Leadership

It is an understatement & cliche to say that 2020 was a unique experience in our lives. Yet, I was fortunate to have access to some great books, newsletters, podcasts etc which taught me lot during this time. In this post, I am listing out some key learnings and few resources that taught me most in 2020.

Key Lessons I Learnt

On Health & Diet

Insulin resistance is underlying cause for most heart related health ailments (especially for South Asians like me).
Carbohydrate heavy diet leads to constant insulin spike. Over period it leads to two kinds of problems. Insulin resistance where muscle and other tissues stop responding to insulin and stop absorbing Glycogen from carbs or Low insulin where pancreas stops producing enough insulin. Both these causes, excess glycogen to enter blood stream or liver (where its converted to fat) leading to multiple chronic illnesses. – South Asian Health Solutions by Ronesh Sinha.
Pay Less attention to overall cholesterol. More attention should be given to Triglycerides. Make sure you maintain Triglyceride-to-HDL ratio < 3.0
Do bodyweight exercises at-least 1-2 times a week. Incorporate interval/HIIT training twice a week.
High stress levels, irregular sleep patterns, low Vitamin D can accelerate insulin resistance.
Shift carb intake to post work-out periods to allow muscles to use for energy instead of carbs shifting to fat cell storage. Workout before breakfast is effective for this reason.
Avoid processed foods, sugary drinks or any man-made foods (our natural body evolution did not prepare to consume those). Moderate the consumption of starchy foods, grains and legumes. Prefer low glycemic carbs over higher ones.

On Money, Finances & Investing

Live below means, not within means. In other words, try to limit life-style creep with income gain. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. Increasing lifestyle with income is never ending hedonic treadmill.
Saving money can give you more control over how you spend your time in the future. Time is the most valuable resource. Money is just a means to buy time.
Good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns through one off hits. It is about compounding above-average returns over a long term. Be patient!
Sell down to a point where you can sleep better. Health above wealth.
Equanimity & Humility: Leave Fear of missing out. Don’t act in haste. Have humility to acknowledge blind spots & tail risk events and don’t let greed wipe out your wealth.

On Parenting

Kids need autonomy, sense of competence and care/relatedness.
Kids should be encouraged to listen to their own intuition, to be spontaneous, to be creative in thoughts and actions. This gives them autonomy and willingness to try and not have fear of failure.
Discipline over punishment. Discipline means teaching them consequences of actions with love. This also tells them you care. Threats and punishment breeds a sense of authority and can hurt their self confidence.
Help kids reason through failure (even for small tasks) and appreciate the effort. This develops learning mentality and confidence that they can learn anything.

On Leadership

Caring personally and Challenging directly builds trust and opens communication lines. Be easy on the person. Be tough on the problem.
Good leadership is ability to balance Directing & Supporting with Coaching & Delegation.
Good communication is about explaining why, how and what behind a Vision. This inspires action and fosters innovation.

On Decision Making

Types of Decisions: Break decisions into one way doors (irreversible ones) and two way doors (reversible ones). Be slow and consensus driven with one way doors, and quick and individual driven with two way doors. Most firms think every decision is a one way door and end up being slow. – Jeff Bezos.
Avoid Trap of Perfection: A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan later.
Escalate fundamental disagreements early
Breaking Decision Paralysis: When two options are so close then its likely you wont regret either one in future.
Tools: preferences, probabilities and payoffs over pros/cons list – How to Decide by Anne Duke

On Markets & Business Strategy

Future monopolies never look like the current ones. Best way to compete is to pick a narrow orthogonal market to existing Monopoly and create immense value for users/customers. Google did not start out to as Yahoo clone, Facebook did not start out as New York Times competitor. – The Greatest game by Jeff Booth
Competing in new market is advantageous to disrupters because its almost always going to be expensive and self-destructive to compete for existing companies – Intel’s Disruption by Steven Sinofsky.
In enterprise software up-selling to existing customer is easier than acquiring new customer. A collection of good enough tools are integrated together is much more valuable proposition for IT department than tools which work great individually. This dynamic helps Microsoft Teams compete well with Slack despite Slack’s superior technology. – Salesforce Acquires Slack by Stratechery
Companies/Industries which have long time gap between generating supply and creating demand are more susceptible to natural disasters. Airlines need to front load supply of planes and recover cost from passengers in future, hotels have to pay for real estate and inventory first before recovering cost from travelers. These are the industries that suffered most during the pandemic.

Books

These are the books that I learnt most from in 2020.

This book is simple, short and effective at explaining why and how to optimize for long term. It introduces three main ideas – thinking through the second-order effects, learning how to best motivate ourselves, and becoming experts at delaying gratification as tools to help us play a long term game.

This is the best book I read on health and diet thus far. This book taught me lot about impact of carbs vs fat, how insulin plays a huge role in multiple health problems. Book explains how reducing carb intake, with regular exercises can most common chronic issues like diabetes, cardiac arrest and even reduce risk of cancer.
Also it is a great companion book to Thomas DeLauer and Dr. Eric Berg DC youtube series on intermittent fasting.

This is a book teaches how to balance being nice and giving an effective feedback. Author explains the concept of Caring Personally and Challenging Directly to build trust and enables open communication. It has some great tools and concepts which I personally found useful in my job as an Engineering Manager.

Decision making is a complex subject. This book simplifies this into few simple tools like – avoiding resulting, avoiding hindsight bias, using preferences, probabilities and payoffs as opposed to pros/cons. I personally found these tools to be easy to use and practical. I have even used them in some of them big decisions I had to make in 2020.

This book unlike most other investment books teaches how we should think about money, expenses, life style choices, retirement, value of time, compounding. An excerpt from the book – “The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.”

Technology is by nature deflationary. Example take a look at Iphone. For the price of $600 dollars it bundles a computer, camera, phone, screen (tv) and others. But monetary policies of all of the central banks are inflationary. In this book, author explains the impact of these policies on society (two class system of haves and have nots), politics, economy and danger it poses.

Podcasts

These are the podcasts that influenced my thinking most in 2020.

This is an excellent resources on business building and investing. It has great conversations with founders and investors walking through their journey. I learn a lot from their episodes on market dynamics, disruption, business moats, incentives in multi sided market place etc.

Great podcast on technology and its impact on society, regulation and frameworks for regulating tech.

I have been a long time listener of this show. This podcast is best one out there when it comes to focusing on fundamentals, understanding market and great education on investing. Especially in 2020, where market movements have been crazy, this podcast was irreplaceable for me.

Blogs/Newsletters

Here are some news letters that influenced my thinking most in 2020.

I have been a long time reader of this blog. This is one of the best resource in understanding business, strategy, technology and internet’s impact on society. Apart from that Ben also has great thoughts on how to regulate technology.

This newsletter covers two of my interests – Finance & Technology. Both business landscape and market dynamics have take a huge inflection in 2020 as distributed work and stay-at-home became prominent. Byrne does a excellent job of put these changes into a larger perspective. It is a great companion read to stratechery.

https://zeynep.substack.com/

2020 was a year of Covid. There has been a lot of information but I found Zeynep’s writing to be single most authoritative source in understanding Covid, its developments, public policy around it, vaccine etc.

Memos from Howard Marks

Thoughts from legendary investor. Bigger picture understanding of market dynamics and behaviors during this pandemic.

What is your Managerial Style – Leadership or Management. Coaching or Supporting?

I have deliberated on this question a lot during my career. While the definition of each of them is very well documented, often conversations tend to pitch one against another, which puts newer managers in the uncomfortable spot of picking one vs other and guessing which one is better or worse making wrong choices (it certainly did for me).

Having seen these styles work well and not-so-well in my career (as a manager and a tech lead), I now believe that a good line managers need to adapt and use both techniques. The success of style depends entirely on context and people.

Management

When I say Management, I refer to following operational style:

Overseeing goals of a team
Being tactical in determining strategy in every step
Being Operation thinker who plans execution steps
Focusing on objectives
Minimizing risk in execution and seeks stability
Sometimes Teach by doing

At a high level, operating style for “Leadership” is:

Setting vision and directing
Influencing & Coaching people through reasoning (explaining “why” we are doing things)
Making people feel part of vision and motivating them to creative in execution while still staying on track
Being a strategic thinker
Optimizing for long term autonomy of the team (some times trading off immediate risks)

There are enough subtle differences between the two styles and often it is not entirely sure what is ideal. In this write up, I try to capture a framework for choosing between the two styles.

Learnings From Mistakes

I made this mistake early in my management career. There was a project that an engineer reporting to me was working on. It involved a lot of cross organizational alignment, planning and execution. I knew this was a steep step up for this engineer. By then through training I received (or let’s say I probably took wrong lessons) I had this idealistic view of a manager leading through coaching than being very tactical and execution focused.

Before too long, this approach backfired for the team and engineer. Project execution was constantly falling off track despite the best efforts of the lead engineer. There was lack of clarity for everyone involved in schedules, dependencies and what needs to be done when. All this while I was still Coaching the engineer – guiding them through questions, helping them arrive at decisions and figuring out the path of the project.

So what happened? What the engineer really needed was more hands on support than just coaching. Someone who can help operationalize the project, help in figuring out milestones, how to get alignment on deliverables and timelines across the team. Purely relying on coaching and expecting the engineer to ask the right questions and figure out a path forward, is setting up for failure at that stage of their career.

It’s through experiences like these that I now believe that to be a good Engineering lead (at least as line managers), one has to be able to operate in both styles depending on context and people involved. You need to be able to do any of the following depending on context.

Directing – Setting path, operationalizing, assigning clear deliverables
Supporting – Help in brainstorming, provide feedback proactively, teach by doing if needed
Coaching – Let them make the decisions, provide high level directions, ask probing questions, help with setting decision frameworks
Delegate – Trust and only get involved when asked

Learnings From Mythology

I was recently forwarded a story about two leaders in Hindu mythology and their differing styles. It is very relevant to current topic in this blog. So I modified that slightly here to draw parallels to our subject.

Ramayan and Mahabharata are two epics in Hindu mythology. The centre story of both these books is around victory of good over evil.

In one story Ram (protagonist) leads his army to defeat Ravana in his land, While in the second Krishna (protagonist) oversees Pandavas defeat Kauravas in the battle at Kurushektra.

In Ramayan, Ram is the best warrior of his side. He leads his army from the front. Strategizes & directs different people to do things which will meet the objectives. His people while very skilled are not capable of operational tactics.. Ram sets direction & also tells people what to do during difficult times. Ultimately they won the war & the final outcome was achieved.

On the other hand Krishna told Arjuna (skilled warrior), I won’t fight the battle. I won’t pick up any weapon; I would only be there on our chariot as a charioteer.

And he did what he said. He never picked up the weapon & he never fought. Still, Pandavas won the war & final outcome was achieved.

What is the difference?

It was their managerial style & It was also the type of people who were being led and situation at hand.

Ram was leading an army of warriors who were not skilled fighters & they were looking for direction. While on other hand, Krishna was leading Arjuna who was one of the best archers of his time.

While Ram’s role was to show it & lead from the front, Krishna played the role of a coach whose job was to help clarify doubts, provide general guidance needed for Arjuna to go about his work.

Krishna couldn’t teach Arjuna archery but he could definitely help him see things from a very different perspective whereas Ram had to use his superior skills and experience in helping guide his warriors across difficult terrains.

So they had to operate in two styles:

Ram- A skilled warrior, was tactical, gave precise roles & instructions (operationalizing the strategy), motivated the army to fight with specific cause in mind. He needed the trust of his warriors to be able to do this. Hint: Management.

Krishna: Arjuna was looking for a coach who provides strategic clarity, explains vision and why it was needed. Krishna did exactly that, he coached Arjuna and allowed the team to take lead, fight for the cause of the team, use his skill and creativity in succeeding. Hint: Leadership

What type do you need to be?

Look at the combination of your team, project and context to reflect what type of role you need to play.

One who keeps answering/solving problems for people ? Or Who asks relevant questions from their people so that they can find their own solution?
Someone who tells/directs, is tactical and operationalizes the plan? Or Someone who coaches and sets a path and lets their people find their own ways?
Are u someone who has had bright engineers but yet fall through in execution of larger projects? Or do you have an engineer who is an expert who seeks clarity and direction?

Best outcomes are achieved when you put the right hat based on the context.

Tag: Leadership

Lessons, Books & Resources that shaped my thinking in 2020