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behaviour decisions leadership other startup

Bezos on decision making

From the letter to Amazon shareholders:

There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them. One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.1 We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.

Categories
behaviour leadership other

Leadership – inspire outstanding performance

Categories
behaviour hacks life other work

Live close to where you work

If you can live close to where you work, I think you’ll have more enjoyable life, more productivity and be more committed so they to do that if you could. Clive Schlee, CEO Pret A Monger

Categories
behaviour decisions other people

Be yourself

Be yourself; because everyone else is taken. Oscar Wilde

Categories
behaviour future other people work

What’s your frame?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana

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Categories
behaviour decisions innovation other

Loser’s Game Programming

Tennis pros win based on the positive actions they take: unreturnable shots down the baseline, passing shots, service aces, and so on. We (beginners) try to emulate our heroes and fail… We hit our deep shots just beyond the baseline, our passing shots just wide of the sideline, and our killer serves into the net. It turns out that mediocre players win based on the errors they don’t make. They keep the ball in play, and eventually their opponents make a mistake and lose the point.

Tennis pros are playing a Winner’s Game, and average players are playing a Loser’s Game. These are fundamentally different games, which reward different mindsets and different strategies.

The smart novice programers play a Loser’s Game, where the greatest reward comes to those who make the fewest and smallest mistakes. That’s not very exciting but works.

What is the best way to succeed? As in all Loser’s Games, the key is to make fewer mistakes: follow examples closely, pay careful attention to syntactic details, and otherwise not stray too far from what you are reading about and using in class. Another path to success is to make the mistakes smaller and less intimidating: take small steps, test the code frequently, and grow solutions rather than write them all at once. It is no accident that the latter sounds like XP and other agile methods; they help to guard us from the Loser’s Game and enable us to make better moves. Search Eugene Wallingford for more info.

Categories
behaviour other process

Scream

To be in control is being able to influence outcomes well in advance making the end result predictable. Not being 100% of the time in control is one of the realities of the modern CTO.

Sometimes you will be faced with issues that are outside of your control (migrating a live service which 1000s of customers use from an old supplier to the new one, for example).

A way to mitigate the unknowns is to map out outcomes and plan of action for each. At minimum set up a reliable support network (develop relationships with supliers, say). You can always scream later.

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behaviour other work

Reverse

Reverse roles so that others agrue your case while you find evidence to support their view. This tactic might help avoid confirmation bias.

Categories
behaviour investing other

Risk

Status quo feels safe. Today feels like yesterday. Auto-pilot is on. Change is hard. Because by changing we are risking status quo in order to gain. The pain of loss is much greater than the allure of gain. We do not feel so bad about losing out on big gains but we desperately try to avoid even small losses.

The differences in how we value risk help to explain why the derivatives, futures markets and junk bonds are worth trillions. Smart investors will buy risk from people at a discount.

Categories
behaviour life other people work

Conscientiousness

Most underrated quality in hiring has to be conscientiousness.