Jot Thought

Just saw a great video by Jonathan Rosenberg. I enjoyed his listed so much that I decided to jot them down to reference.

Rules for Communication

• Over communicate in all ways all the time
• Openly share everything with your colleagues
• Repetition does not spoil the prayer
• Each word matters. Be crisp and direct and choose each word wisely.
• Great leaders are great teachers. And great teachers are great storytellers. Narrative is what matters.
• As leaders you learn more by listening than by talking.
• If you must talk, ask questions. People learn more from your questions than your answers.
• If you actually know the answer in a business situation, stop listening by all mean and talk! Back up your answer with data.
• Strive to respond to email instantly.

Rules for Company Culture

• Avoid hippos (highest paid person’s opinion)
• You should not be able to figure out the org char by looking at a product
• Help the organizations crush bureaucracy in all forms
• When you are trying to accomplish something, ask for a winning strategy and the tactics needed to win. On their own, strategy and tactics don’t produce winners. You need both.
• People or more production if they are crowded.
• Empower the smallest of teams. A small team can often do more than a big one.
• Working from home is malignant, metastasizing cancer.
• Engineers and product managers and complexity, marketing adds management layers, sales adds coordinators.
• Knights are knights and knaves are knaves.
• Organizations will elide import details. So you must verify every assertion made.
• Focus on values rather than costs. Spend 80% of your time on 80% of your revenue stream.
• Never, never suggest copying the competitor.
• Hope is not a plan.
• Success breeds the green-eyed monster.
• Do all reorganization in a day. 24 hours.

Rules for Hiring and Development

• Know how to interview well
• Great people attract great people.
• Managers don’t hire people. Committees hire people.
• Instead of laying off the bottom 10%, don’t hire them.
• Don’t hire specialists, especially in high tech.
• You cannot teach passion.
• Urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring.
• Identify and purge the bad eggs.
• Diversity is your best defense against myopia.
• You can’t pump the management training program.
• Life is not fair. Disproportionately reward risk takers and performance.
• Build around the people who have the most impact.

Rules for Decision Making

• Decision is about consensus not unanimity.
• There’s consensus without descent.
• If there’s doubt about what to do, consider your customers perspective
• Choose your goals wisely.
• None of us is a smart as all of us.
• Where the is harmony, there is no innovation.

Rules to Foster Innovation

• Innovation comes from creativity. Creativity cannot be managed.
• Create a culture of “yes” based on optimism and big thinking.
• Never stop someone from moving forward with their good idea because you have a better one.
• A leader’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capabilities when failures occur.
• A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
• Many management challenges are teaching moments

Rules for Humility

• Learn something new so you remember how difficult it is to learn
• Never stop learning.
• Humility is correlated with age. Arrogance is inversely correlated with age.
• You get person leverage trough empowerment, delegation, and inspection.
• Judgement comes with experience and experience comes with errors.
• Smart people can smell hypocrisy.
• Don’t burn bridges.
• Would you work for yourself?
• Write a self review and be critical of yourself.
• Communicate, confess, comply, when you make a mistake.