Management Phases of Growth

These stages arent necessarily going to be sequential. Same manager may show signs from multiple different stages with varying proportions. They may regress between stages unknowingly during war times or under stress or pressure. The stages overall correspond to many manager's stage and growth.

Stage 1

New Manager : A new manager who is unwittingly trying to prove why he deserves the management job

Common Signs

1. General insecurity
2. Hero mentality : dives in wherever needed, wears all the hats, fills all the gaps, prone to burnout
3. Rarely says No or I Don't Know
4. Nitpicks a lot when providing feedback
5. Sometimes ends up competing with direct reports
6. Still honing delegation skills
7. Generally have mastery over a certain area or domain which leads from IC -> Manager transition

Stage 2 

A manager who is all business and primarily treats people as resources. May care about people. But cares more about short term results and targets. When the two are in conflict, unabashedly prioritizes short term results. 

Common Signs

1. Graduating from phase 1
2. Gets distracted in 1:1s
3. Often uses processes, policies, senior management, company culture for their stance, don't own the message
4. Tends not to make an effort to maintain a relationship once someone leaves the team
5. Doesn't optimize for long term health and wellbeing, optimizes for people and product metrics
6. People don't follow this manager
7. May sometimes feel the need to perform in 1:1
8. May burn out the team or members of the team
9. Doesn't have a strong executive presence at the top

Stage 3

A manager with only one management style that he uses on everyone on the team. In most cases, it is the style that "he prefers" to be managed.

Common Signs

1. Even though he doesn't spell out loudly, there is a preferred style and playbook which is "the right way to do things". Deviations are a headache. 
2. Hires people who fit a certain stereotype and lacks diversity. 
3. Great rapport with a few team members, but leaves all other team members very frustrated. 
4. May be directive or assistive depending on junior or senior people, has a set of questions as playbook. The playbook is evolving and doesn't have many new tricks.
5. May have good personalization in their style, but works for some types of folks.
6. These managers may be able to run certain kinds of teams sustainably and in a healthy manner for a reasonable lengths of time
7. Starting to develop executive presence
8. May sometimes model a stage 4 implementation and not the abstraction. May do it unknowingly, so will swing from doing well to being terrible depending on team and context change. 

Stage 4

Great Managers

1. Great Managers have multiple leadership styles. They are able to adapt their style to needs and the challenges depending on the lifecycle of the team and personalize that to the different kinds of needs and styles of the people. The adapt their approach to the learning and working styles of everyone, they don't have an ideal employee. 
2. They address context first and then content.
3. They don't apply band-aid on the wounds or address symptoms. They understand most of the problems are inter-personal. They diagnose and address the root cause. 
4. They use their charm, eloquence and writing skills as tools, not as weapons. 
5. The put their team members above their own self when they are in conflict. 
6. They are proactive about the career growth of their team members, they don't dread those conversations, they invite them. 
7. They are confident and secure in their role.
8. They model high agency. 
9. The have a mature attitude.
10. They know its fine to express vulnerability. They create a safe environment for learning. 
11. They exude presence. 
12. Good managers consistently get good results
13. They don't necessarily squeeze the last drop out for short term optimization for their team, but get long term optimal results for the company. 
14. Key difference between phase 3 and phase 4 is that mastery over a certain area is not needed for a stage 4 manager to succeed in that area. 
15. Executives rely on stage 4 manager's inputs to chart the trajectory of the organization. 

I didnt come this far to only come this far

I didn’t come this far to only come this far. I hear some people saying things like: “When I make it”… “When I get to the top”… “I’ll keep working hard until I get to the top”… “Until I reach my goal”… Let me tell you something: There is no “END”! WINNERS NEVER STOP!
If you reach your GOAL: SET A BIGGER GOAL. If you get to the top of the mountain: Find a bigger mountain!
It’s the journey.
The journey last’s a lifetime
From the start to the finish it’s a real grind
Spent so many days…. working on my mind
Keep a strong mind, live a strong life!
My goals are higher than the skylines
So I ain’t sitting on the sidelines
You think I care about hard times?
I didn’t come this far to let my life fly by
This ain’t about the money
This ain’t about the fame
It ain’t about the status
or material things
It’s about the growth
It’s about the challenge
setting goals, achieving then setting bigger goals
I always hear people say “when I make it, or when I reach the top then I’ll stop”
But the winners never quit
The winners never stop
the journey never ends even
Even at the top!
I didn’t come this far, to only come this far.
I knew the road would be tough from the start
I never complained about my cards
I know the journey is long
Whatever comes my way I’ll stick to the path
Nothing can stop me
just look at my scars
I didn’t come this far
To only come this far
NO! NO! NO!
I’m only getting started. This is just the beginning.
I AM proud of my achievements, but that doesn’t mean I’ll settle for them!
PROUD but NEVER SATISFIED.
PROUD but FOREVER HUNGRY.
PROUD and ALWAYS READY!
PROUD but PUSHING.
PUSHING FOR MORE!
PUSHING FOR GREAT!
I didn’t come this far just to only come this far
I came this far to go further!
Get stronger and push myself harder
I wanna let you know I’m just getting started
I’ve been knocked down
Kicked on and picked on
Stabbed in the back
Heckled and laughed at
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been let down
But a thousand failures never ever kept me down
I know what it takes
I ain’t scared of mistakes
Sometimes you go through hell before the pearly gates
Everyday’s a new day, a chance to be great, a chance to elevate
There’s no way I am stopping at the third base
If ain’t going all the way, then I ain’t starting in the first place
I didn’t sacrifice everything and come all this way
To give up when I’m only 3 feet away
I didn’t come this far, to only come this far.
I knew the road would be tough from the start
I never complained about my cards
I know the journey is long
Whatever comes my way I’ll stick to the path
Nothing can stop me just look at my scars
I didn’t come this far
To only come this far
NO! NO! NO!
If the journey wasn’t challenging, the destination wouldn’t be rewarding. It’s the challenge that makes the greatness. If you reach your GOAL: SET A BIGGER GOAL If you get to the top of the mountain: Find a bigger mountain!

How to manage your skip - playbook

You relationship with you skip is key to your long term success in the organization. Your skip has wider visibility of the organization, they know what is brewing in the 6 month, 1 year horizon and can fast track your career when you might start feeling to get stalled. 

Here are the top few things that your skip cares about

1. What is your brand, who you are as a person, where are you at and where do you want to go and how can you help your skip.
2. Ask them what their top 5 priorities are, what gets them up from bed every morning - aspiration and what keeps them awake at night - headaches. See how you can position your team in those top priorities. 
3. Understand their people plans, who are the key people who they are investing on and how can you be one of those who they invest on. 
4. It is always important to talk about your medium/long term ambitions with your skip so that he is aware. You need to always let them know that you can take on more. Key to doing that is delegating and setting current things up well and taking on more by doing additional org impact. From your skips perspective, they are always thinking that how can I take on more and who are the people who can help me deliver. A lot of the higher level decisions will happen when you wont even know and these conversations will set you up for being considered for those roles. 
5. You should talk to your skip about organization health, if you notice group dynamics, conflicts arising in the organization, it is your responsibility to let your skip know and help them build the organization.
6. If you have a plan on managing up beyond your chain, that is something that you can share and get buyin with your skip. These are all examples of good agenda items. This is where your skip can help you gain broader organizational visibility. 

Things your skip doesn't care about

1. Dont waste time talking to your skip about projects, that is your managers job and your skip expects your manager to take care of it

Super Thinking : The Big Book of Mental Models

MENTAL MODELS

What is a mental model and why should we care?

Mental models are recurring concepts that you can use to quickly create a mental picture of a situation, which becomes a model that you can later apply in similar situations.

Every discipline, like physics, has its own set of mental models that people in the field learn through coursework, mentorship, and firsthand experience.

However, there is a smaller set of mental models that are useful for people like you and me in general day-to-day decision-making, problem-solving, and truth-seeking.

In short, mental models are shortcuts to higher-level thinking.

If you can understand the relevant mental models for a situation, then you can bypass lower-level thinking and immediately jump to higher-level thinking. For this to happen, though, you must apply them at the right time and in the right context.

Super Thinking is a toolbox that systematically lists, classifies, and explains all the important mental models across the major disciplines.

Reading this summary (and maybe later the full book) is just the first step. Learning to successfully apply mental models doesn’t happen overnight. You must develop your powers through repeated practice.

In the next 9 chapters, let’s explore the 130+ major mental models out of the 300 included in this book.

(The name of the mental model in bold, followed by a short explanation. For more mental models and examples, please read the full book.)

1. BEING WRONG LESS

To avoid mental traps, you must think more objectively.

Try arguing from first principles (a group of self-evident assumptions that make up the foundation on which your conclusions rest), getting to the root causes (the real reason something happened), and seeking out the third story (the story that a third, impartial observer would recount).

Realise that your intuitive interpretations of the world can often be wrong due to availability bias (when information recently made available to you distort your objective view of reality), fundamental attribution error (e.g. when you think someone is mean, rather than thinking they were just having a bad day), and optimistic probability bias (being too optimistic about the probability of success).

Use Ockham’s razor (the simplest explanation is most likely to be true) and Hanlon’s razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness) to begin investigating the simplest objective explanations. Then test your theories by de-risking (to be wrong less, you need to be testing your assumptions in the real world), avoiding premature optimisation (tweaking or perfecting something too early).

Attempt to think gray (the truth is not black or white, but somewhere in between, a shade of gray) in an effort to consistently avoid confirmation bias (interpreting new information in a biased way to confirm pre-existing beliefs).

Actively seek out other perspectives by including the Devil’s advocate position (taking up an opposing side of an argument, even if it is one you don’t agree with) and bypassing the filter bubble (online companies showing you more of what they think you already know and like).

Consider the adage “You are what you eat.” You need to take in a variety of foods to be a healthy person. Likewise, taking in a variety of perspectives will help you become a super thinker.

2. ANYTHING THAT CAN GO WRONG, WILL

In any situation where you can spot spillover effects (the effect of an activity spills over outside the core interactions of the activity, like a polluting factory), look for an externality (like bad health effects) lurking nearby.

Public goods (like education) are particularly susceptible to the tragedy of the commons (like poor schools) via the free rider problem (like not paying taxes).

Beware of situations with asymmetric information (one side of a transaction has different information than the other side), as they can lead to principal-agent problems (the self-interest of the agent may lead to suboptimal results for the principal).

Be careful when basing rewards on measurable incentives, because you are likely to cause unintended and undesirable behaviour (Goodhart’s law).

Short-termism (when you focus on short-term results over long-term results, not investing enough in the future) can easily create disadvantageous path dependence (your available set of decisions now is dependent on your past decisions); to counteract it, think about preserving optionality (make choices that preserve future options) and keep in mind the precautionary principle (when an action could possibly create harm, proceed with extreme caution).

Internalise the distinction between irreversible (hard, if not impossible to unwind) and reversible decisions (more fluid), and don’t let yourself succumb to analysis paralysis (poor decision-making because of over-analysing the large amount of information available) for the latter.

Oh, and heed Murphy’s law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong)!

3. SPEND YOUR TIME WISELY

Choose activities to work on based on their relevance to your north star (the guiding vision of a company or person).

Focus your time on just one of these truly important activities at a time (no multitasking!), making it the top idea on your mind (where your thoughts drift toward when your mind drifts freely).

Select between options based on opportunity cost models (every choice has a hidden cost: the value of the best alternative opportunity you didn’t choose).

Use the Pareto principle to find the 80/20 in any activity and increase your leverage (like getting financed to achieve your business goals faster) at every turn.

Recognise when you’ve hit diminishing returns (the tendency for continued effort to diminish in effectiveness after a certain level) and avoid negative returns.

Use commitment and the default effect (scheduling default commitments toward your long-term goals) to avoid present bias (overvaluing near-term rewards over incremental progress on long-term goals), and periodic evaluations to avoid loss aversion (getting more displeasure from losing than pleasure from gaining) and the sunk-cost fallacy (previous losses influencing you to make a bad decision now).

Look for shortcuts via existing design patterns (reusable solutions to a problem), tools, or clever algorithms. Consider whether you can reframe the problem.

4. BECOMING ONE WITH NATURE

Adopt an experimental mindset, looking for opportunities to run experiments and apply the scientific method wherever possible.

Respect inertia (any resistance to a change in direction): create or join healthy flywheels (once something is spinning, it takes little effort to keep it spinning); avoid strategy taxes (a long-term commitment with inertia to an organisational strategy, leading to suboptimal decisions) and trying to enact change in high-inertia situations unless you have a tactical advantage such as discovery of a catalyst and a lot of potential energy (stored energy waiting to be released).

When enacting change, think deeply about how to reach critical mass and how you will navigate the technology adoption life cycle (innovators, early adopters, early/late majority, laggards).

Use forcing functions (a pre-scheduled event that helps you to take a desired action) to grease the wheels for change.

Actively cultivate your luck surface area (make your luck by meeting more people and finding more opportunities) and put in work needed to not be subsumed by entropy (too rigid life with few opportunities).

When faced with what appears to be a zero-sum or black-and-white situation, look for additional options and ultimately for a win-win (where both parties end up better off).

5. LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS

Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy (believing that a streak of events is more likely to continue, while the underlying probability hasn’t changed).

Anecdotal evidence (informally collected evidence from personal stories) and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation – you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions.

Look for tried-and-true experimental designs, such as randomised controlled experiments (participants randomly assigned to two groups) or A/B testing, that show statistical significance.

Any isolated experiment can result in a false positive (falsely giving a positive result when it really wasn’t true) or a false negative (the opposite) and can also be biased by myriad factors, most commonly selection bias (when the selected sample is not representative of the broader population of interest), response bias (when an important subset of people fail to respond to an experiment, the results will end up biased), and survivorship bias (e.g. not accounting for the opinions of former employees).

Replication increases confidence in results, so start by looking for a systematic review and/or meta-analysis (combining data from several studies into one analysis) when researching an area.

Always keep in mind that when dealing with uncertainty, the values you see reported or calculate yourself are uncertain themselves, and that you should seek out and report values with error bars (a visual way to display a measure of uncertainty for an estimate)!

6. DECISIONS, DECISIONS

When tempted to use a pro-con list (listing all the pros and cons of a decision and weighing them against each other), consider upgrading to a cost-benefit analysis (more systematically and quantitatively analysing the benefits and costs across an array of options) or decision tree (a diagram that looks like a tree, with different decisions & outcomes as branches) as appropriate.

When making any quantitative assessment, run a sensitivity analysis (analysing how sensitive a model is to its input parameters) across inputs to uncover key drivers and appreciate where you may need to seek greater accuracy in your assumptions.

Beware of black swan events (extreme events which have significantly higher probabilities than you might initially expect) and unknown unknowns. Use systems thinking (when you attempt to think about the entire system at once) and scenario analysis (analysing different future scenarios that might unfold) to more systematically uncover them and assess their impact.

For really complex systems or decision spaces, consider simulations to help you better assess what may happen under different scenarios.

Watch out for blind spots that arise from groupthink (a bias that emerges because groups tend to think in harmony). Consider divergent (trying to get thinking to diverge in order to discover multiple possible solutions) and lateral thinking (trying to get thinking to converge on one solution) techniques when working with groups, including seeking more diverse points of view.

Strive to understand the global optimum (the best solution amongst all local optimums: good, but not great solutions) in any system and look for decisions that move you closer to it.

7. DEALING WITH CONFLICT

• Analyse conflict situations through a game-theory lens. Look to see if your situation is analogous to common situations like the prisoner’s dilemma (probably the most famous game theory example), ultimatum game (a game that helps you keep fairness in mind when you make decisions that impact people important to you), or war of attrition (long series of battles depletes both sides’ resources, eventually leaving vulnerable the side that starts to run out of resources first).
• Consider how you can convince others to join your side by being more persuasive through the use of influence models like reciprocity, commitment, liking, social proof, scarcity, and authority. And watch out for how they are being used on you, especially through dark patterns (models used to manipulate you for someone else’s benefit).
• Think about how a situation is being framed and whether there is a way to frame it that better communicates your point of view, such as social norms (the right thing to do, such as a favour) versus market norms (considering your own financial situation first), distributive justice (fairness around how things are being distributed) versus procedural justice (fairness around adherence to procedures), or an appeal to emotion (influence by manipulation of emotions).
• Try to avoid direct conflict because it can have uncertain consequences. Remember there are often alternatives that can lead to more productive outcomes. If diplomacy fails, consider deterrence (using a threat to prevent an action by an adversary) and containment (an attempt to contain the enemy, to prevent its further expansion) strategies.
• If a conflict situation is not in your favor, try to change the game, possibly using guerrilla warfare (nimbler tactics of a smaller force that larger forces have trouble reacting to effectively) and punching-above-your-weight (purposefully performing at a higher level than is expected of you) tactics.
• Be aware of how generals always fight the last war (using strategies, tactics, and technology that worked for them in the past), and know your best exit strategy (coming up with a well-defined exit plan that will keep you from doing things you might later regret).

8. UNLOCK PEOPLE’S POTENTIAL

People are not interchangeable. They come from a variety of backgrounds and with a varied set of personalities, strengths, and goals. To be the best manager, you must manage to the person, accounting for each individual’s unique set of characteristics and current challenges.

Craft unique roles that amplify each individual’s strengths and motivations. Avoid the Peter principle by promoting people only to roles in which they can succeed.

Properly delineate roles and responsibilities using the model of DRI (directly responsible individual, accountable for the success of each action item).

People need coaching to reach their full potential, especially at new roles. Deliberate practice is the most effective way to help people scale new learning curves. Use the consequence-conviction matrix (a conviction, consequence quadrant (high/low) to sort your decisions) to look for learning opportunities, and use radical candor within one-on-ones to deliver constructive feedback.

When trying new things, watch out for common psychological failure modes like impostor syndrome (fearing being exposed as a fraud, even though in reality they are not) and the Dunning-Kruger effect (describing the confidence people experience as they move from being a novice to being an expert).

Actively define group culture and consistently engage in winning hearts and minds (communicating directly to people’s hearts and minds to win them over) toward your desired culture and associated vision.

If you can set people up for success in the right roles and well-defined culture, then you can create the environment for 10x teams (collectively achieving outsized impact) to emerge.

9. FLEX YOUR MARKET POWER

Find a secret (knowing something that is important yet mostly unknown or not yet widely believed) and build your career or organisation around it, searching via customer development for product/market fit (or another “fit” relevant to the situation).

Strive to be like a heat-seeking missile (collecting data and constantly looking for bigger and better targets) in your search for product/market fit, deftly navigating the idea maze (the process of turning your secret into a product that achieves product/market fit). Look for signs of hitting a resonant frequency (actions/strategies that bring dramatically better results) for validation.

If you can’t find any bright spots (positive signs in a sea of negative ones) in what you’re doing after some time, critically evaluate your position and consider a pivot (a change in course of strategic direction).

Build a moat (shielding yourself from the competition) around yourself and your organisation to create sustainable competitive advantage.

Don’t get complacent; remember only the paranoid survive (you will not keep winning in perpetuity), and keep on the lookout for disruptive innovations, particularly those with a high probability of crossing the chasm (many ideas, companies, and technologies fail to make it from one side of the technology adoption life cycle to the other).

CONCLUSION

Key takeaways

• Mental models unlock the ability to think at higher levels.
• To avoid mental traps, you must think more objectively.
• Choose activities to work on based on your guiding vision.
• Look for shortcuts via existing design patterns, tools, or algorithms.
• Apply the scientific method and experimental mindset when possible.
• Analyse conflict situations through a game-theory lens.
• Manage to the person, accounting for each individual’s uniqueness.
• Find a secret and build your career or organisation around it,

Managing Up Beyond your Chain : Guardian Angels

 Often times in today's organizations, we have a multi-master situation. Business situations are dynamic, industry, consumer, product trends always changing, leading to re-organizations at the top. Line Managers are often good at managing chaos at the bottom or even across, but only few managers are good at Managing chaos at the top. If you are one of those managers whose team is getting plagued by re-orgs, who always seems to get affected when a new director or VP comes in, here are some strategies for you to navigate a dynamic work environment

1. North Star : Have a north star for your team/feature/product which is tied to the long term mission of the product/company. Without this you are a functional unit without any long term investment.
2. Strategy : Have a clear strategy about how you are going to hit that north star, with milestone level goals with buy in from leadership - this means your immediate boss off course, his boss and main decision maker in your chain
3. Guardian Angel in Engineering : Network with upper management and identify a guardian angel/s for your project. Guardian Angels are people higher up in the leadership chain with influence and power who are invested in the outcomes of your project. They may or may not be directly funding your project, but would like/need your project to succeed to further their agenda. 
4. Guardian Angel in Product : find key product leads typically much higher up above you who might benefit from the business wins/metric wins/the value proposition that your team brings. They can be valuable product liason for your area.
5. Point 5 is to reiterate the importance of both point 3 and 4. You need to network both on the engineering and product side and dig the well before you are thirsty. Don't start this networking when the reorg rumor is hitting. Start this as soon as you start delivering value. You need a network at the top with varying degrees of support. 
6. Time Decay : Remember that this kind of network loses value with time as people come and go, priorities change. Hence it is important to have pulse and make sure your team is working on the most valuable projects in the area. 
7. Collaboration peers : Guardian Angels are much more powerful just by their positions and decision making power in the company. Collaboration peers can give you lot of bottoms up and organic power. These are the people who get value because your team's impact bleeds into their territory. These are the peers who are your allies in the organization. Focus on transforming this relationship from transactional impact goals/metric focus to a more strategic "lets win:win increase the pie" approach. This will help you build bottom's up traction for your team in the organization. 
8. Grow the team : Grow other senior voices in the team so that you are not the only voice.
9. Build a network of mentors : These are leaders who are not necessarily directly related to your team/company. These are leaders who you have worked with in the past who have an equity in your career growth. These leaders are your board of advisors with organizational complexity case studies. By bringing these case studies you can add value to them and the relationship and make them a part of the journey. 

Different manager's at different points of time are employing either some or all of these approaches. Let me know in the comments what worked for you or what did not. Also looking to learn other strategies that you have successfully employed. 

Art of introduction

 The impact of a powerful introduction email is often underrated and something that leaders dont think about too much. However, if done well, this can help you set the tone with you new team. 

Background

Describe your key achievements. This will help you build trust, you are still selling yourself to your new reports and peers. Why should they trust you to be successful in this area ? 

Why did you take the role ? 

Explain how you connect/relate to the mission and vision of the area and how this opportunity aligns with your goals

What do you do in free time/hobbies/passions ?

This is providing avenues to the team to connect with you outside of work

Conversation starters

I like this part. This can include something like a truth or a lie, that builds interest in the introduction and drives engagement. This engagement could all lead to meaningful connections in your work relationship. 

Art of Goodbye Note

 Saying “goodbye” is one of those activities that seems so simple it hardly requires advance thought — and so endings creep up on us and catch us unprepared. We tend to default to our habitual responses whether or not they’ve been effective in the past. As a result we often miss opportunities to enjoy truly meaningful endings — instead they’re rushed and poorly planned — or we skip over them entirely, casting the old aside as we race toward the new.
The goal of this article is to outline a good Goodbye Note

Goodbye XYZ

Say how you were fulfilled and incredibly lucky to be a part of the XYZ mission and vision

Why are you switching team/job ?

Talk about the opportunity and how that connects to your passion

What were your proudest moments on the team ? 

• List top 5 accomplishments

What did you learn over these years on this team ? 

Share a key theme and message

What is the outlook for the team ? 

This is important as a leader to show that you are leaving in a good note so that you dont start a landslide of departures after you leave

How will the management structure look like after you leave ? 

You may not have all these details yet, but this is just to leave a message that the change has been thought over and leadership has a plan in place. 

Pro tip 

Share the photos with the team that you have taken

Being a Two Career Couple requires a Long Term Plan

 “We learned to take the long view, mostly because we didn’t have any other choice,” says Kate, now in her sixties and busy investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs. “Both sticking to our full-time corporate jobs or one of us becoming a full-time parent weren’t attractive options to us. We wanted to change the model, not just flip it.”

Kate and her husband, Matthew, were a classic dual career couple. They met in business school, married, and settled into two demanding corporate jobs. But Kate quickly saw that there were too many layers to get to the top anytime soon in her firm. Matthew had a quicker route in his flatter organization. When the couple decided to have children, they sat down and strategized together. How could they design two careers that could give them both what they wanted: meaningful work, financial security, and a great family?

One of their innovations was to plan a lifetime family career — together. Most of us well-meaningly want to support our partner and their careers. But thinking about two careers individually and then trying to marry them together is often a design challenge. Matthew and Kate started with designing a life, and retrofitted to identify careers that might deliver it. They devised a single vision for their couple — and the family they had just started. They thought of it as a team vision, like they might at work. What were their respective strengths, and their respective dreams? How could they use each other to guarantee the success of their broader vision, while minimizing some of the risks they might bump into along their road? It wasn’t so much the plan that helped them, they found. It was the conversation and the search for complementarity. They were each agreeing to contribute to building something to fit them both, over a lifespan.

In their thirties, they decided that Kate would leave her corporate job to gain the flexibility she prioritized short-term to care for their two young children. He would continue in his corporate role to cover this life phase’s financial needs. She would launch a business she had identified as having serious potential, and test run it. If it worked, he could join her later down the road to scale and sell it, and be able to re-invent themselves again.

And it worked.

From the Sum of Two to The Power of Two

Dual income couples are now the norm: over two thirds of couples in Canada and the UK, and 60% of couples in the U.S. They are beginning to realize they may each be the other’s most significant career asset.

Not only can your working spouse mitigate risks like being made redundant, they can also serve as a trampoline to allow you a shot at your dream, whether it’s a novel or a non-profit, a start-up or a soap opera, and whether you grab it in your thirties or your sixties.

This is a whole new, potentially delightful, ballgame. It wasn’t possible in an earlier era of single earner families, where the financial burden historically (and often still psychically) fell to the man. Nor is it true today in the growing number of couples who simply flip the gender roles but still stick to the same model. (Nor among single parent households, dominated by women.) These options have little flexibility, and less security in increasingly volatile economic times.

But for too many dual career couples, even in an era of supposed equality, two individuals can end up competing for short-term trade-offs rather than cooperating for longer term, mutually beneficial gains. Couples end up negotiating, based on current realities, rather than pacing themselves for the long (and lengthening) haul. This translates into decisions based on who has the higher income, the assignment abroad, or the babies. How many couples decide that one parent will stay home, because the cost of childcare is more than one parent’s (still usually mom’s) income? They forget to calculate the impact of that choice on that parent’s career, on their lifetime earning potential (opting out can cost up to $1 million in lost income), and on the couple’s opportunities to switch roles or combine them.

As careers morph into 50-year marathons rather than 30-year sprints, we may also want to think of couple careers over much longer timeframes. We still let too many decisions made in our thirties seal our professional fate for decades. How much more reassuring to know that you can hand the baton back and forth — and still finish the race in style. We may find that primary carers of children increasingly become later life entrepreneurs. And that corporate titans are delighted to retire into honorary bag carriers for their newly jet-setting spouses.

Flex Your Mind to Find Your Model

For many, there is more focus on innovation at work than at home. So invite a little brainstorming into your family boardroom (the dinner table). What’s your model? Are you both happy with your respective roles as currently defined? Is there a dream one or both of you feel it’s time to dust off and discuss?

Here are some of the models I’ve seen couples define, negotiate and enjoy, sometimes only for a phase, sometime for a lifetime. All of them work, as long as both halves are aligned and agreed — at least for the moment. If you have designed an original Career Model, let me know (email martha@20-first.com), and I’ll add it to the list.

• Single Career — a historic classic. One partner has the career that defines everything else. The spouse and children follow that career. This often allows for high salaries, and gives one partner total work focus. The other partner is open to all other roles, without having to worry about income. But the couple is more at risk of unexpected and complete loss of income. The non-working partner will find it much harder to recover from eventual separations or divorce, and will often not be putting anything aside for pensions. One of the challenges for many senior women (most of whom have working partners) is that they sit on senior teams dominated by men with non-working wives. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage when the team cultures created by Single Career spouses lean to the 24/7. Because they can.
• Lead Career — a version of the above. One career is clearly dominant, and will define where the couple lives, and where they move to. The other partner has a part-time or flexible freelance, teaching or online career. Same advantages, and some mitigation of the disadvantages of the Single Career Model. For example, Jo followed her oil executive partner around the globe and turned her trailing spouse role into a profession. She wrote books about how to reinvent yourself, and became an online editor and writer’s coach.
• Alternators — many couples opt for what they see as an egalitarian alternation of opportunity. Each has first dibs for the next promotion or geographic move, and the other agrees to adjust in function. This doesn’t always mean the other partner follows, with family in tow. Sometimes families stay in one place, and the roving partner commutes a lot. In multinational companies, surprising numbers of spouses live apart, sometimes for years. This approach can get a little bit transactional if it is held to too inflexibly. When “my turn” becomes absolute, couples lose the balance they were aiming to build. Helen and her husband Rob, a highly successful and very visible pair of CEOs alternated weeks throughout the year. Each would be able to fully focus on work, travel and urgencies one week out of two. The other week, they’d have primary responsibility for everything else. It allowed them to be able to enjoy both roles fully and regularly.
• Parallelograms — two parallel, high-powered careers, sometimes called “power couples.” Increasing in number, these careers are often mutually reinforcing, with professional networks and knowledge that feed each other, think House of Cards. These couples love to talk shop, and share what’s going on in their mutual careers, because it will nourish the other. These couples can learn from each other, buy from each other’s companies. Juliet and Andrew run two separate but related businesses, where one heads the for-profit arm, and the other the non-profit arm. Together, they make a successful combination. The risk here is usually for the family. They may not get quite as much attention as they’d like. Their parents are too excited talking to each other. Two big careers are particularly frustrating to employers these days, as these couples are increasingly less mobile geographically. The seniority of the other partner’s job is not always easy to replicate or transfer.
• Complements — diversity in couple careers can be as beneficial as diversity in any team. Couples with very different kinds of careers, with different phases, peak periods and timeframes often find life a bit easier to sort out. Pressure points are often not at the same time of the year or at the same phase of life, so that they can be more easily managed. This covers a vast range of occupations, from the corporate career and the academic, to the entrepreneur and the writer. George and Anne used day and night shifts as their differentiator, with one being a nurse at night, the other an engineer by day. They overlapped for breakfast and dinner… Juliet was a flexible freelancer when her children were young, her husband John loved his corporate work in social responsibility. When the children were older, her business took off. John retired early from an illustrious career and was able to travel the globe with his now big-earning wife and her successful business. Another advantage of very different tracks is it takes away some of the competition between careers that can overlap if they are similar. Two lawyers or two consultants who progress at very different speeds, especially if there are childcare choices involved, can lead to conflict. Different careers tend to have different success criteria and life cycles, which can work together well.

Whatever the model, the secret lies in the co-design. You may move from one model to another over the course of ever-longer careers, and that may even be part of the plan. But it helps to be able to put a name on what you’re both doing, and acknowledge the advantages and risks of each option at different phases of life. Family careers offer flexibility, security, and options. Two people end up with a supportive spouse who shares a life vision and is as invested in your career choices as they are in their own. That is exponentially beneficial to both.

This piece appeared on the harvard business review

Indian Origin CEOs

1. Arvind Krishna - CEO, IBM
2. Sundar Pichai - CEO, Google LLC & Alphabet INC
3. Satya Nadella - CEO, Microsoft
4. Shantanu Narayen - CEO, Adobe Inc.
5. Jayshree Ullal - CEO, Arista Networks
6. George Curian - CEO, NetApp
7. Nikesh Arora - CEO, Palo Alto Networks
8. Sanjay Mehrotra - CEO, Micron Technology
9. Laxman Narasimhan - CEO, Reckitt Benckiser

Youtube 2021 Priorities

2020 Lookback

• During the first quarter of last year, we saw a 25 percent increase in watchtime around the world.
• 2020 was YouTube Gaming's biggest year yet, with over 100 billion hours of gaming content watched on YouTube.
• In the first half of the year, total daily livestreams grew by 45 percent.
• first time streamers accounted for more than 10 million streams on the platform.
• They included Brazilian artists like Jorge & Mateus, who live streamed a concert from their garage that’s been viewed over 40 million times.

Creator Communities

• YouTube's creative ecosystem contributed approximately $16 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2019, supporting the equivalent of 345,000 full time jobs.
• The UK in 2019 saw approximately £1.4 billion contributed to the British GDP and the equivalent of 30,000 full time jobs. And in France, there was an estimated €515 million contributed to the French GDP and the equivalent of 15,000 full time jobs.
• The number of channels making the majority of their revenue from Super Chat, Super Stickers or channel memberships on YouTube tripled.

Future

• Youtube shorts is receiving an impressive 3.5 billion daily views! 
• Currently testing a new beta program with a group of beauty and electronics creators to help people discover and buy the products they see in videos. 
• TV was our fastest growing screen in 2020. That’s why we’ve worked to improve the look, feel, and performance of the Living Room app.

[Book Review] Fooled by Randomness

 

• According to Taleb, the book's most popular chapter was Chapter 11, the one in which he compressed all the literature on the topic of miscalculating probability.
• Important point: “it's more random than we think, not it is all random.” Chance favors preparedness, but it is not caused by preparedness (same for hard work, skills, etc.)
• “This business of journalism is just about entertainment, particularly when it comes to radio and television.”
• As much as we want to “keep it simple, stupid” … It is precisely the simplification of issues that are actually very complex, which can be dangerous.
• “Things that happen with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.”
• “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
• One common theory for why people pursue leadership is because of “social emotions” which cause others to be influenced by a person due to small, almost imperceptible physical signals like charisma, gestures, and gait.
• This has also been shown via evolutionary psychology: when you perform well in life, you get all “puffed up” in the way you carry yourself, the bounce in your step, etc. From an evolution standpoint this is great because it becomes easier to spot the most successful / desirable mate.
• The concept of alternative histories is particularly interesting. If you were to relive a set of events 1000 times, what would the range of outcomes be? If there is very little variance in your alternative histories (i.e. You chose to become a dentist and you will probably make more or less the same amount of money and live a similar lifestyle all 1000 times), then you are in a relatively non- random situation. Meanwhile, if there is a very wide range of normal results when considering 1,000 variations (entrepreneurs, traders, etc.), then it is a very random situation.
• The quality of a choice cannot be judged just by the result. (I first learned this in baseball. Just because a pitch you call or play you call doesn't work out doesn't make it a poor choice. It could have been the right call, but bad luck. Or vice versa.)
• “Certainty is something that is likely to take place across the highest number of different alternative histories. Uncertainty concerns events that should take place in the lowest number of them.”
• You should think carefully about getting more insurance / shielding yourself from events that — although unlikely — could be catastrophic. You essentially want to insulate yourself from terrible random accidents.
• We have a tendency to see risks against specific things as more likely than general risks (dying in a terrorist attack while traveling vs. dying on your next trip, even though the second includes the first). We seem to overvalue the things that trigger an emotional response and undervalue the things that aren't as emotional.
• We are so mentally wired to overvalue the sensational stories that you can “realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.”
• Fascinating famous Swiss study of the amnesia patient who couldn't remember doctor's name but did remember him pricking her hand with a pin.
• “Every man believes that he is quite different.”
• It's better to value old, distilled thoughts than “new thinking” because for an idea to last so long it must be good. That is, old ideas have had to stand the test of time. New ideas have not. Some new ideas will end up lasting, but most will not.
• The ratio of undistilled information to distilled is rising. Let's call information that has never had to prove its truth more than once or twice, undistilled. And information that has been filtered through many years, counter arguments, and situations is distilled. You want more distilled information (concepts that stand the test of time and rigorous analysis) and less undistilled information (the news, reactionary opinions, and “cutting edge” research).
• There is nothing wrong with losing. The problem is losing more than you plan to lose. You need clear rules that limit your downside. (“If any investment loses one million dollars then our firm sells immediately.”)
• Much of what is randomness is timing. The best strategy for a given time period is often not the best strategy overall. In any given cycle, certain places will be dangerous, certain trading strategies will be fruitful, etc.
• If you find yourself doing something extraordinarily well in a random situation, then keep doing what's working but limit your downside. There is nothing wrong with benefitting from randomness so long as you protect yourself from negative random events.
• Randomness means there are some strategies that work well for any given cycle (an extreme fad diet), but these cycles are often short to medium term successes. More importantly, the strategies that work for a given cycle in the short term may not be the best for long run. They are sub optimal strategies winning over a randomly beneficial short term cycle. The same can said for setting huge goals, following a fad diet, chasing an extreme training protocol, and so on. Unsustainable and suboptimal for the long term. In this way, evolutionary traits that are undesirable can survive for a period of time in any given population. That is, suboptimal strategies and traits can seem desirable in the short run even though they will be resoundingly defeated in the long run.
• Important point: you can never affirm a statement, merely confirm its rejection. There is a big difference between “this has never happened” and “this will ever happen.” You can say the first, but never truly confirm the second. It just takes one counter example to prove all previous observations wrong. We never know things for sure, only with varying degrees of certainty.
• There are only two types of ideas. Those that have been proven wrong and those which have yet to be proved wrong. (Feynman said something similar.)
• Strive to become a man of leisure who can afford to sit with ideas, think properly about them, and gradually provide something of value.
• Science is speculation. This is important to remember. Scientists are simply creating well-formed and well-educated conjectures about the world. But they are still conjectures that can be proved incorrect by one random event.
• It's a difficult standard to demand that you can actually implement ideas and not merely share them (there have been many brilliant philosophers and scientists who have had great ideas they didn't personally use), but is an idea really that great if you can stick to it? Obviously, everyone has different skills and circumstances, so maybe someone can use your idea even if you can't. But generally speaking, I think you should be able to live out the ideas you share.
• Pascal: “the optimal strategy for humans is to believe in the existence of God. For, if God exists, then the believer will be rewarded. If God does not exist, the believer will have nothing to lose.”
  My first thought: “yes, but what if you believe in the ‘wrong' God?” Should you play a numbers game and believe in the God most people believe in? Or, can we safely assume that of the infinite number of possible Gods humans could have designed it is unlikely that any of the ones we worship are actually the God? So, just believe that a higher power exists? Whew. Tough call here.
• Social treadmill effect: you get rich, move to a better neighborhood, surround yourself with more successful people, and feel poor again.
• “Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.”
• Skewness and expectations: you can't just look at the odds of something happening, but also the payoff you receive if it works (and the cost of it failing). A bet on something very unlikely can be smart if the payoff is large and you have rules to limit the many small losses that are likely.
• Minor stalemates in life can often be solved by choosing randomly. In many cases it doesn't really matter so long as you choose something and move forward.
• We follow rules not because they are the best options, but because they make things fast and easy.
• Humans are inherently flawed. The cognitive biases that we have are simply a result of how our brains work. Sometimes these biases help us rather than hurt us. But they are always a result of how we are built. That makes them particularly difficult to avoid.
• We seem to focus too much on “local” changes, not global ones. That is, we care too much about the latest change rather than the overall trend.
• “Wealth does not make people happy, but positive increases in wealth may.”
• We do not think, but use heuristics to make decisions.
• Emotions are “lubricants of reason.” We actually need to feel things to make decisions.
• Emotions give us energy and they are actually critical to life in the day-to-day world. In other words, the goal here is not to become a robot who can analyze everything with perfect logic.
• Even if you know about randomness and cognitive biases, you are still just as likely to fall victim to them.
• How to overcome these biases? We need tricks. We are just animals and we need to re-structure our environment to control our emotions in a smart way.
• “Most of us know pretty much how we should behave. It is the execution that is the problem, not the absence of knowledge.”
• “I try to remind my group each week that we are all idiots and know nothing, but we have the good fortune of knowing it.”
• Do not blame others for your failures. Even if they are at fault.
• The only aspect of your life that fortune does not have control over is your behavior.
• Repetitiveness is key for determining if you are seeing skill or randomness at play. Can't repeat it? Not skillful.
• “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible. We scorn the abstract. Everything good — aesthetics, ethics — and wrong — fooled by randomness — with us seems to flow from it.”