Tag: personal development

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Let the best ideas win

Good ideas survive deep skepticism and intense competition. Stress-testing ideas exposes their weaknesses and highlights their strengths. Innovation happens when people are encouraged to put forward their best thinking, no matter their status, power, or tenure.

I heard Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chairman, speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He attributed a lot of Google’s success to the company’s practice of letting the best ideas win. Google embodies this ethos and approach to innovation in X Development, its semisecret innovation lab that works on moonshot technology, such as Google’s self-driving cars. The lab celebrates failure and gives bonuses to teams that successfully kill their own projects by disproving their hypotheses.

Easy to understand, difficult to implement

Most of us enjoy seeing our ideas adopted and don’t like watching them be criticized. When you combine this self-protective tendency with the hierarchies that develop in organizations, you can unintentionally protect bad ideas. You have likely witnessed a situation where no one wants to criticize an idea because it’s a pet project of someone who holds power in the organization.

Surrounding yourself with people who think like you blinds you to flaws in your thinking. The search for truth, knowledge, and innovation requires a free and open exchange of ideas. Seek out people with diverse viewpoints and invite criticism. Allow the best ideas to grow and let the bad ones die. Natural selection has been implementing this principle since life on earth began.

Learn to embrace failure and argue constructively

Innovation requires failure. British inventor Sir James Dyson spent 15 years creating 5,126 versions of his dual cyclone vacuum cleaner before he found the right design. Criticize ideas—not people. The competition of ideas only works if people share their best thinking, and people won’t speak up if there is a chance they will be attacked or disrespected. Not all ideas are going to be good. However, people need to feel safe and supported so they will share their ideas. Find believable people who disagree with you. Understand all ideas should be considered but consider the presenter’s track record and experience. If you don’t have direct experience with a topic, then don’t offer strong opinions. Consider a person’s believability when evaluating the worth of their opinions.

Here are a few practical ways to let the best ideas win.

There’s usually an exception to every rule. Ignore this rule if there is not enough time to implement an idea before the company dies.

Good ideas survive intense scrutiny. Encourage everyone on your team to put their best ideas forward. And let the best ideas win.

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Always take the red pill

Always seek out the truth even if it contradicts the beliefs you hold. Self-deceit and ignorance can harm you.

In the science fiction movie The Matrix, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) a blue pill and a red pill and the opportunity to understand the true nature of reality.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

As Neo reaches out to pick, Morpheus says,

“Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.”[1]

If we don’t allow ourselves to see reality, we will make poor choices.

Ray Dalio swallowed the red pill and offers them to his employees. Ray founded Bridgewater Associates over 45 years ago. One of the top investment management firms in the world, Bridgewater manages over $160 billion in assets. Ray credits Bridgewater’s success to building the company culture on radical truth and radical transparency. They believe learning compounds when you get feedback and hear what everyone else is thinking. All 1,500 employees are expected to speak their mind. They prefer not to live in the fog of not knowing what people think. No matter what their status in the organization, employees are expected to speak up and share harsh truths.

A good example of taking the red pill comes from an email sent to Ray from an employee named Jim Haskel. The email highlights the direct honest communication expected at Bridgewater. Remember, Ray is the founder and CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world.

Ray,

You deserve a “D-” for your performance today in the meeting . . . you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized. In the future, I/we would ask you to take some time and prepare and maybe even I should come up and start talking to you to get you warmed up or something but we can’t let this happen again. If you in any way think my view is wrong, please ask the others or we can talk about it.[2]

Jim

Here are a few practical ways to take the red pill.

There’s usually an exception to every rule. Consider alternatives if pursuing truth results in breaking the law or physical violence. To improve your judgement and be wrong less often. Always take the red pill and seek out the truth.

[1] The Matrix, produced by Joel Silver, written by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, production company Warner Bros, 1999.

[2] Ray Dalio, TED Conference 2017, “How to build a company where the best ideas win.”

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Build high performance teams

A group of people will be smarter and stronger than any one individual. Our prosperity has been built on this principle. Cooperation requires a common goal. Banding together to fight off predators. Hunting animals faster or stronger than you. Aligning to fight off other tribes. Born vulnerable, our ancestors were unlikely victors. Lacking the lion’s strength, the rhino’s protective thick skin, and the cheetah’s speed our odds of survival looked grim. People cooperating resulted in the winning survival strategy to overcome the dangerous forces of nature.

We not only survived but prospered and evolved to become the apex predator. Cooperation continues to be the organizing principle of our institutions. Business, religion, government, and sports all involve groups of people cooperating and aligning around a common aim.

Startups and professional sports involve groups of highly skilled people in pursuit of a common purpose. And they have a lot in common. Both are highly competitive stressful environments with large financial investment at stake. Winning requires peak performance. Recruiting top talent is essential to achieve success. Strong group identity creates shared norms, values, and behaviors. Culture, strategy, and grit make the difference between winning and losing. Both employ technology to obsessively track metrics to learn faster.

With all of these similarities, why don’t knowledge workers train like professional athletes? Science has taught us a lot about how to optimize human performance. Professional sports teams take a holistic approach to optimize performance of each player. They seek out unfair advantage wherever possible. Nutrition, sleep, mental training, physical conditioning, and specialized coaching. Frequent feedback loops are used to accelerate learning.

Your brain performs better when you sleep well, exercise, and maintain a healthy diet. As a knowledge worker, your habits impact your performance. Exercise provides the single most effective way to improve your cognitive ability. Cognitive decline begins in healthy educated adults in their twenties and early thirties. Increasing blood flow to your brain on a consistent basis prevents cognitive decline. Exercise also reduces stress, increases your energy, prevents injury, strengthens your immune system, and combats disease.

Insufficient sleep leads to getting sick and making mistakes. If you sleep less than seven hours a night you accumulate sleep debt which impacts your brain function and immune system. Your attention, response time, creativity, decision making ability becomes compromised.

Eating a healthy diet improves your performance at work. Companies gain productivity due to healthier employees and reduced sick days. Maintaining healthy eating habits boosts your immune system, improves mood, controls weight gain, and combat disease.

High performance cultures are built on high performance habits. Peak performance requires proactively designing your culture around rapid learning, trust, accountability, and habits to improve mental fitness. Habits to improve mental performance are not limited to sleep, exercise, and diet. Mental fitness also requires exposing yourself to new ideas, considering a diversity of viewpoints, and learning new skills. Your team’s learning accelerates through consistent daily practice and feedback. Design daily habits around these principles to build a high-performance team.

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Rules for decision making

Without rules we risk getting jerked like a puppet, simply reacting to conditions around us. Rules for behavior and communication allow us to work together more effectively, and rules can also help you make better decisions. Just as programming languages provide instructions for computers, decision-making rules become the operating logic of your company. Rather than issuing top-down, centralized mandates, providing decision-making rules will empower the people closest to the problem to decide how to proceed.

How you act and communicate with the people you work with will determine your company culture. Using rules, you can embed the actions you want into your culture. Decision rules provide a structure so you can navigate uncertainty and increase your chances of success.

Rules must be memorable and clearly explain the desired action. If you forget the rules or don’t understand them, you won’t use them. Rules work best if you use them daily, reinforcing their concepts.

Follow these eight rules to make smarter decisions and be wrong less often.

Don’t get jerked like a puppet and react to conditions around you. Use decision rules to program your culture and make better decisions.

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Opportunity cost

You make dozens of decisions every day. And every decision you make has a cost. By deciding to pursue one thing, you’re saying no to something else. At work, if you decide to participate in a meeting, that timeslot is filled and you can’t spend the time focused on a creative task. You can’t do everything. Life requires tradeoffs.

Opportunity cost is the cost of not pursuing alternative opportunities. The higher the value of what you could be doing versus what you actually are doing, the greater the opportunity cost.

It’s easy to recognize opportunity cost when it’s staring you in the face—like moving to a new city, changing jobs, or planning your next vacation. But most of us don’t consider opportunity cost in our decision-making process for the majority of our decisions.

We know money is not infinite, but we often treat time, energy, and attention as if they are. Your time is limited. If you choose to spend an hour on something, you can’t use it for anything else, so making smart decisions about your time is critical.

Do you stop to consider multiple scenarios of how you could spend your time before scheduling a meeting, attending a conference, pursuing a potential customer, or deciding to build a new product feature?

What are the costs of spending too much time on nonessential busy work? Such as cleaning up your email inbox or spending time in non-essential meetings.

What are the costs of signing a contract with a customer? Are there higher-value clients you won’t be able to serve because you’re too busy serving a lower-value customer? You want to choose your customers carefully.

One of the most extreme examples of opportunity cost is the decision to start a company. I love creating and building businesses. But startups require a tremendous commitment of time and energy. The potential rewards are large if you succeed, but the opportunity cost is huge if you fail. If you’re an employee of a company and the business isn’t doing well, it’s much easier to go to work somewhere else. It’s worth it to start your own company. But you should consider the opportunity cost before jumping in blindly.

Here are a few useful ways to consider opportunity cost.

  1. Do fewer things better. Tradeoffs imply that in order to become good at a few things, you’ll be mediocre at a bunch of other things. That’s okay. Focus on being excellent at a handful of things and consider dropping or outsourcing some of the other stuff. Doing fewer things also allows for breathing room. If you’re too busy, you could miss out on great opportunities. But it’s also hard to say no to good opportunities. Be ruthless and say no to almost everything. This frees up time and creates space to pursue a great opportunity.
  2. Create a minimum of three imagined scenarios. For important decisions, develop at least three different potential solutions or scenarios with a detailed list of benefits and consequences for each scenario. Consider not only what you’ll gain from each scenario, but also what you will lose. Assume each scenario is wrong. Try to disprove them!
  3. Choose a high aspirational hourly rate for yourself. No one values your time more than you do. Your aspirational hourly rate doesn’t have to be consistent with what the market is paying you today. Factor it into every decision. I set my hourly rate at $1,000 an hour. This usually forces me to outsource most things so I can focus my time and mental energy on higher-value work. This means delegating tasks whenever possible and minimizing time doing busy work, errands, and household chores. Having a $1,000-per-hour opportunity cost helps motivate me to focus on what’s important.
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A map is not the territory

Maps help guide us where we want to go. They represent the accumulation of knowledge from people who have traveled the route before you. Maps help you avoid getting lost and wasting time.

But a map is not reality—just as an architectural blueprint for a building is not the building. A map is both a representation of reality and an interpretation of reality shaped from the perspective of the map maker. There are no perfect maps. All maps are subjective and distorted, capturing the best understanding of the people who create them. 

One of the earliest surviving world maps was drawn on silk in 1389 and depicts the Chinese Ming Empire. The map spans the entire Eurasian continent from Japan to the Atlantic Ocean. It is particularly notable for the way in which it distorts the size of various landmasses. Mainland China sits like a monolith in the middle of the map, while Japan and Korea are both far larger than modern-day India. The African continent, meanwhile, is depicted as a relatively small peninsula with what appears to be a giant lake in its center. You would have a hard time navigating the world if you were following that map.

Often, we think of maps as tools to help us navigate the physical world, allowing us to get where we want to go. But we also have mental maps. You interpret reality based on the maps in your head. When you learn a new skill, you create a mental map of each step you must take to perform the skill. Your experiences of people, culture, and physical environment shape your mental maps.

Imagine being born into a world that had no maps—of either the geographical or mental varieties. Imagine trying to navigate the world without the benefit of thousands of years of knowledge compiled from our ancestors’ painful failures and hard-earned victories. Just as cartographers provide us with maps of our city, so science provides us a map of human knowledge. Art maps our creative expression, imagination, and experience. Religion gives us maps to a virtuous and meaningful life.

Maps are useful. But It’s important not to confuse a map with the territory. Maps get outdated because the terrain constantly changes and evolves. Even Google maps can lead you in the wrong direction if you don’t pay attention.

Navigating the wilderness

In my early twenties, I led backpacking and climbing expeditions for teenagers in remote parts of Alaska. Backpacking with a group of kids in remote wilderness areas ten days from the nearest road required me to become proficient at reading maps. We did not have GPS, and our only backup in case of an emergency was a radio that only worked when a plane flew over us—which would happen every few days. A route-finding mistake could bring severe consequences.

We could carry only enough food for seven days. A small plane would meet us mid-route, land on the glacier, and drop another seven days of food. If we did not make it to this predetermined food-drop location, we would not have food. Route finding was challenging because some rivers could not be crossed and others could be crossed only before sunrise. After a few hours of sunshine, the ice on the glacier warmed enough to unleash a torrent of water, making a river crossing impossible. 

Learning to navigate with maps and also learning that the “map is the not the territory” was essential to navigating the wilderness. Those principles have also proved valuable in business. It’s important to study your competition and companies who came before you to look for patterns, to see what strategies worked and failed. But every company is unique, and you can’t blindly copy the customer acquisition strategy, design process, or business model of another company. Even if your business is targeting the same customers, it’s highly unlikely your map will look exactly the same as the map from another company. 

Strategies for navigation

Here are a few strategies that have helped me follow the right paths and successfully navigate unexpected changes in terrain.

  1. Aim at the right target. Make sure you have a well-defined destination that aligns with your goals.
  2. Orient your map. When I taught 16-year-olds to read a map in the wilderness, I first taught them to orient the map correctly. If you don’t align the map to the terrain, it is easy to start walking in the wrong direction.
  3. Zoom in and out. Zoom in to deconstruct a problem into its foundational elements. Zoom out to see the big picture and make sure you are solving the right problem.
  4. Calibrate against reality often. Test your assumptions often to make sure you are on the right path.