Leaders are made.
Leadership is a skill.
Individuals become better leaders by honing their leadership skills.
To hone leadership skills, take the lead wherever possible-community, company, family etc.
We all start from somewhere and become better with practice, smart work, learning, and reflecting.
Do startup founder(s) get more credit for the startup’s success or blame for its failure than other members of the startup (managers, technical leads etc)?
We know of founder(s) who started companies but what about the initial 5 to 50 employees who helped the startup grow.
What contributes to a startup’s success? Is it the founder(s)’ idea, their execution, their initial key hires, or just the timing of their idea(s)?
How much should we praise founder(s), recognize their successes and failures, and attribute to the startup’s growth?
Road trips are fun and adventurous with a good group, couple or on our own.
If we’re driving to a destination, we can choose some places to stop along the way that interests us : local eats, city attractions, must-see locations/landmarks and other interest(s) we have.
A good mix of planned activities/stops along the way and unplanned stops to see if certain locations/ landmarks seem exciting can make the journey memorable.
Few good music playlists, podcasts, and audio books can make the travel fun and entertaining.
Packing healthy snacks and drinks provides needed fuel and energy to our body!
Workshops that could provide tremendous value to current college students especially after they graduate are:
Financial Management
Priority Management
Skills Development
Health and Fitness
Leadership
Networking
One of my favorite parts from Kobe Bryant’s The Mamba Mentality How I Play book is the page with the heading I Asked A Ton Of Questions. In that page, Kobe shares:
I asked a ton of questions.
I was curious. I wanted to improve, learn, and fill my head with the history of the game. No matter who I was with—a coach, hall of famer, teammate—and no matter the situation—game, practice, vacation—I would fire away with question after question.
A lot of people appreciated my curiosity and passion. They appreciated that I wasn ’t just asking to ask, I was genuinely thirsty to hear their answers and glean new info. Some people, meanwhile, were less understanding and gracious. That was fine with me. My approach always was that I’d rather risk embarrassment now than be embarrassed later, when I’ve won zero titles.
Image by : Andrew D. Bernstein
Workshops are focused, interactive, and the results can be immediate.
With the current pace of technological advancements, workshops are more effective than year long programs to get faster and effective results.
The format of workshops enables participants to learn a new skill, become more knowledgeable about a topic/subject, interact with other team members etc. in a short time frame.
Online workshops can be as effective as in person workshops and can have participants from various parts of the world.
Which workshop(s) have you attended recently or planning to participate in?
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it’s very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand. – Bill Buford
To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is. – Bruce Lee
How about sharing your biggest and limitless vision for your idea/company with your team and prospective employees?
One of the single most important reasons for top talented individuals to join a startup, growing company or even a multinational is the vision of the company’s founders or the company’s management/leadership team.
People switch jobs and careers all the time. Besides financial compensation package, benefits, perks etc., the most talented individuals are also looking to work on the biggest challenges, make tangible impact, and leave their own mark along the way. Next time you want to attract the best talent from the job market, share your idea and vision with them. See how that turns out!
Should you develop your product first or start marketing the idea first?
If the idea has some legs to become a business, building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first could help. Once you’ve build an MVP, you can test it out with potential customers. Collect feedback from early users of your product/service and continue developing it to create the best value to your product/service users. Marketing the product/service once you’ve built a user base would be prudent.
Product development and marketing will go hand in hand overtime. In the initial stages, product development should be prioritized over marketing. An excellent product/service will always be easier to market!
A company, WeAreGrowing Inc. decides to add several new team members to its company. They place ads, go through job sites, and recruiters to find and interview the best talent to join their growing company. Lots of time, human resources, and energy goes into finding the right candidate(s) for the roles and after several interview(s), the team members are selected and officially onboarded into the company.
For the new team members, the first few days and weeks are exciting at WeAreGrowing Inc. As the weeks and months go by, these new team members are not “new” anymore and become “regular employees.” As WeAreGrowing Inc. continues to grow, they add more new team members and so on. Sometime in the distant future, few team members decide to leave WeAreGrowing Inc. for various reasons – join another company, higher studies, start their own venture, etc. Then WeAreGrowing Inc. become highly alert on the recent layoffs and in a move to not lose the team members plans to meet them. HR and managers talk to the team members about how much the company values them and promises that the company will continue to grow. Yet the team members share that their plans to move on were made months ago and felt that their personal and professional growth was stagnant for sometime and were not growing at WeAreGrowing Inc.
There seems to be a long drought in team engagement between when new team members join a company and when they decide to leave. A company can convince itself that they did whatever they can at their disposal to keep the team member(s) engaged and growing. However, team members feel that the company did not engage them enough or challenge them enough or show tangible growth during the time they were with the company. Addressing the team engagement issues when the team members are almost out the door is too late!
If a company sincerely believes that the team is their biggest asset, then they should treat them as such – keep them engaged and challenged throughout the team members’ journey within the company. It’s more expensive for companies to find and hire new talent than keeping the current talent engaged and productive. Better for the company to approach their people that they can leave at any point and realize that the team members have many other career choices as well. You (HR, Managers, Founders or Leaders) just have to deliver the message and show that staying with the company is the best career choice for the team members!
I finished watching the Stephen Curry : Underrated documentary on Apple TV.
The documentary tells of almost a fairy tale like story of how Stephen Curry who was overlooked throughout his basketball journey (high school, college, early NBA years) to ultimately becoming a 4 time NBA champion (so far). Stephen’s journey to the NBA was filled with challenges and underestimations. However, he kept going, working on his game, and continued to reach newer heights.
Stephen had a lot of people helping him on his basketball journey – family, coaches, team members, and the community. He emphasized how important his Davidson coach, Bob McKillop and his Davidson team members were critical to his confidence and growth on the basketball court especially in his early years at Davidson.
It’s an incredible sports documentary and highly recommend watching it for Stephen Curry fans as well as for any sports fan.
What if we could have a Skills degree similar to a College degree?
A Skills degree would show all the skills you have accumulated over the years. Writing skills, editing skills, sales skills, Excel skills, technical skills, marketing skills and more skills. In a knowledge economy, our skills are our biggest assets. Skills are learnable and we can get better overtime with practice and repetition.
What skills do you have or working to be better at?
Meetings fill up a work day. There’s a meeting here and a meeting there. Then the day is almost done and we still have a lot of important work to be done.
With remote work being a part of our professional lives, video conferencing tools so easy to use (Zoom, Meet, Teams), and devices at our hands, we could be taking meetings from anywhere. An organized meeting with an agenda, meaningful audience engagement, and clear next steps is well worth it. However, many meetings fall off the mark and we end up just looking busy and not getting much work done. There’s a huge opportunity cost to meaningless and unproductive meetings when the team could be working on more productive and important tasks. A CBS News article stated that “Based on how much time workers said they spend in nonessential meetings as well as their salaries, the survey estimated that organizations employing 5,000 people waste around $100 million annually on unnecessary gatherings.”
What are the solution(s) then?
Meeting Purpose: Before setting up a meeting, asking ourselves is this meeting necessary, what’s the agenda, who is absolutely needed for this meeting, what can be the end result of this meeting etc. Being absolutely clear on these few questions can make a huge difference on how the meeting goes.
Meeting Audit: Once meetings have been on the calendar, conducting a meeting audit from time to time is important. A meeting audit will consist of reviewing whether this recurring meeting is still necessary, what can be changed, and if possible can the meeting be removed from the calendar completely.
Meeting Scalability: Often times, there could be meetings conflict where the same key individual(s) are needed in multiple meetings. Considering if the next individual in charge can attend the meeting instead, can the meeting be recorded, or can the video conferencing platform create an AI Summary of the meeting are some options to make better use of our time at work.
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot shares his thoughts on rare skills and the Trillion Dollar Venn Diagram Of Success (phrase credit to him).
Dharmesh shares that “You probably have a few valuable skills right now. The question is, how do you turn those skills into a successful career or company? By combining skills together. But combining any set of skills won’t necessarily get you where you want to go. You need to be strategic about which skills to acquire. Here’s my framework for combining skills to maximize your potential.”
Engaging company cultures have empowered, creative, and growth oriented team members leading company culture events. Through empowerment, employees are given the decision making authority and independence to decide what activities bring out the best in the team. Through creativity, employees can be resourceful and come up with activities that are out of the box and meaningful for the team. Through a focus on growth-oriented activities, employees can initiate programs that integrate both learning and fun.
What’s your company culture like?
With AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, the possibilities seem endless. In fact, it has made it very easy for us in various professions to go to ChatGPT, write a prompt, and get a good output in a span of seconds. With ChatGPT, we can have a solid starting point for an email to a client, a college essay, speech or anything that ChatGPT can help you with.
This means that the ART part is becoming more important and will continue to do so in the future. If every sales person or customer success manager in the company goes to ChatGPT to help them write emails, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). If every student in the classroom goes to ChatGPT to help them write an essay, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). And the list goes on.
Our creativity, personality, uniqueness, authentic experiences, and human emotions are where we create meaningful connections with others in the world we live in today. Bring your authentic self to the work that you do and have that human connection. Let AI take care of the rest!
Bill Gross said in a TEDTalk that timing was the single most important attribute to startup success.
There’s no science to when’s a good time to start a venture. However, waiting for the idea to be perfect, or wanting to have all the “necessary” data points in the world to make the launch decision or just plain waiting probably won’t do much good to your “exclusive” idea.
Ship your idea. Gather feedback from prospects/customers. Iterate based on learnings. Keep going!
A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?”
The above excerpt is taken from Tim Ferriss‘ 17 Questions That Changed My Life who had quoted Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives using the above analogy.
Sunlight is very important for us and provides many benefits.
The benefits of sunlight are:
Sleep at night. Early morning sunlight in particular seems to help people get to sleep at night.
Weight loss. Morning light also seems to help people keep the fat off.
Boosting serotonin. Sunlight helps boost a chemical in our brain called serotonin which can give us more energy, be positive, and focused. Higher levels of serotonin correlate with better mood and feelings of satisfaction and calmness, and lower levels link to depression and anxiety.
Eye health. Moderate amounts of sun over one’s lifetime helps to maintain good eye health.
Here’s two good resources on sunlight and health : more benefits of sunlight and health. Why Sunlight Is So Good For You
Which one is better for your enterprise? Going for Scale or Staying small?
If you run the best coffeeshop in town, do you focus on opening 100 more around the country or making the flagship coffeeshop the only one available and best in the world? If the decision to open 100 franchises of your coffeeshop, came with ownership dilution, longer working hours, more work travel to setup franchises, more stress, less personalized experiences for your customers, would you still want to do it because the financial upside is huge? If the reasons you started the coffee venture in the first place – delighting customers daily, creative and financial freedom, doing something that you are passionate about are available to you with one coffeeshop, would having MORE coffeeshops make you happier or less?
It would certainly help to revisit why you started your entrepreneurial journey in the first place!
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