aware of what’s happening. I don’t read rule books or watch online tutorials if I can help it. I listen to books more often than I read them. I prefer asking for directions rather than reading maps and I definitely expect myself to get distracted every few minutes. I treat that as completely normal and expect work sessions to be littered with lots of small breaks. I do email breaks and kill two birds with one stone. I banned Facebook feed breaks in April 2013 and have managed to stick to that ban – the Facebook feed is too much of a rabbit hole for someone like me. :-)

However, as I’ve been working hard on getting to my ideal life process (sleep, eat, exercise, read, meditate, be incredibly productive and reflect – consistently), I’ve realized there’s no getting around focus. And, here it is important to understand focus, both as a noun and as a verb.

Focus as a noun. Focus as a noun is our normal vision of focus – think someone bent over a library book for hours. This is hard when you are wired to be distracted. But, on the plus side, I’ve realized that folks like me tend to have speed on our side. I think our brains realize that the time we spend focused on something is precious and it aims to compensate for the distractions with increased intensity. In short, if you pay attention and work on this, distractions become no big deal. You learn to harness them productively.

Focus as a verb. This is where the magic lies. Focus as a verb is an intensive, dynamic and iterative process. Focus as a verb is when you understand your big directional goals, are deeply committed to them, and are going to leave no stone un-turned to get to them. This involves a relentless pursuit of the things that matter. It requires constant reflection to make sure you’re doing the right things and a mindset that just refuses to give up despite the many challenges you are to face. It is an overarching idea that governs your life. This is what obsessive leaders like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have in spades.

The easier way to think about these 2 kinds of focus is to think of them as analogous to management and leadership. Management is getting things done efficiently while leadership is doing the right things in the first place. Once we learn to manage ourselves, focus as a noun becomes easy to deal with. The hard part is the focus as a verb. That’s where we prove our mettle as leaders of our own selves. That’s where the magic happens.

And, there is no getting around it.

Hat tip to Greg McKeown for the focus as a noun and verb insight

Hygiene and Motivation factors – The 200 words project

I hope you’re having a nice weekend. Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from How will you measure your life? by Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon..

Psychologist Frederick Herzberg noted the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum – starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are two separate, independent measures and are functions of hygiene factors and motivation factors.

Hygiene factors are factors like compensation, status, and work conditions. Bad hygiene factors cause dissatisfaction but having good hygiene factors alone do not make you love your job. They just stop you from hating it.
Motivation factors are factors like challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. These factors are those that make you love your job.

The challenge is that motivation factors are hard to measure while hygiene factors (especially money) are relatively easy to measure. A lesson both for job seekers and job creators – create an environment high on motivation factors while ensuring hygiene factors don’t get in the way. Let it not be the other way around..

Hygeine motivation factorsSource and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when you’ve satisfied the hygiene factors but the quest remains only to make more money. Herzberg’s theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions: Is this work meaningful to me? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to learn new things?’ | Clayton Christensen

Ser Allister Thorne on leadership

My wife and I caught up with the 4th season of ‘A Game of Thrones’ over the past few days as it is finally available on the iTunes store. This would normally lead to a few rants about HBO’s antiquated approach to content distribution online. But, not today.

In one of the (many) war scenes in the season, Ser Allister Thorne says this to Jon Snow –

“Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second guessing himself, that’s the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.”

As much as I despise Thorne’s character, I thought this observation on leadership was particularly insightful.

I’ve observed this over and over again. The idea “often mistaken, but never in doubt” is regularly used in jest. But, it is one of those characteristics that I find to be essential in leadership. No matter what you do, you’re always going to be second guessed. Yes, sure, an ability to listen to reason and change course matters. But, if you’ve just set sail, the right course is almost never clear. More often than not, conviction and self-belief matter more.

And, I’m not just talking about leading teams. This applies just as well to just leading ourselves..

Nobel prize winners and stupidity – MBA Learnings

In our first Microeconomics class this quarter, our professor spoke of her experiences presenting research to audiences that included Nobel prize winners. She noticed that the Nobel prize winners were most often the ones who raised their hands and asked questions. Some of these questions might even have been perceived as “stupid” questions as they occasionally sought to clarify some of the most basic concepts of the discussion.

When she observed this pattern repeat over and over again, she realized that it was that willingness to learn and dig deep that made the Nobel prize winners special. You see, they might have been stupid when they started but they saw to it that they didn’t stay stupid for long. And, her message to us was to make sure we asked questions about any concept we didn’t understand in class.

This is my third iteration of being a student and, in my quest to learn how to learn, I feel like I’m finally begin to understand and internalize lessons like this. This is a trait I observed in top executives from my time as a consultant as well. They were very willing to look stupid and ask questions around the underlying assumptions. And, these questions often unearthed real insight.

This lesson reminded me of the Mark Twain quote – ‘ A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t.’

You don’t often control your current level of stupidity. But, staying at your current level of stupidity is entirely your choice. If you find yourself wondering if your question is a stupid question, remember the Nobel prize winners..

(Thanks Professor!)

The perfect spaghetti sauce

What is the perfect spaghetti sauce? How spicy, salty, or thick would the perfect spaghetti sauce be?

Howard Moskowitz’s breakthrough insight here was that there is no perfect spaghetti sauce. Instead, there are many different kinds of perfect spaghetti sauce that suit different kinds of people. Starbucks wouldn’t exist if there was a perfect cup of coffee. And, Earl Grey certainly isn’t everyone’s favorite cup of tea.

The best products, services, and businesses don’t attempt to be everything to everybody. There’s a simple and important reason for this – the best products stand for something. The moment they make that choice, they lose people who don’t agree with what they stand for. A multi-millionaire may scorn Ikea’s philosophy but, for every one of those, you’ll find ten 20-somethings who will swear by it. That’s part of the game. You can’t win them all. In fact, I’d go far as to say you don’t really want to win them all.

It is much the same for us as people. If we attempt universal popularity, we will almost certainly lose what we stand for. Unlike in the case of a product or service, that means more to us than a decline in sales. It is the difference between a life and a life well lived.

The stakes are much higher. Forget about choosing wisely. First, we must choose.

Immortalized through music

I am a quirky music lover. I don’t go out of my way to discover new music and, instead, rely on serendipity. But, once I discover a song I like, it goes onto my iTunes list – this is an eclectic yet carefully curated list that has grown with time. I buy my music because it solidifies this deep emotional connection with it. The other quirk is that I have music on through 60-80% of the time I work. Since my high school days, I’ve just gotten used to having music in the background. It suits my kind of ADD for some reason.

Now, the reason for this post is that the music I listen to often has some really powerful memories associated with it. There are songs that remind me of certain times in the last 12 years – some good, some tough, and some fun – and then there are many that remind me of people. In some cases, it was because a close friend loved it and, in other cases, it was because we listened to it on repeat during a memorable moment. These people and moments become immortalized in my memory through music.

Just this weekend, I heard a song that nearly brought tears to my eyes. The funny thing is that I didn’t even know the lyrics – it was just the “feel” of the song.  There’s something about it that makes me want to pause, take stock and reflect. I’ve been listening to this song often these past few days – my wife’s normal question when I go through the ‘listen-to-a-new-song-often-phase’ is – “are we listening to this on repeat today?” (I clearly have a long list of music quirks :-))

As I explained to the friend who shared this song, music is my favorite kind of gift and she’s been immortalized in my memory through this song.

This is an unusual mid-week post but, as I woke up this morning, I reflected on what’s been a busy few days. And, I felt I needed to take some time this evening to stop, reflect, and take it all in. But, as I started writing today’s post, I played the song and realized that the mini-moment of peace would go a long way in making sure I start the day in the right mindset. So, I deleted what I began writing about and thought I’d just share the song with you.

Maybe you might find it helps too. Here’s to a bit of pause, a bit of reflection, and a bit of peace this mid-week.