Extreme Ownership - Key Takeways

Leadership takes a whole lot of practice, intentional practice and reading the book 'Extreme ownership' is another confirmation that the road is narrow, steep and dangerous but the reward of following your calling is worth it. Some takeaway that I want to quickly jot down and share here are as follows:

• A great leader teaches a team so well that even in his/her absence the team will thrive
• Even with less natural ability one can develop into highly effective leaders, if we are willing to learn, be intentional of the skills sets that better ourselves and others. Leaders are not just born; they are also made. 

TAKEAWAY #1: Extreme Ownership is about taking ownership of your mission and being truly responsible for everything.  Recognizing your excuses that you tell yourself why you can or can't do something is just an excuse. 

TAKEAWAY # 2: Set and hold your team to high standards of excellence. It is not what you preach it is what you tolerate. Leaders must ensure that tasks are repeated until the highest expected standard is achieved. 

TAKEAWAY # 3: Simplify. As mentioned in the previous post plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear and concise. Brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands. Encourage questions and communications. 

TAKEAWAY # 4: Snowball Effect. Even the most competent leaders cannot tackle multiple problems simultaneously.  Try to stay a step or two ahead of real-time problems.  Don't get into the weeds of details too much so that you lose strategic perspective. 

TAKEAWAY # 5: Contingency Plans. The authors talk about QRPs - Quick reaction plans, if a team has been briefed about contingencies the team can rapidly execute when problems arise without specific directions. Anticipate with your best ability challenges before they happen, map out an effective response plan. Communicate these strategies to your team. Accept and mitigate risks. 

TAKEAWAY # 6: Prioritize & Execute. Again it is easy to get lost in the details "Pull yourself from the firing line" to maintain a strategic picture. Don't go too forward and don't be too behind. Keep a pulse of your unit and your big strategic objectives. Evaluate the highest priority and lay out the highest priority effort for your team. 

TAKEAWAY # 7: Decentralize Command. Trust and delegate. Give ownership to planning and your team will own the plans. Create organizational charts, build trust and communicate some clear objectives. I cannot take on more than 6 leads as a direct report. Think rigorously about reorganization and using key players strategically on the board. 

TAKEAWAY # 8: Plan Ahead. The mission you leade and undertake must be simplified so it is clear and connected to the strategic vision. Delegating the planning process to key subordinate leaders, encourage team participation and feedback while planning and briefing all participants once the plan is established. Conducting post operational debriefs is extremely important. Knowing even if there are leaders who may not agree with your plan once the plan is executed make everyone own the plan.

TAKEAWAY # 9: Leading Up & Down the Chain of Command.  Explain to your team members the strategic plan, make them and the leadership situationally aware. Situational awareness up and down the chain is important and how you communicate at each level horizontally, vertically and with team members who are not in your direct chain are important. Use negotiation, influence, and favor for up the chain and for teams, partners, vendors and leaders who are not in your chain of command

TAKEAWAY # 10: Discipline equals Freedom.  Discipline is the pathway to freedom. Understand the dichotomies of leadership.  Put aside ego and personal agendas to ensure the mission and the team has the greatest chance to accomplish strategic goals. 

Since we are on Complexity - Simplify to Simple Plans

Last week I finally finished reading "Extreme Ownership - How U.S Navy Seals Lead & Win" written by ex-navy seals turned business consultants, Jacko William and Lief Babin. The authors give good coverage of the lessons they learned in battles in Iraq while supporting Marines and the legendary 101st Airborne units of the U.S Military. Though I want to cover many things from the book I will focus on one of the key principles they teach "Simplify" since I have been thinking about this

principle today.

They share that combat like anything in life has layers and layers of inherent complexities. Simplifying therefore as much as possible is critical for success. As leaders, we cannot afford to present gobs and gobs of information and not check if the plan, tactic, or strategy we have communicated can be recalled simply by your teammates or troops. The authors opine navy seals are taught to break down complex plans in a series of simple steps and after grouping them rehearsed rigorously multiple numbers of times. Every briefing ensuring the lowest common denominator on the team understands. The lesson here is plans and communication of those plans should be made simple and communicated and practiced a number of times. 

It is not to say projects, tasks and relationships can or always be straightforward and be broken down to simple steps.  Understanding that people always gravitate to the path of least resistance and it's in our nature to resist change can become opportunity spaces for leaders to take some time in attempting to listen and understand legacy archaic layers. Then ask for suggestions,  all the while cutting redundant steps and proposing simpler straightforward action steps. Finally, making sure the teammates retain the simple steps proposed, repeat and practice and finally regular follow-ups will harness the benefits of simplification.

Talking of Startups - Bill Gross Wisdom

Bill Gross from Idealabs has always been one of my business and tech heroes. Bill has & is been a founder of hundreds of companies many of which have sold for millions and billions of dollars. His TED talk is one I have recommended time and again to several friends. This six-minute talk is packed with the wisdom of the lessons he learned from trying to answer the curious question on what makes startups successful? This one is worth listening to:

To summarize - it's best to quote Bill from the talk:

The idea matters a lot. But timing might matter even more. And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing".

Advice for Startup Leaders - 101

If you are an entrepreneur or a learning leader some podcasts I highly recommend are 'Tribes of Mentors', 'How to build a startup', 'We study billionaires', 'and Blitzscaling'. There are many others out there but these are the ones I have stuck with. A recent one I heard on building startups from the good folks at YCombinator and Stanford share simple reminders that I want to record here. I have often found its the simple things that are hard to practice and be consistent with. John Maeda researcher on complexity says "its the simple things in design that have the greatest complexities hidden behind in its evolution and background" (paraphrase mine). The evolution of making it

simple -  goes through a creative, complex and a disruptive birthing process. The ones mentioned below though simple are often hard to arrive at, so here they are:

• While doing sales and marketing getting a 'yes' and 'no' is better than a thousand "maybe's". The 'Yes' and 'No' leads are the ones that allow you to focus/zero in your energies and save you from wasting time. 
• While prospecting listen to your prospective client 70% of the time and focus only 30% of your the time talking or selling. 
• Always have your 30-second pitch ready on what your company does. Be Clear and Concise. 
• Prepare a two-minute or less pitch on what your products and services are while courting investors.
• Simplify your business model showing how you are bending the cost curve and leveraging efficiencies while planning to remain profitable. 
• Be in control of the meeting while asking for money. You are not begging, you are inviting them to come on a journey and that they have the opportunity to invest. 
• If you are meeting investors in the same week in the same city...run investor meetings on same days or closely together on those days of that week if possible... it saves you time and helps you gain perspectives on questions, offers, and misses.
• If possible hire a full-time person who can focus on talking to investors and raising money;  Raising money and searching for potential angel investors/funders can be distracting while you are building a product/service and managing the business growth. 
• Be articulate and transparent about founder commitments and relationships
• Don't be too technical, tell them what problem you are trying to solve and what is the value proposition that will make customers buy your product or service. 

Key Points from David Rubenstein's Interview with Tim Cook

Honestly,  irrespective of lack of rocketship visioning after Steve Jobs untimely demise at Apple I think the season under Tim Cook is still worth studying and inspiring.  Tim Cook as the leader at this point in time has been raised from inside to manage, maintain (especially those large coffers of cash and intellectual capital), and lead Apple to its next phase. Here's his interview with David Rubenstein at Duke and the key takeaways from it.

• We run Apple for the long term
• Doing something different than conventional wisdom has always been Apple's way. 
• It's extremely important to keep a pulse on the user
• High expectations for everyone who works at Apple. 
• Diversity matters and investing in diversity everywhere helps in building better communities and better products. 
• Being brave and courageous for the issues you believe in helps you contribute positively towards current movements and issues in society. 

Key points David Rubenstein's Interview with Jeff Bezos

No introduction is needed for Jeff Bezos and what he has achieved with Amazon and moonshot projects like Blue Origin. Recording here another interview from David Rubenstein with Jeff Bezos on the key points I learned. In a recent discussion with my teammate and partner on observations from this video,  we were talking about how curiosity helps in discerning what will help me invest our time or talent in exploring what others have learned and what are the things we can actively discard and say 'No' to.

• Trusting your gut instinct and how you feel about things is vital for the decision-making process
• Ideas an innovation can come from the colleague who is stuffing boxes with you on the floor
• What do you really want to be known for at the end of your life? A good father, husband, and one who left some legacy
• Respect and honor the people who were key influencers in your life
• Be curious, be hungry, dwell in 'what if' questions and possibilities. If you will, you won't hesitate to move from one end of the country to the other or even from one country to another.
• Make decisions keeping the decade framework in mind not to please the stock market ticker

Key points David Rubenstein's Interview with Satya Nadella

I like reading biographies as well as listening to interviews and thoughts from key leaders of our times. I tend to share these videos with people close to me.  My boss is one of them and we exchange key ideas or lessons we personally learned.

The video link for the interview is embedded below (24 mins worth listening too):



Key points from Satya that are worth mentioning:

• Just be yourself. There is immense power in bringing your presence to the table you sit at (identity). 
• Innovation won't come about without listening. This is key for me as I lead some disruptive innovation in upcoming projects at work and in future consulting environments. 
• Empathetic listening leads to the building of a human organization. The stories of Satya's paraplegic children has given him empathy for the marginalized in society and shapes his thinking and decision-making process
• Concepts...capabilities...fostering capacities and capabilities builds culture. 
• Ability to see trends before they become conventional wisdom comes with your vintage views and patterns from different domain areas. This one is my extrapolation from the interview. 

Truths About Innovation Cultures

Recently I read a great article by Gary P Pisano professor of Business Administration and Senior associate dean at Harvard Business School titled the 'The Hard Truth About Innovation Cultures".  I really liked the article and summarize here what I learned.

The myth out there in the industry is for successful innovation to happen the organization should provide a culture where failures at experiments are encouraged and not frowned upon and hence innovative cultures are misunderstood. Gary propounds a tolerance for failure requires a high

intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline and competent staff who are chosen meticulously to ride the bus along with you. Hence mediocre technical skills, bad work habits, busyness or busy bee activities and poor management cannot foster a culture of running tight experiments within budgets. Google is known to have an employee-friendly culture but is also the hardest place to get into. Gary states Google can encourage risk-taking and failure because it can be confident that most Google employees are very competent. For me, this translates to senior leadership articulate what is a productive and unproductive failure along with getting the right people/talent on the innovation strategic journey you are embarking upon.

Second point Gary states is the willingness to experiment should be a highly disciplined affair. Though the team may be comfortable to ambiguity and uncertainty it has a clear time frame, budget, constraints defined upfront. Thought initial explorations are unconstrained the ideas are narrowed down as the focus and belief become clear towards experimentation. He gives the example of Flagship Pioneering a Cambridge, Massachusetts company who models this applying lean approaches and encouraging their teams to narrow framing after initial explorations and defining clear criteria, timeframes and budgets. I like how he states disciplined experimentation is a balancing act. As a leader, you want to encourage people with moonshot unrealistic ideas and give them time to formulate their hypotheses. Killing the idea too soon can and funding it without a timeframe can both be detrimental for the experiment, team and the organization.

Third truth Gary posits is the teams that are good at innovation psychologically sage and brutally candid. The idea here is each member feels safe to criticize other people's idea while knowing well they have the thick skins to receive criticisms as well. Even if the criticism is sharp people are encouraged to defend their proposals with data and logic. The challenge for leaders here is to not to have incredibly nice organizations or incredibly divisional approach where team members may begin to hate each other. Providing alternate solutions along with criticism is one of the hallmarks of respect as described by Ed Catmull in 'Creativity Inc'.  General Dwight Eisenhower before D-day operations invited top officers for input and criticizing his plans...he said "I consider it the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in this plan to not to hesitate to say so. I have no sympathy for anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results."  Eisenhower was demanding criticism.

Fourth truth Gary outlines in the article is the need for collaboration but with individual accountability.  Team members have a sense of collective responsibility when others seek help in the journey but do not enable laziness. An accountability culture allows individuals to make decisions and own consequences. Ed Catmull is stated as an example again who describes in his book Creativity Inc., Pixar allows the selected director of a movie which feedback to take and which one to ignore and is then held accountable for the contents and the movie-making process. Accountability and collaboration can become complementary when accountability drives collaboration where clarity of decision-making rights at each individual level and team level are clear.

Finally, innovation cultures have flatter organizational structures with strong leadership. Here lack of hierarchical structure does not mean lack of leadership, paradoxically flatter organizations have higher failure as clear strategies priorities and directions are not outlaid by leaders. This also means flatter organizational structures requires at the individual level develop strong leadership capacities. Amazon and Google are very flat organizations but their employees at all levels enjoy a high degree of autonomy to pursue innovative ideas but there is also a high degree of accountability and directional outcomes at high levels specified.

Final thoughts:

• Valuable learning can only occur by sharing, transparency, and failures where learning is demanded. 
• Innovation as a free-for-all will see discipline and unnecessary constraint on their creativity. The people who will not thrive will have harder decisions to make. 
• Innovation cultures are systems of interdependent behaviors they cannot be implemented in a piecemeal fashion.
• Disciplined experimentation will cost less and yield more useful information. Tolerance for failed experiments becomes prudence rather than shortsighted accidental adventures. 
• Tolerance for failure can encourage slack thinking and excuse making but too much intolerance for incompetence can create fear of risk-taking and stifling of innovation. The latter will eventually lead to irrelevance. 

Thoughts,

Dr. Sam Kurien

Innovation Culture - Three Boxes

A few years ago Dr. Vijay Govindrajan gave an interview at Willow Creek Leadership Summit. The video below and has been used in our leadership development presentations last year. What continues to impress upon me is for moving away from Box 1 thinking is to selectively unlearn. All this needs to be done while continuing business operations. Leaders have the on going challenge to guide their teams while doing this (improving present efficiencies of current business processes) while continuing to learn new things that lead to the development of new ideas and new strategies (innovation). Summing up what Vijay is expressing is the onus on leadership as they do strategic thinking is about shaping the future that is not yet tangible. - "Strategy is Innovation".  The cultural within leaders and their teams is to journey from Box 1 (Competition for the present) thinking to Box 2 & Box 3 strategies (Competition for the future).



Lao Tzu once said "To acquire knowledge one must rigorously learn every day but to acquire wisdom one must unlearn every day" My translation: rigorous learning and rigorous editing and purging!