Category: personal AnGoL

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been right about a lot. She was right in the early 1990s, when, as a fierce critic of China’s human rights record, she rejected the bipartisan faith that economic liberalization in China would inevitably lead to greater democratization. She was right again in 2003 when, as the leader of the House Democrats, she was one of the few party leaders to oppose the war in Iraq. She was right during the 2008 primary, when she rejected the entreaties of powerful allies of Hillary Clinton — Harvey Weinstein among them — to get behind a plan to use superdelegates to help Clinton take the Democratic nomination from Barack Obama.

Pelosi was right throughout Obama’s administration, when she struggled to make the president see that his fetish for bipartisanship was leading him to make pointless concessions to Republicans, who would never negotiate in good faith. In “Pelosi,” Molly Ball’s admiring and illuminating new biography of the most powerful woman in American politics, there’s a scene where Pelosi expresses her frustration to Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, over Obama’s doomed courtship of Republican support for health care reform. “Does the president not understand the way this game works?” she asks. “He wants to get it done and be beloved, and you can’t have both — which does he want?”

The House speaker would rather get it done. There’s a pattern in Ball’s book. Again and again, Pelosi is dismissed, first as a dilettante housewife, then as a far-left San Francisco kook, finally as an establishment dinosaur — and throughout, as a woman. She perseveres, driven by a steely faith in her own abilities. And more often than not, she is vindicated.

Source: Nancy Pelosi’s Brilliant Career – The New York Times

We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.

Source: A Note on Reading Big, Difficult Books…

“There was a guy, Pete Kiewit in Omaha, who used to say he looked for three things in hiring people: integrity, intelligence and energy,” Buffett said. “If they didn’t have the first, the other two would kill them, because if they don’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy.”
It makes sense — if you can’t trust someone to act with integrity in a situation that demands it, then should they really be allowed anywhere near you or your brand?

Source: Billionaire Warren Buffett to MBA students: This is the key to success

Why a Systematic Approach Works By switching our focus from achieving specific goals to creating positive long-term habits, we can make continuous improvement a way of life. This is evident from the documented habits of many successful people. Warren Buffett reads all day to build the knowledge necessary for his investments. Stephen King writes 1000 words a day, 365 days a year (a habit he describes as “a sort of creative sleep”). Athlete Eliud Kipchoge makes notes after each training session to establish

Source: Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life

There are proven ways to reskill your workforce, level up your people and encourage them to continuously learn and evolve. Enter The Home Depot. Yes, that Home Depot. After more than four decades in business, the company has adopted a strategic framework and revitalized culture that promotes and actively encourages learning at all levels of the organization. It’s called the Orange Method. Catchy and on brand, right? During last month’s Cloud Foundry Summit, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anthony Greg

Source: What Home Depot Can Teach DevOps (and Anyone Else) – The New Stack

As for the Navy:

The LCS was the first class of Navy ship that, because of technological change and the high cost of personnel, turned away from specialists in favor of “hybrid sailors” who have the ability to acquire skills rapidly. It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board—one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized “legacy” ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer. The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one.

And:

Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone. Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles.

Source: Is the generalist returning? – Marginal REVOLUTION

You can see where this is going. The answer lies, as it so often does, somewhere in the middle, in a balanced approach. It’s absolutely critical to stay open minded, flexible, and to check your ego at the door to reverse your previous opinion if warranted. But at some point, you and the team must lock in and move forward.

Here’s a simple trick I used to use to maintain the right balance. I took an old saying and put a twist on it, sharing it with my team as a mantra: Debate 70: Decide 30: Commit 100.

It means that we first allotted a certain amount of time to decide on something important. We’d spend 70 percent of that time debating differing points of view in a healthy, productive fashion and 30 percent of our time carefully funneling toward a decision. Then, after we’d decided (again allowing for a fair amount of back and forth per Bezos’s point), we 100 percent committed to the decision. Debate. Decide. Commit.

We set very strict rules at that point for what could open up a decision made; it was primarily only new and obvious pivotal data that could do so.

The approach really worked. People felt heard but also felt the herd was moving forward. You can apply this approach too to get the best out of the spirit of what Bezos said.

Source: Jeff Bezos Says This Is the Single Biggest Sign That Someone Is Intelligent (It’s Counterintuitive) | Inc.com

“We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” — Louis L’Amour

https://blog.coleadership.com/self-sacrifice-is-not-how-you-grow-as-a-leader/
Embracing a growth mindset can sometimes be as simple as asking ourselves, “What can I learn from this experience?” Other times, it’s helpful to have a more guided set of questions to help us learn from difficult situations:
What’s holding me back from thriving in these situations? Being honest with ourselves by acknowledging where we are is the first step toward growth. Very often, the biggest obstacles to where we want to be is ourselves, and we need to start by naming any beliefs we hold about ourselves that are getting in the way.
What’s possible if I could handle these types of situations easily? This type of visioning into the future keeps us motivated in the day-to-day. It gives us a destination to work towards.
What has to be true for this discomfort to instead feel easy? Identifying the gap between where are we and where we want to be gives us a path from our starting point to our destination.
What help do I need to ask for? When we realize that sustainable leadership isn’t about self-sacrifice, then we also allow the possibility of others helping us on our journey. Asking for help can be hard — and another area for growth — and effective leaders ask for help.
What can I do to systematically improve my ability to handle these situations? We’re not looking for overnight changes, just how we can be even just 1% better every day — that’s a large part of why I turn my journaling into a daily practice.
Over time, as we keep learning and growing, those 1% improvements compound into differences that look like night and day. And what was once hard and uncomfortable can become easy and normal.

I feel so sad right now. Hay. I miss my kids. I miss my wife.