Modern Leadership

1. Influence > Authority
2. Intent / Mindset > Current Talent
3. Context > Content
4. Inception > Orders
5. Why > Who > What
6. Ears > Eyes > Mouth
7. Questions > Answers
8. Prevention > Solution
9. Presence > Multitasking
10. Self-management > People-management 

Entrepreneurial Superpowers

Here are some leadership lessons I picked up working in pre-IPO startups and FAANG in Silicon Valley. 

1. Being able to work with and manage difficult people puts you at a huge advantage
2. Fear, pride, anger, excitement cloud your ability to make sound logical decisions. Making non-emotional decisions with impartial information is a super power. 
3. Crisp and clear communication is a super power.  You cannot be crisp if you are not precise. Do not hide uncertainty and do not bury nuance. 
4. Rigor and quality are essential to building and decision making. You cant build well and make good decisions without structured thinking and mental models. 
5. Likeability is key people like to do business with people they like. Leading by fear doesn't work.
6. Develop structured thinking, operate from clear first principles, create frameworks that make it easy for those principles to come to life across teams, products and people and communicate them effectively. 
7. Every leader's main job is sales : selling your idea, vision including hiring, managing, leading.
8. Being able to change your mind based on data, facts, new opinions. Surround yourself with people who will challenge your opinions. Build a culture around youself that is inclusive and invites that feedback. The biggest challenge as you go up the ladder is that the real feedback dries up. 
9. Saying NO. You sometimes have to step over the pennies to pick up the dollars. 

Mindset : The new psychology of success

 The Book in Three Sentences

1. Skills can be cultivated through effort.
2. People with a growth mindset thrive on challenges.
3. The fixed mindset: “I can’t do it”. The growth mindset: “I can’t do it yet”.

The Five Big Ideas

1. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
2. “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over”.
3. “People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
4. “The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties”.
5. “Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.

Mindset Summary

• “[Children with a growth mindset] knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort”.
• “Not only were [the children with a growth mindset]not discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning”.
• “What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”
• “Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise ‘is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement’.”
• “For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life”.
• “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over”.
• “This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience”.
• “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?”
• “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset”.
• “The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving”.
• “When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself”.
• “Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist, once said, ‘I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures…. I divide the world into the learners and non-learners’.”
• “People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
• “We gave fifth graders intriguing puzzles, which they all loved. But when we made them harder, children with the fixed mindset showed a big plunge in enjoyment”.
• “For [people with a growth mindset] it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress”.
• “‘Becoming is better than being’. The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be”.
• “People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower”.
• “College students, after doing poorly on a test, were given a chance to look at tests of other students. Those in the growth mindset looked at the tests of people who had done far better than they had. As usual, they wanted to correct their deficiency. But students in the fixed mindset chose to look at the tests of people who had done really poorly. That was their way of feeling better about themselves”.
• “John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them”.
• “French executive Pierre Chevalier says, ‘We are not a nation of effort. After all, if you have savoir-faire [a mixture of know-how and cool], you do things effortlessly’.”
• “People with the growth mindset, however, believe something very different. For them, even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements”.
• “They may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment”.
• “The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties”.
• “Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.
• “Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call”.
• “People with the growth mindset in sports (as in pre-med chemistry) took charge of the processes that bring success—and that maintain it”.

Drive : The surprising truth about what motivates us

 The Book in Three Sentences

1. Much of what we know about motivation is wrong.
2. Tasks are either: (1) Algorithmic—you pretty much do the same thing over and over in a certain way, or (2) Heuristic—you have to come up with something new every time because there are no set instructions to follow.
3. The carrot and stick approach to motivation is flawed.

The Five Big Ideas

1. Researchers have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.
2. Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
3. We have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
4. Research shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
5. The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Drive Summary

• “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.”—Edward Deci
• “When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? ‘If-then’ rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.”
• “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”—Jonmarshall Reeve
• “Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.”
• “[Teresa] Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.”
• “Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, offering to pay people decreased the number by nearly half.”
• “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”
• “Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.”
• “Get people fired up with the prospect of rewards, and instead of making better decisions, as Motivation 2.0 hopes, they can actually make worse ones.”

The Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
2. They can diminish performance
3. They can crush creativity
4. They can crowd out good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking

• “The Sawyer Effect: practices that can either turn play into work or turn work into play.”
• “The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.”
• “First, consider nontangible rewards.”
• “Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies.”
• “Second, provide useful information.”
• “Give people meaningful information about their work.”
• “In brief, for creative, right- brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering ‘if- then’ rewards. You’re better off using ‘now that’ rewards. And you’re best off if your ‘now that’ rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.”
• “[Self-determination theory] argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.”
• “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
• “In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called ‘autotelic experiences’—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.”
• “The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow.”
• “In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate. The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you’re throwing comes out smooth or uneven.”
• “Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences.”
• “In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self-melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, ‘forgetting themselves in a function.’”
• “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.”
• “At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.”
• “One of the best ways to know whether you’ve mastered something is to try to teach it.”
• The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

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.