Michael Rill

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Tag: Leadership

  • The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies

    Jason Cohen writing on A Smart Bear about one of the fundamental concepts of strategy, durable, differentiated strengths.

    “Leverage” means generating a large effect from a relatively small effort, created by riding tailwinds of natural abilities or hard-won assets, rather than fighting a battle for which you are ill-equipped. […] Leveraging strengths is the only way to do great work. (Not “fixing weaknesses.”) Better yet, leveraging differentiated strengths means you beat the competition. Best is when that differentiation is durable over time.

    Without leveraging strengths (rather than spending far more energy shoring up a weakness that still won’t be great), the company will not succeed in creating something great. Without leveraging differentiated strengths, the company will not surpass competitors, will have a hard time winning and keeping customers, and will have an even harder time justifying profit-generating prices. Without leveraging durable, differentiated strengths, the company’s success will be short-lived, differentiation will be temporary, and once again it will be reduced to out-spending on marketing or lowering prices until it is unprofitable.

    A winning strategy explains which strengths the company will leverage, how it will side-step rather than “attack” its weaknesses, which strengths can be leveraged for differentiated sales today, and which long-term moats the company is constructing.

    The three kinds of leverage that anchor effective strategies

    Once you understand that a great idea is not a competitive advantage. It’s a bet that the idea is valuable and you’ll be able to execute better than anyone else. But once an idea is proven competitors will try to copy it. Then it becomes a question of whether the idea is actually tied to a strategic advantage that cannot be copied or compensated for. Then, and only then, you have a durable, differentiated strength.

    My favorite quote from the article

    How do you beat Bobby Fischer? Play him at anything but chess

    Warren Buffet
  • Embrace the red

    Embrace the red

    One of the biggest success factors for OKRs is culture. A healthy team culture of trust is fertile ground for successful OKR implementations. One of the core principles is to “embrace the red” in OKR reviews.

    It’s important to celebrate what teams are doing well. At the same time, learning and growth happens in areas that are blocked or need attention. As teams create new categories, targeting new audiences and inventing new products, there will always be aspects that need to improve, i.e. show up red on the OKR scorecard. The red key results are the opportunity to improve the eventual outcome as soon as possible.

    It is easy to slip into a mentality that suggests anything in red is negative – and uncomfortable to address. Focusing on red key results will generate the fastest growth. It opens up the path to improvement, growth and scale.

    Once you “embrace the red” OKRs shift from a performance management tool to a learning device that facilitates impactful conversations about what teams learn as they build, launch and operate products.

    Image: Engine start button on Unsplash

  • Categories for journaling

    Over the past few years, long-hand journaling helped me reflect and think through many personal and professional topics. Ofir Sharony offers a nice framework to establish a journaling routine.

    “Start by shutting down all interruptions: disable Slack mentions and email notifications, place your phone out of sight, and enter your flow by wearing your noise-canceling headset. Once you feel focused, go over today’s calendar, skim through your to-do list, and reflect [on one or more of] on the following:

    1. Creations: What did you create today?

    2. Decisions: What were the top decisions you made today?

    3. Insights: What interesting ideas did you or others raise today?

    4. Challenges: What were the main challenges you faced today?

    5. Tomorrow: How do you make the most of tomorrow?”

    Leadership journal: become an inspiring leader | Medium

    It’s a nice structure and allows us to process what happened today to learn and improve for tomorrow. Little by little.

  • Companies are not families

    Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget:

    And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a bunch, we’re going to cut you.

    We spend the majority of our waking hours at work and with the people at work. But I always die a little inside when I hear teams talk about being a family. While it might be an alluring thought, it is neither realistic nor appealing. Family is about being bound together and in the best of cases about shared values and unconditional love.

    Work ultimately is always at the base level a transactional relationship. You work and get compensated for it. At work, you are replaceable. Everyone is. To your family, you are not. A workplace is replaceable. A family is not.

    In that regard, I’d rather aspire to establishing a community at work. One that promotes values like caring, love, a sense of belonging, respect, empathy, joy, and fairness. These might all be attributes shared with families, but there should be a clear line separating work and family.

    High functioning teams add layers on top of it like shared values, growing together and standing up for one another. But ultimately, it’s a loose band that last for a few years until it doesn’t. And that’s OK.

  • Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Rick Klau once gave one of the most influential intro presentations to Objectives and Key Results: How Google sets goals: OKRs / Startup Lab Workshop – YouTube. It’s an evergreen talk and has gotten nearly 1.2 million views over the past nine years. He recently followed up with a post What my OKRs video got wrong. In that post he mentioned that one of his key learnings is “What you and your team say no to is at least as important as what you say yes to”.

    It reminded me of a story that I often tell when introducing OKRs. It is about Atalanta, a heroine in Greek mythology. If you have watched Disney’s Brave you will notice similarities with Merida, the main character.

    Atalanta was a strong, independent woman, and she was the fastest runner in ancient Sparta. To her father’s chagrin, she did not care to get married. Her father did not agree to that plan and set up a contest in which young men would race to win her hand in marriage.

    To keep her freedom, she asked to be allowed to participate in the race herself, i.e. race for her own hand. Her father, not thinking she had a chance of winning, agreed to the deal.

    At the same time, there was a young man called Hippomenes, who fell in love with Atalanta a long time ago. The race was his chance to marry his love. He knew how fast Atalanta was, so he prayed to Aphrodite. Gossip and intrigue are nothing new, and Aphrodite didn’t like Atalanta. So, she gave Hippomenes three golden apples and told him to drop one at a time during the race to distract Atalanta. To her demise, she was so fond of those golden apples that she stopped to pick them up.

    After each of the first two apples, Atalanta was able to recover the lead, but when she stopped for the third, Hippomenes won the race. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes was finally successful, winning the race and Atalanta’s hand.

    Adapted from Christina Wodtke‘s Execution is everything

    If only Atalanta had set clear goals and stock to them. She would have stayed single, footloose and fancy free.

    Atalanta’s story is surprisingly timely. We all are running into golden apples every day. So much to do, so little time. However, unless we focus on a few things, we spread ourselves too thinly and what feels busy is actually distraction. OKRs help discern the trivial many from the vital few.

    The most obvious example is the selection of key results. When introducing OKRs a lot of teams start with more than five key results for each objective, because those are the metrics they are tracking. Over the course of one or two quarters most realize that focusing on three-ish key results per objective helps them focus their energy and get more done by saying no to more things.

    In other words: If at all possible, avoid the temptation of golden apples!

    Image: Herp Atalanta and Hippomenes.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

  • Incentives and tools

    Working together across multiple teams is hard. People disagree on direction and priorities which can be frustrating at times. It’s easy to attribute this to ignorance, lack of insights, malevolence or any other factors that are out of one’s control.

    A more healthy way is to understand what people are trying to achieve. Two questions helped me in the past:

    1. Incentives: What drives your bonus?
    2. Tools: How can you influence that outcome?

    The faster you can figure that out, the easier it will be to work within the complexities of multiple teams. It also allows you to realize when people have no incentive at all to support you in your mission (which is usually fine!). They might do it out of goodwill anyway, but an engineer whose bonus is determined by the uptime of a service might look skeptical at your suggestion to move fast and break things.

    Of course, those two questions make for a weird ice breaker. But keeping those questions in mind when you get to know a person can turn an awkward coffee chat into a meaningful conversation. It is a great shortcut to working better together.

  • About this blog

    About this blog

    Having started multiple blogs before with various degrees of moderate success, I know of the dangers of crafting the About-page too early: you write down all your good intentions and once you press “publish”, you struggle to live up to your grand aspiration. It would be much safer to do it with a portfolio of posts in your back pocket. However, I understand that it is a good idea to define the scope of the blog early on and that should be part of your about-page. Let’s make this my ingoing hypothesis and if this blog turns out to become something completely different, I’m happy to change it.

    As the tagline in the upper left says, this blog is a collection of thoughts on helping others be their best (you can call it leadership if you want to) and software as a strategy to change business models (I still have to write up what I actually mean by this). I deeply care about both topics. If you think of it as a Venn diagram, I like to spend my time in the space, where both circles overlap.

    But why this blog?

    Writing helps me organise my thoughts and typically improves my thinking along the way. Doing so publicly provides an incentive to be less sloppy. Also: sharing is caring and if somebody enjoys reading these notes, that will make me a delighted person.

    What would this blog look like if it is successful?

    Success would mean writing one longer piece every other week and sharing two or three articles each week. In other words: making the time to write regularly and thereby progress my thinking. That’s all. That’s quite a lot.

    OK, but who are you?

    I was born and raised in Northern Germany, my journey has been continually south – Bremen, Regensburg, Munich and now Melbourne, where I work as a program manager, i.e. gathering, filtering, abstracting, synthesizing and delivering information. I’m part of a small team in a large corporation that helps that bespoke corporation learn from high-growth software companies and startups. Before coming to Australia, I worked for six years as a strategy consultant and before that I did a degree in business IT. And now this …

    Photo credit: Atos International / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

  • Advice to new graduates

    Advice to new graduates

    Amongst other things, I’m a manager of new starters in my job. A few weeks ago I was asked to speak to the upcoming class of new starters in our organisation and share some of my learnings with them. Below is a write up of the talk, which I thought might be helpful. It isn’t meant to be advice, but rather it’s an opportunity to share a few things, that I remind myself of from time to time and which I believe might help a new starter:

    1. Build your network

    One advantage of working for a larger organisation is that you have access to a lot of great people. However, a pitfall of networking is viewing it as a transactional activity for the sake of increasing your influence. Don’t do that. Rather view it as an opportunity to learn. Here are three tested strategies to build your network as a graduate:

    • One of our core values is “better together”. As a graduate you have basically a license to tap into other peoples’ minds. So find interesting people and approach them. My last graduate was bold enough to chat up our CEO on the intranet … and got a response. Not that I recommend doing that to everybody, but it shows that people are open to engage with one another.
    • Learn from your fellow graduates. Exchange ideas and experiences so that you can help each other avoid mistakes. All of you are going to join the company at the same time, which typically creates a great bond. This gives you a great network and support group from the start. Use that.
    • Look for networking opportunities in seemingly mundane tasks. As an example, I’m working in a small team of 30 people. Every once in a while we need to update the team chart. I typically ask one of the graduates to do that. I could do it myself with a simple mass email. However, it’s a great opportunity to interact with the rest of the team and become visible. Volunteer for those tasks that give you exposure … even if it is something as mundane as updating contact information and profile pictures.

    Bonus tip: if you have the opportunity, meet people in person. The experience is typically much richer, you can associate a face to the person and it is not uncommon that the senior person takes up the check for coffee. Free coffee, what’s not to like.

    2. Get organised

    You will be thrown lots of curveballs and your job will get hectic at times. The last thing you want to worry about in those moments are questions like “What was that task I was supposed to do by end of the week?” or “What did we agree over coffee last week?” If that wasn’t enough, your brain will frequently remind you of those questions, typically at 4am, when you can do very little about it.

    Getting organised and learning some basic self-management will help reduce your stress levels significantly. Here are three tips that will help you get better sleep at night:

    1. Write things down. Invest in a nice notebook, a pen and start taking notes in meetings. It will have multiple benefits, e.g. you are more engaged, you remember facts better and you have notes in case you forgot something – very important to calm down your mind at 4am. Don’t take notes on the computer. Trust me on this one: Science is pretty unanimous, that recall rates for hand written notes are far superior to typed ones. I always carry a notebook with me. If I have an idea, I write it down. If somebody says something smart, I write it down. This ensures that I don’t lose those nuggets. Once a day I review those notes and highlight the keepers or transfer tasks into my task manager. Which brings us to:
    2. Maintain a list of all your tasks. This can be a page in your new notebook, an app on your phone or a file on your computer. The only thing that matters is that you have a complete inventory of things that you need to be doing for two reasons:
      1. Your brain is good for having ideas, it is not very good for holding them. So get them out of your head onto paper. That alone releases stress.
      2. You can only feel good about the things that you’re doing, when you know what you are not doing. Having that inventory of all tasks will help you be very intentional about both, what to do and what not to do.
    3. Ask somebody who is good at this to share tips with you. Alternatively, read a book on personal organisation – and keep it to one book, because it is easy to read about productivity without actually doing the work. Two books I can recommend are “Getting Things Done” by David Allen or “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey – pick one.
      Getting organised will help you maintain a cool head in hectic times and make sound decisions. And most importantly, it will make you sleep well at 4am.

    3. Aim to be good

    Every single one of my graduates has asked me at some point: How do I become an exceptional graduate? While I appreciate the aspiration, the answer is not as straight forward. Especially when you work in a team, where everybody is motivated to bring their very best to work. Over time I have come to the following conclusions:

    1. Get the basics right – 100% of the time. It is not the fancy stuff that will set you apart, but consistently getting the basics right, e.g. being on time, being polite and treating others with respect even under stress, writing emails without typos, being open and honest when you made a mistake (and you will make mistakes, that’s part of the learning process). Exceptional graduates get that right 100% of the time. And if you don’t get the basics right, everything else won’t matter.
    2. Don’t compare yourself to others. The easiest way to misery is to compare yourself to what other graduates are doing. The temptation is there, because you all seem to start from the same point. But every one of you has different strengths and weaknesses. Be aware of those and use them to your advantage. Everybody runs their own race and constantly trying to run other peoples’ races isn’t much fun and won’t set you up for success.

    4. Be kind to yourself

    Work can be tough at times and you will without doubt run into a rough patch at work. This is going to be a time of growth for you after being a top student. Everybody here was a top student – that’s one of the reasons why you got the job. You will get criticised a lot and you will improve tremendously over the next 18 months … and honestly, for the rest of your career. It is hard work and can feel overwhelming at times. The good news: we’ve all been there at some point and you come through and will learn something, but it will be tough while it lasts.

    That’s why it is important to have something to get your mind off of work like sports, meditation, cooking or dancing. Your best ideas will come when you’re not at your desk, but hiking in the mountains, surfing, showering or just being bored.

    Do that regularly, because it is important to maintain a healthy perspective. Most days you won’t save lives. And to do great work, you need to be able to disengage from work from time to time. It is important to take care of yourself and your well-being. It is an investment in yourself that will pay off with long-term dividends.

    Conclusion

    The graduate program is designed to give you a wide range of experiences. Every six months you can chose a new challenge and try out something completely different. Use this opportunity and try out things that you have no idea about. And if the conclusion after a rotation was that you don’t like that specific area. That’s OK, because you didn’t know that before.

    Get out of your comfort zone, experiment with areas that you don’t know anything about and make mistakes and learn from them. You are just starting out and this is the time to figure out what you’re made of. You might be surprised what you’re capable of doing.

    In the end, all that is written here is nice to know and bleak theory. It will only prepare you so much for what is waiting for you. To really learn, you have to be there, make the mistakes and get your bruises (and I can promise you, every one of them will hurt). But then you get up, try again and succeed.

    Photo credit: JohnE777 / Foter / CC BY