people & performance / strategy & solutions
Members of the House of Beautiful Business community shared ideas on how to improve meetings. Before you join your next meeting, have a read-through of what they came up with. See what the repetition is saying (or not saying).
Even better: before you schedule your next, ask yourself: does this really require a meeting?
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
In response to an article in The Economist about the need for middle managers, Michele Zanini writes:
Just because the ladder has fewer rungs doesn’t mean leadership opportunities are scarce-quite the opposite. By giving people the ability to gain influence (and compensation) based on accomplishment as opposed to advancement, an organization ends up with more, not fewer leaders. And these leaders don’t have to devote their talents and energy to politicking or sabotaging each other in zero-sum promotion battles.
The accomplishment-advancement distinction is worth exploring, but I don’t share Michele’s conclusion: the organization will likely end up with more spirit of initiative, not necessarily more “leaders”.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
When you read what everyone else is reading, you’re likely to think what everyone else is thinking. And you might only be reading what the algorithms are putting before you. It’s time to rewild your attention.
Big-tech recommendation systems (…) pose a (…) challenge for our imaginative lives: Their remarkably dull conception of what’s “interesting”. It’s like intellectual monocropping. You open your algorithmic feed and see rows and rows of neatly planted corn, and nothing else. (Clive Thompson)
Here’s a simple idea: go to a bookstore or a library, look for a book, and let serendipity (the books around the book you’re looking for) provide surprises and discoveries.
Creativity is not about “being creative”. It’s work. And it doesn’t have to be hard work.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
It’s called Cooperative overlapping.
It seems self-evident. Starting to speak before another has finished violates their right to the floor. In formal contexts such as political debates, it breaches the rules. In casual conversation, it is simply rude.
But it’s not so simple. As a linguist who studies the mechanics of conversation, I’ve observed and documented that beginning to talk while another is talking can be a way of showing enthusiastic engagement with what the speaker is saying. Far from silencing them, it can be encouragement to keep going.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
Food for thought about privacy policies from Doc Searls:
There is no reason why websites and services can’t agree to your privacy policy, and your terms of engagement. In legal terms, you should be able to operate as the first party, and to proffer your own terms, to which sites and services can agree (or, as privacy laws now say, consent) as second parties. That this is barely thinkable is a legacy of a time that has sadly not yet left us: one in which only companies can enjoy that kind of scale. Yet it would clearly be a convenience to have privacy as normalized in the online world as it is in the offline one.
Doc is Founder and director of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Co-founder and board member of Customer Commons,
He is a blogger and he is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter
Building a successful organization is a mix of doing new/novel things, old things, and very old things. I think we usually spend too much time talking about the new and novel as if it’s a silver bullet. Doing the old and very old things consistently and well is overlooked.
I would add an additional distinction: there’s the new/novel and there’s the timeless. There is also the timely: doing things at the right time.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
In some [groups], you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter
From the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual, here is an 8-point plan for disrupting meetings and conferences. You will probably recognize some of these from your own circumstances:
(1) Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make ‘speeches’. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make committees as large as possible—never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate ‘caution’. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
“(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision. . . . It might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter
Again, this month it’s a combination of research and practical insights, some timely and some timeless:
Happy reading and feel free to share these management and leadership insights with your friends and colleagues.
Also, if you want to receive your own copy by email, subscribe!
Important, yet often forgotten:
So much startup advice comes down to one common element: Hiring the best people. Whether it’s Twitter threads about how the first 50 hires set the cultural tone, or blog posts recommending that a founder interview the first 100 employees, most pointers are about keeping an unwavering focus on the people who power startups.
“While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn’t talk as much about the systems. What I don’t come across as often is a read about how the systems that those first hires build are the manifestation of the culture,” says Fishner.
In his view, it’s not an either or — it’s both. “While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems,” he says. “The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your memes are highly influential on your outcomes. Likewise, both your people and your systems are highly influential on your company’s outcomes — but the system side doesn’t get as much attention as it should.”
Fishner expands on why he thinks systems deserve equal footing. “While early employees help set implicit norms, building systems early in a company’s lifecycle sets explicit norms. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows,” he says.
(…)Fishner’s conviction here surprisingly comes from his college days. “I studied philosophy. My thesis was on the impacts of subconscious advertising techniques. Theories of economics are built on the foundational belief that individuals are rational, well-informed and autonomous. But in practice, none of those things are true. For example, we’re far from autonomous — each person influences other people,” he says.
“In my reading and research for the thesis, I came to more of a determinist worldview that free will is overrated and our willpower is overstated. We’re actually much more influenced by the environments that we’re put in.
Having watched technology go from a curio to curiosity to a daily necessity, I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, “minimum viable product” or “growth hacking” are.
But it is time to add an emotional and moral dimension to products. Companies need to combine data with emotion and empathy or find themselves in conflict with those they deem to serve.
This comes up quite often in my coaching conversations. For now, I’ll say this: the choice to ignore the emotional and moral dimensions of one’s work, services, or products is itself an emotional and moral stance.
Both Malik and Sacasas’ newsletters/blogs are well worth following.