Actionable insights from books
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
Team performance is driver by 5 factors:
- Everyone in the group talks and listen in roughly equal measure and keeps things short.
- Members maintain high level of eye contact and their gestures are energetic.
- Members communicate directry with one another, not just with the team leader.
- Members carry on side conversations within the team.
- Members break, go exploring outside the team and bring information back to share with the others.
This factors ignores every individual skills.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Note: the author was an investigative reporter with BA in environmental science and astronomy and master's degree in environmental science and journalism.
- Delay your specialization in order to explore and learn different domains. The more hats you wear, the more empathy and understanding you gain. You will be able to connect seperate areas of expertise.
- Matching a strategy to a challenge as a key to successful life. Optimize your learning for this mapping. Note: Cynifin framework can help in this mapping.
Links
- Summary of the book by it's author (20 min TED talk).
- Link to book
Working Backwords: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Note: the authors worked closely to Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, for 20 years.
- Build products, processes, and teams by starting from the customer impact.
- Example for processes: hiring (Amazon Bar Raiser Program), building products (working backwards and PRFAQ)
- If you are not meeting your customer needs fast enough and the reason is too many hands offs between teams, consider having a single leader to oversee those teams. Amazon calls it a Single Threaded Leader (STL).
- Create process for creating a vision collaboratively and ensure this vision is visible during the delivery. Keep the implementation details flexible.
Links
Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity
Note: the author is the former CEO of ServiceNow and current (2023) CEO of Snowflake.
- 5 steps to improve your execution: raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy.
- Hire for aptitude, not experience
Links
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Notes: the author was a professional poker player. In the book, she generalizes successful poker strategies to life and business. "life is closer to poker than to chess".
- Think and express your believes on a range of certainty instead of true/false. This will allow you to adapt your believe when new information arrives. It will also invite others to collaborate because they know that your thinking is adaptable.
- Build trust by (1) expressing uncertainty, and (2) start with things you agree with and follow with "and" and not with "but".
- Improve decision making with the 10-10-10 process: before a decision, ask yourself “What are the consequences of each of my options in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years?”. This process might trigger feeling af regret, which the author calls "mental time travel".
- If you want to achieve something, write down the outcomes first and than the dependencies/obstacles. The author calls it "Backcasting". This can reveal events or obstacles that are rare or hard to overcome and can lead you to develop strategies to address them.
- In addition to writing down the positive outcomes, write down the negative ones. Studies shows that it will increase the chance your success because it will give you more perspective, empathy, and nuance of your challenge/goal.