My learning/reading this week (W44 2018)

1) "The 5th thing I’ll miss most about China." by Emily Chang

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6462891008437903361

[Quote] Seeing big data at work. Working in China provides one of the best educations in the power of data.

Go quick and go early, to start capturing as much data as possible. Ensure the quality of data is as good as possible. Integrate data streams as seamlessly as possible. And make all of the above big data a top priority.

Here’s the analogy for big data: Even if one builds the perfect engine, with limited fuel, one can only go so far. On the other hand, an engine of reasonable quality armed with tanks and tanks of fuel, can go a long way. Especially when the more fuel one has, the better one learns how to use it.

The market research firm, iResearch, estimated that in 2017, Chinese mobile spending outnumbered that of the U.S. by 50:1 (2017 mobile pay transactions surpassed $17 trillion)! That’s a lot of fuel. [/Quote]


2) "Choose the Right Words in an Argument" by Amy Gallo

Source: https://hbrascend.org/topics/choose-the-right-words-in-an-argument/ 

[Quote]
When addressing a conflict with a colleague, the words matter. Sometimes, regardless of how good your intentions are, what you say can further upset your coworker and just make the issue worse. Other times you might say the exact thing that helps the person go from boiling mad to cool as a cucumber.

Linda Hill explained that the words we use in confrontations can get us into trouble for three reasons:

First, the stakes are usually high when emotions are. “With conflict, there are typically negative emotions involved, and most of us aren’t comfortable with those kinds of feelings,” she says. Our discomfort can make us fumble over our words or say things we don’t mean.

The second reason that we often say the wrong thing is because our first instincts are usually off. In fact, it’s often the words we lead with that get us into so much trouble. “That’s because too often we end up framing the issue as who’s right or who’s wrong,” she says. Instead of trying to understand what’s really happening in a disagreement, we advocate for our position. Hill admits that it’s normal to be defensive and even to blame the other person, but saying “You’re wrong” or “Let me tell you how I’m right” will make matters worse. “We’re often building a case for why we’re right. Let that go and focus on trying to resolve the conflict,” she says.

Third, there’s often misalignment between what we mean when we say something and what the other person hears. “It doesn’t matter if your intent is honorable if your impact is not,” Hill says. Most people are very aware of what they meant to say but are less tuned into what the other person heard or how they interpreted it.
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3) "Taking the Long View: Looking For Entry Strategies Rather Than Exits" by Adam Bryan

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-long-view-looking-entry-strategies-rather-than-adam-bryant

[Quote]
Reimer: One of the challenges that board members have faced, and Wells Fargo gets to be the poster child for this, is that the board may be unaware of the culture of the organization. In a private company, what’s the board’s role in asking the right questions about culture?

Tjan: It starts with how directors think about their purpose for being on a board in the first place. My philosophy is that a director’s role is to support the CEO until you don’t, and then either the CEO has to leave or you have to leave. That ties into the cultural question, because your role on a board is to play a supporting actor role and to serve as a sounding board to the CEO.

[...]

Bryant: Any other do’s and don’ts for directors and CEOs, beyond the ones you’ve already mentioned?

Tjan: One of the simplest ways and frameworks I’ve tried to use in board meetings is to be super-clear about the discussion points that you’re seeking to just inform versus ones you’re seeking input versus ones that you’re seeking approval. Directors can conflate those things and create a dynamic in which they believe they should be approving everything.

For CEOs, there are seven design points that I’ve given to them on working with directors. The first one is to really ask yourself if there is common purpose and vision. You want board members who can see and embrace your purpose. The second thing is, can you really articulate the value add of this board member beyond playing a governance role?

A third one that you should ask of any senior candidate or board member is, do they love, use or, at a minimum, deeply appreciate the product you’re selling? Having an end-user or customer-centric point of view is critical. Too many board members govern in the abstract of the product. In some businesses, like a B2B software business, you can’t fully use the product. But have they looked at the product demo? Have they shown some intellectual curiosity about it?

A fourth one is independence. Are we really clear on any potential conflicts? Have we been transparent? My fifth one is around timeframes for their term. Is it one year, two years, three years, more than five years? The sixth thing is whether they clearly understand the role they’re going to play on the board.

The last one goes back to my earlier point. Is this person going to be a constructive advocate and support the CEO? Do you feel that you have a trusted relationship and that there’s mutual support?

[...]

Reimer: Were there ways in which your background – growing up as a child of immigrants in a remote fishing village in Newfoundland -- shaped your willingness to take a long view?

Tjan: We’re all by-products of our context and our clan. There are certain character-building experiences that come from growing up and living in an environment that has that Omaha effect, as Buffett likes to say. There’s a reason he tries to stay out of environments that are success theaters. There’s something about living in Omaha that gives you perspective.

And sometimes when you have less when you’re younger, you have an ability to be more appreciative of the people around you. You get that odd twin character trait of a great hunger to succeed and do better and also an appreciation for the depth of culture that you see in people who have been there much, much longer than you.
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4) "IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion" by Alex Sherman & Lora Kolodny

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-deal-valued-at-34-billion.html

I believe IBM sees this as a strategic attempt to close the gap with AWS and Microsoft Azure in the space of enterprise cloud computing. Amazon and Microsoft continue to show strong growth in the segment of cloud in the latest quarterly earning reports. Amazon has accumulated unassailable first mover advantage over the years while Microsoft has a clear edge in bundling Software as a Service in its cloud computing offering. IBM tries to differentiate itself with hybrid cloud - and therefore in my opinion the acquisition of Redhat might be able to strengthen its position in this area.

When I said Amazon still enjoys the first mover advantage, it doesn't mean that I was saying Amazon was the very first pioneer of cloud computing. Indeed, I do know the fact that Amazon was not the inventor of Cloud Computing and the first company that has successfully commercialized cloud computing probably was Loudcloud co-founded by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen in 1999.

However, AWS has been widely recognized as the first truly scalable cloud computing service provider in the recent 10 to 15 years.

Besides, my statement "Microsoft has a clear edge in bundling Software as a Service in its cloud computing offering" was referring to the following sources of information:-

Source 1: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2017-7/?IR=T

[Excerpt1-1] Microsoft's key advantage isn't necessarily in technology, but rather in its enterprise know-how and established customer base. Lots of Microsoft's biggest customers have contracts with the company that give them steep discounts on its software. Microsoft has been using those agreements to give customers big incentives to try Azure. [/Excerpt1-1]

[Excerpt1-2] Microsoft recently (in 2017) announced that its cloud computing business as a whole — including not just Azure, but Office 365 and its other cloud services — is now pulling in revenue at an $18.9 billion annualized pace. You can't compare that number directly with AWS' revenue, because Amazon doesn't offer anything comparable to Office 365, which remains a huge business for Microsoft. [/Excerpt1-2]

Source 2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/10/12/why-amazon-wont-catch-1-microsoft-in-the-cloud-because-its-all-about-software/#78b052b832cc

[Excerpt2-1] the Cloud Wars shift dramatically and strategically away from brute-force hardware to increasingly sophisticated and aften-dazzling software, I believe Microsoft--#1 on my Cloud Wars Top 10—will continue to reign supreme over Amazon and every other cloud competitor because of Microsoft's 42-year history of deep immersion in software. [/Excerpt2-1]

[Excerpt2-2] That soaring valuation (of Microsoft's market capital) didn't come about by diversification or by financial wheedling or dabbling in mobile phones—it came about by tripling down on the thing that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said is "eating the world": software. [/Excerpt2-2]

[Excerpt2-3] [(It) is always the case with enterprise technology, sooner or later software becomes the ultimate competitive advantage, and that's exactly how it's playing out in cloud computing. And so for Amazon, the fundamental question is this: does it have the software chops to compete with hugely successful competitors in the cloud that were born as enterprise-software companies, grew up as enterprise-software companies, and are refining themselves as cloud-centric enterprise software companies? [/Excerpt2-3]

I generally see that the reasons why almost all big tech giants (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba) are jumping on the bandwagon of Cloud Computing is that they are still perceiving this is a "Cloud First" technology era. Companies are no longer able to capture much differential value by position themselves as "Mobile First".  And the "AI First" era probably is still some years ahead of us (besides Machine Learning/Deep Learning is also dependent on huge virtual/physical hardware storage and strong processing capability that are residing on the cloud).


5) "13 Difficult Things Highly Successful People Learn To Do Young" by Brianna Wiest

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2018/02/26/13-difficult-things-highly-successful-people-learn-to-do-young/

[Quote] "Successful people," as we'll call them here, are defined largely by their willingness to lean into difficulty and transform it, rather than avoid it or cast blame. Some of their most consistent and outstanding traits involve being individuals who see opportunity in challenge, and who strategize in the face of crisis whereas others only react emotionally. They understand the value of being good over being "right," and are always willing to grow.

Interestingly, these individuals aren't always the most visible individuals in their workplace – and even if they are, they would be the last to applaud their own self-development. What we can learn from them is that life will consistently present different circumstances to which we control how we respond. If we can garnish from those situations wisdom, patience and potential, we can yolk the true essence of a leader, which is to see change and growth where others see crisis.[/Quote]


6) "Use the 'Five More Rule' When You're Feeling Stuck" by Michelle Woo

Source: https://lifehacker.com/use-the-five-more-rule-when-youre-feeling-stuck-1829911156

[Quote] Maybe you’ve started a task but have gotten stuck, paralyzed by the magnitude of the hill that’s in front of you. Instead of giving up, tell yourself this: Just five more. In a piece on the lost art of concentration, The Guardian explains the “five more rule.”

This is a simple way of learning to concentrate better. It goes like this: whenever you feel like quitting—just do five more—five more minutes, five more exercises, five more pages—which will extend your focus. The rule pushes you just beyond the point of frustration and helps build mental concentration. It’s a form of training as well as being a way of getting something accomplished. [/Quote]

7) "8 Time-Management Hacks to Optimize Your Life In and Outside Work"

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/322152

[Quote] 5. Separate opportunities and operations

Sharran Srivatsaa: Every CEO and entrepreneur I mentor wishes they had more time. I advise them to install the personal productivity system I’ve used for over a decade, which has created hundreds of millions in revenue for our companies. I divide our days into two simple parts: designating mornings for opportunities (growth, sales, and influence) and afternoons for operations (delivery, follow up, and delight). The easiest way is to separate your daily to-do list this way.

This creates a healthy blend of new opportunities for growth while keeping our delivery commitments. Of course, there are days that throw off this schedule, but if you can make this your “default,” it will instantly create dollar-productive progress in your life, every single day. —Sharran Srivatsaa, angel investor and CEO of Kingston Lane, a push-button technology execution platform for real estate; grew Teles Properties 10X to $3.6 billion in five years. [/Quote]

8) "How to Gracefully Exclude Coworkers from Meetings, Emails, and Projects" by Khalil Smith, Heidi Grant, Kamila Sip and Chris Weller

Source: https://hbr.org/2018/10/how-to-gracefully-exclude-coworkers-from-meetings-emails-and-projects

[Quote]
You and about 20 of your coworkers are sitting around a crowded conference room table, discussing the details of some project. Some people are fighting for attention, trying to get a word in. Others won’t stop talking. Others have tuned the meeting out, retreating to their laptops or phones. At the end of the meeting, the only real outcome is the decision to schedule a follow-up meeting with a smaller group — a group that can actually make some decisions and execute on them.

Why does this happen? People hate to be excluded, so meeting organizers often invite anyone who might need to be involved to avoid hurt feelings. But the result is that most of the people in the meeting are just wasting time; some may literally not know why they’re there.

Whether it’s a meeting, an email thread, or a project team, people need to be excluded from time to time. Being selective frees people up to join more urgent engagements, get creative work done, and stay focused on their most important tasks. How, then, can leaders do this gracefully?

We recommend three steps.

i) Focus on key employees to protect them from overload. Most leaders try to pare down a meeting list or an email thread by looking for employees who clearly don’t need to be on it. But we suggest the opposite approach. Who is the valuable, collaborative employee you are most tempted to include? Now ask yourself: is she really necessary?

ii) Address people’s natural social needs. The acts of excluding and being excluded are intensely emotional, even when people know they’re invited to too many meetings and resent getting too much email.

That’s because humans are social creatures; we naturally want to help those whom we consider close to us. The employees who suffer from collaborative overload take on such heavy burdens in part because they are compelled by these ancient impulses. It’s the same reason leaders over-include: They want others to feel like they belong.

The kind of exclusion that doesn’t trigger backlash or stymie productivity must address people’s varying social needs. If we look at who suffers from collaborative overload the most, we end up with two groups: employees who are too busy to be included in everything and employees who believe being over-included is a sign of prestige and status.

iii) Set clear expectations. Exclusion only hurts when people expect to be included.

The neuroscience of expectations shows there’s a great cost to mismatched expectations. When the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region heavily involved in expectation matching and processing social exclusion, detects an error, it kickstarts a process that drains huge amounts of cognitive energy. This happens every time we encounter something unexpected, like seeing a favorite restaurant closed or getting disinvited to a meeting we’d normally join. That’s because the brain wants to make sense of the situation; it expected one thing and got another. Leaders eager to get the most out of their team members, by redirecting their efforts to more valuable activities, must understand and appreciate this aspect of the brain’s behavior.

If you only need a small subset of people attending a meeting, communicate with the rest of the group to ensure each person understands why they are not needed. Laying this groundwork also helps mitigate what psychologists call “social threat.” Just as loud noises and scary images can feel physically threatening, humans are wired to avoid threats in social situations, whether it’s anxiety, uncertainty, or isolation.

Managing people’s expectations ahead of time can act as a buffer against people feeling these kinds of social threats. For instance, the brain craves certainty, and being explicit about meeting participants’ roles offers it. Most of us also crave fairness, which you can provide by being transparent about the reasons for someone’s exclusion. That way, people can be excluded without the sting of feeling excluded.

Thoughtful exclusion in action

Leaders are responsible for appreciating these fundamental, albeit fragile, nuances of perception. When the time comes to launch a new project or host a big meeting, they should make it perfectly clear who needs to be involved, who doesn’t, and the reasons why. This way, employees will better understand how their role fits into the team’s larger mission, and with knowledge of other people’s roles, they’ll know who is working on what.
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9) "How to Earn a Reputation as a Fair Manager" by Liane Davey

Source: https://hbr.org/2018/08/how-to-earn-a-reputation-as-a-fair-manager

[Quote] Research has suggested that the relative importance of the fairness of the outcome versus the fairness of the process depends on which an employee hears about first. The research looked at a hypothetical hiring process in which some applicants were evaluated with a fair process and some with an unfair process (the difference was whether the evaluators scored all nine parts of the assessment protocol or only one of the nine). Some of the participants were told about the process that was used to make the selection decision before hearing whether or not they got the job, whereas others were told about the process after.

For those who heard about the process before the outcome, the fairness of the process (rather than whether they got the job or not) predicted their overall satisfaction. For example, people who heard about the process of evaluation, but found out that they were ultimately not hired, were OK with that outcome because they believed the process leading to that decision had been fair. For those who learned about the outcome first, the fairness of the outcome was more important. For example, when people first heard that they were not hired, without any explanation of the process used to arrive at that decision, they immediately assumed that the decision was unfair.

The study provides an important lesson: when you’re using a fair process that might lead to an unfair allocation, be sure to provide details about the process before your team learns of the decision. [/Quote]


10) "Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do" by Gianpiero Petriglieri

Source: https://hbr.org/2018/11/business-does-not-need-the-humanities-but-humans-do

这篇《哈佛商业评论》文章，是我所读过描绘工具理性在高科技时代，全面凌驾和压抑价值理性最传神、透彻的文章。

[Quote] A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. “Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words,” wrote New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos. As the girl told it to Osnos, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.”

The story was popular because it easily reads as an allegory: the hacker in chief determined to find a technical solution to every problem, even far more complex ones than Scrabble—fake news, polarization, alienation.

It is not just tech wizards and corporate executives who live by instrumentalism, becoming machines as they make them. Plenty of intellectuals who wear the Team Human jersey, when you look closely, play for Team Machine. Browse the popular management literature, and you will notice that most articles follow a well-worn genre: pointing to a problem and prescribing practical solutions. We celebrate what works and make us work better, we devour tips and techniques to be more effective, we love shortcuts and hacks to straighten our lives out.

We seldom pause to consider the side effects of those prescriptions. What if best practices make us worse humans? What if inconvenience and discomfort, boredom and distractions, are features and not bugs of a good life? What if social fragmentation and dearth of meaning in the workplace are not symptoms of what is not working, but side effects of what works? That is, unintended outcomes of our obsession with solving problems and cutting a profit?  [/Quote]


11) Other readings during week 44:

https://hbr.org/2018/10/how-one-hospital-improved-patient-safety-in-10-minutes-a-day

https://hackernoon.com/6-skills-every-developer-should-have-besides-coding-skills-35ab2891a1e4

https://hbr.org/2018/10/4-ways-to-pressure-test-strategic-decisions-inspired-by-the-u-s-military

https://hbr.org/2018/10/4-analytics-concepts-every-manager-should-understand

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capture-your-value-you-must-communicate-tim-williams


12) Other informative videos that I have watched in week 44:

i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcRxFRgNpns
Video Title: "Blitzscaling 08: Former Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google" by Greylock Partners

ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKXJWf-WMg
Video Title: "Blitzscaling 02: Y Combinator President Sam Altman on Y Combinator and What Makes The Best Founders" by Greylock Partners

iii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYN3ghAam14
Video Title: "Blitzscaling 19: Lindkedin CEO Jeff Weiner on Establishing a Plan and Culture for Scaling" by Greylock Partners

iv) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhP08uuffs
("Blitzscaling 16: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Building a Streaming Empire" by Greylock Partners)