Accountability

We tend to blame everything and everyone, because it is so easy. Pl. consider this ..

9 steps to become an indispensable employee

For a change, ET has a meaningful article on how to build a great career. Here's a list of things each one can do to become indispensable:

• Develop deep expertise in a task critical for the organization
• Mentor your colleagues and provide support
• Step out of your comfort zone and volunteer to do more
• Offer solutions that are useful for the organization
• Learn to adapt to the changed situation
• Delight your boss by making his work easier
• Demonstrate integrity at work
• Be consistently reliable in everything you do
• Build ties within and outside the organization

Makes sense? Read the full article here.

A Leader must ...

Found on LinkedIn - a post by Tom Bradicich, former NI Fellow.

A leader must assimilate all 7 perspectives: 

• Optimist: Glass is half full. 
• Pessimist: Glass is half empty. 
• Marketing: Glass gives you ‘headroom’ to scale. 
• Finance: Glass is a 50% opportunity cost. 
• Legal: Glass and water ratio is as is, nothing otherwise expressed or implied. 
• Engineering: Glass can be optimized by reducing its capacity. 
• Sales: Want to buy more water?

Day 1 vs Day 2 Companies

Amazon founder CEO, Jeff Bezos's annual letter to shareholders  is out (thanks to Jin Bains for drawing my attention to this). Jeff Bezos talks of an interesting concept called Day 1 and Day 2 companies (full letter attached to this post).

Day 1 companies are companies that are beginning at their potential. Day 2 companies on the other hand are companies in stasis.  Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. He says, Amazon therefore always wants to be a Day 1 company. 

Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. (Notice that this is applicable in our personal capacity too - Irrelevance, Decline, Death - chilling, isn't it)

Bezos credits Amazon's precise focus on customer outcomes for the company's success. He said Amazon focuses on always giving customers something better, even if it means inventing something totally new, like Amazon Prime.

"Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen," Bezos writes.

To that end, Amazon tries not to conflate the process of serving customers with the results, Bezos said.

"[In Day 2], you stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp. It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, 'Well, we followed the process,'" Bezos writes. "A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process."

The company has also embraced, and even pioneered, outside trends like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. While trends like those can be easy to spot, "Day 2" organizations resist them, he writes.

"The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind," Bezos writes.

That means making what Bezos calls "high-velocity decisions." That doesn't mean making low-quality decisions, but it does mean most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had, Bezos said.

"You need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think," Bezos said.

Quotable Quotes

Recently I finished reading this very instructive book "Tools for Titans". As usual I highlighted phrases that resonated. Here are a few.

• The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.
• The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism
• If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you?
• Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot
• You must want to be a butterfly so badly, you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.
• If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow
• We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training
• When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be
• A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have
• Life is a series of choices—take accountability for yours

Why do you need mentors

I was talking to a very senior and a successful executive recently, trying to understand his leadership philosophy and how it has evolved. In the course of the conversation he introduced me to a tool that help get clarity on priorities and can therefore help us make better decisions. He then casually mentioned it was taught to him by one his mentors. Initially, I was surprised as to why such a successful person should/would have a mentor, but then I quickly realised that part of the reason why he has been successful is because he has mentors. It amazes me that so many folks do not have mentors, even at an informal. 

Ever wondered why do you a need a mentor? Here are few reasons I can think of:

• For a reassuring pat on the back
• For an unapologetic slap on the face
• To explain why your fears are unfounded
• To tell you why your excuses are BS

(and for everything else you've a friend that tells you exactly what you want to hear, make you happy in the short run and therefore possibly irrelevant in the long run).

Responding to Feedback You Disagree With

Getting feedback that seems just plain wrong can be isolating, painful, and maddening. What should you do when this happens to you?

Receiving feedback well doesn’t mean you have to take the feedback. Being good at receiving feedback means just that: that you receive it. That you hear it. That you work to understand it. That you share your perspective on it. That you reflect on it. That you sit with it.  That you look for that (even tiny) bit that might be right and of value. Then you get to decide whether or not to act on it.

Did it resonate? Read the full HBR article here.