the best way to keep learning after you leave school is surround yourself with the smartest people you can find.
Just find the smartest people, hook in and hang on. join them, observe them, learn from them, take what you can learn and help them.
if you want to build a ship, don’t drum up men to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Communication
Overcommunicate in all ways all the time.
There is no such thing as too much communication.
When you think you’ve communicated something too much, you’re probably just beginning to get through.
Openly share everything with your colleagues.
Trust breeds loyalty.
Repetition does not spoil the prayer.
when you say something so many times you are sick of it, that’s about to the time they are starting to hear it.
Each word matters.
be crisp and direct and choose each word wisely.
Great leaders are great teachers. And great teachers are great storytellers.
As leaders, you learn more by listening by talking.
listening makes you more humble, more intuitive, and smarter. talking does none of these things.
when you listen, you learn how things work as opposed to when you talk and state how you think things work.
If you must talk, ask questions.
people learn more from your questions than your answers. it makes them think and explore the choices with you.
If you actually know the answer in a business situation, stop listening by all means and talk!
but if you go this route, back up your answer and your position with your data.
you don’t win arguments by saying “I think”; you win by saying “let me show you.”
Strive to respond to email instantly.
Company Culture
Avoid hippos(hippo is the highest paid person’s opinion)
You shouldn’t be able to figure out the pecking order or org chart by looking at a product.
Help the organizations to crush bureaucracy in all forms. Dying organizations foment it.
When you’re trying to accomplish something, ask for a winning strategy and the tactics needed to win.
People are more productive if they are crowded.
Empower the smallest of teams.
The Mythical Man-Month
Working from home is a malignant, metastasizing cancer.
And jealousy is a green-eyed monster that you cannot slay. but you can take away the monster’s greatest weapon, which is surprise, and you can fight it with envy’s kryptonite, which is humility.
Do all reorganizations in a day.
Hiring and Development
Know how to interview well.
Great people makes great company.
Manager don’t hire people. Hiring committees hire people.
Instead of laying off the bottom 10%, don’t hire them. It’s way harder to fire people than it is to hire them.
Don’t hire specialists.
Don’t grow up to be a specialist.
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. – Einstein.
You cannot teach passion.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
when enthusiasm is real, it’s palpable. If you can’t taste it in the room, it’s not there. – Jonathan Rosenberg
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 and purge the bad eggs.
Decision making
Decision-making is about consensus, not unanimity.
There’s no consensus without dissent.
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody is not thinking. – George Patton.
If two people always agree, isn’t one of them redundant?
If there’s doubt about what to do, consider your customer’s perspective.
Choose your goals wisely.
None of us is as smart as all of us.
Foster Innovation
When there is harmony, there is no innovation.
You cannot manage creativity to manage risks. Innovation comes from creativity.
Create a culture of yes based on optimism and big thinking.
Never stop someone from a good idea for a better one.
Darwinian rule works. Best ideas win and others fail.
A leaders job is not to prevent risk but to recover from failures fast. Good failure happens quickly.
A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Nothing teaches like a crisis.
Humility
Learn something new to remember how hard it is to learn. Teach something so you can learn.
Never stop learning. School is never out.
Humility is correlated with age. Arrogance is inversely correlated with age.
You get personal leverage from delegation and inspection. Smart people surround themselves with smart people.
Judgement comes from experience and experience comes from errors.
You learn more from your mistakes. At google screw ups are written and archived to learn from for the future.
Smart ppl can smell hypocrisy.
So think before you act or speak.
You have to commit to your team’s goal and vision. They can tell when you don’t really mean it.
Make sure you spend ur time on things you say is important. Culture is set from the top.
Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others. It is the only means.
Don’t burn bridges.
Would you work for yourself?
Write a self review and be critical about yourself.