Be Deliberate

If you want to be deliberate, you have to write it down. If you write it down, you have to change it as the culture evolves. It's a combo of how you currently work and how you aspire to work.

Be Explicit

• If you ever think "I shouldn't need to spell this out" then that's a massive red flag!
• If you are ever uncertain whether someone has understood you, ask them "does that make sense". Don't say "do you understand?" as that's putting the onus of responsibility on them, rather than taking responsibility for clear communication yourself. The WORST is to say "you're not understanding me".
• Being implicit saves time in the short term, but it leaves room for misinterpretation, which is expensive in the long term. Think of it like this: if you don't take the extra 30 seconds to spell something out, you add a 10% chance that something will be done the wrong way, needing time to correct it, which adds 1h to the task. Multiple that by all the little micro-communications you have and you end up wasting a shitload of time just because of basic misunderstandings. English is great but it's easy to interpret the same set of words 2 different but subtle ways.
  • Pro tip! You can actually shortcut the need for someone else being explicit by simply repeating back to them how you understand them in your own words. This decreases the chances of misunderstandings down to near-zero!

Do Your Homework

Start with your own ideas about things, write them down, then do your homework. As you are doing your homework, refine your thesis.

• There are a few benefits to doing your homework:
  • You get to learn from people smarter than yourself, which helps with humility
  • You get to learn about all the terrible ways people try and do things, which helps with boosting your confidence that you can achieve the thing you're trying to achieve.
  • You build trust with the people around you, as they will see that you are humble enough and motivated enough to augment and improve your ideas with the learnings of others. This means that when you speak, people will listen a lot more closely instead of thinking "they clearly haven't thought this through" or "that's interesting but I wonder if they know about how this is usually solved".
• Ask yourself "am I ok with junior staff trying to figure out how to do things without researching the best possible way to do something?". If you are comfortable with this idea, then you are going to get teams that just do random shit instead of being effective. Keep in mind that if you don't set a good example, and publicly share how you approach problem solving, they won't have good behaviour to emulate.

Amazon leadership principles

• Bias for action - when you want to achieve something, take action. Don't plan, just take action. After you've taken your first step, make a fucking plan. Don't keep running off in a random direction without mapping out your learnings. Plans should map to learnings, and if you don't have a clear lesson attached to an outcome at each stage of a plan, rethink how you can frame each step. But first: take action.
• Disagree and commit - don't seek consensus; solicit disagreement, ensure that it's heard and evaluated openly and honestly. Even if people disagree, as long as people believe that you've heard them, care about their perspective, investigated and evaluated it, they are more likely to commit to supporting and driving the decision.

Netflix culture

From Netflix culture (original)

• encourage independent decision-making by employees

  • you want to guide people by giving them context

  • e.g. ask, don't tell - asking shapes how people think and it's much more powerful if they think they've come up with something. I HATE being told what to do, but when Cy says "I think that the recruiting is more important than the financing. What do you think?" it completely sells me on changing my focus. So much more powerful than "Please prioritise hiring over getting the loan completed.".

  • A good quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince):

    If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.