Source: http://fortune.com/2013/07/23/video-and-transcript-brian-chesky-and-john-donahoe/
Highlight:
The importance of mutual mentorship
[Transcript] Brian Chesky: Yes. So one of the things I’ve always done is I imagine I’m as smart as the people I surround myself with. So I’ve always tried to seek out ‑‑ like a lot of people ask how out of art school in five years do you learn how to become a CEO? And the answer is, you talk to CEOs, and you talk to people who have done the job.
And I’ve talked to numerous CEOs, but John was different than everyone else I talked to. Everyone I talked to, I went to to get advice. And what they did is, they gave me advice, because they saw themselves as bigger, more successful, and more advanced, and so therefore they knew something I didn’t know, and they were there to teach me. John was completely the opposite. He was like you know something I don’t know, and he was essentially trying to get as much information and knowledge out of me, and that was like the mutual mentorship that we had was unbelievable.
But I think it’s incredibly prescient because so many ‑‑ a company needs to be both nimble and robust. And if you aren’t both, you will eventually die in the technology industry. And so us, we’re nimble, we’re innovative, but we have to become a robust company. We’ve got to scale. We want to be one of the next great marketplaces, like eBay. Well, John has done that. So if there’s one person in the world to talk to it’s John.
Well, John wants to build a 100-year company, but the problem with these technology companies, they’re in worlds where people like us are coming around, and we’re changing the game every few years. And so he has to completely be dialed into what’s new. And I think he’s very smart. And history has shown so many different companies who they thought they knew everything, they thought the world would never change, and look what happened.
Stephanie Mehta: So, John, if you could distill it, what are a couple of the best things that you’ve learned from talking to Brian?
John Donahoe: Well, just how he defines design. Most people when you think about design think about the pixels. And Brian said to me, look people spend less than 5 percent of their experience on the Airbnb experience, so the design of the user experience on the site or mobile app itself may be important, but it’s only a small piece of the equation. He said to me, John, what’s important is design thinking, bringing a systematic approach to how you design a great experience for your customers end-to-end. And if you think about it, they’ve got an incredible challenge, the full Airbnb end-to-end design experience.
Stephanie Mehta: But it’s not that different from the eBay experience.
John Donahoe: It’s not. It’s not. And he took me, like I said, it was upstairs at that time, and they had these frames. He calls it the frames of the customer’s experience. They are 15 frames, and only one was a site experience. And so just a systematic way he’s thinking about design and design thinking.
And what I’ve done is shamelessly stolen everything I can, the concept, the ideas, and we’re trying to inject these more into eBay, because, again, as you said, we have a very similar experience.
Stephanie Mehta: So if I went to eBay’s site today, is there something that I might be able to look at that is a direct result of the conversations you’ve had with Brian, or that reflects the ethos that he’s shared with you?
John Donahoe: Yes. About the same time, what we have over the last really six to ten months, we’ve implemented what we’re calling Voice of the Customer. And it’s called Voice of the Customer Rapid Response, where we are ‑‑ and it’s not anything on the site itself, but we have rapid cycle teams, we have dedicated rapid cycle teams that every time there’s an inbound problem, a bug, something about the post-transaction experience, we have a dedicated team who is fixing it. And Brian’s systematic approach of design syncing, and the whole end-to-end consumer experience, he talks about a seven-star experience. And this is just what I love.
Brian Chesky: Beyond a five-star, if there’s only five stars, what would the imaginary sixth or seventh star look like?
Stephanie Mehta: It goes to seven.
John Donahoe: And Brian talks about having a seven-star experience. And I went back and said, if we had a seven-star experience, what would that look like? And that’s a question I wouldn’t have asked before I met Brian. [/Transcript]
2) [Village Global] Lessons on Leadership with John Donahoe, CEO of ServiceNow
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ2tgWPDk1o
[Transcript] Ben Casnocha: So the power of a senior team being a team is is profound and so what do you do as CEO if you're trying to get your head a product and a head of engineering and head of marketing to work well together as a team and bring them together? What do you do as a leader?
John Donahoe: I start with with a couple things. By the the way, I'm giving all these answers as oh they're easy. None of this is easy.
If it were easy, anyone could do it and we wouldn't need you, right? You know.
I start with, I did this, so when I joined ServiceNow I have two or three people that have been here for years.
I have two or three people who got here and are ahead of me.
And I've three people I have brought in right from a highly successful company.
So I take them offsite.
I said what are your individual aspirations for us as a company, for us as a team and for you personally?
And we share that and of course what happens is when you do that, you actually find that when you talk about on aspirational level, they overlap a lot.
People start realizing, wait, we're more similar than we are dissimilar. Then we get clarity what do we need to accomplish to be successful. [/Transcript]
3) [Churchill Club] A New Era for Work: Maynard Webb & John Donahoe
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSbJhNFrntw
[Transcript]
Sustaining Performance
John Donahoe: I think sustaining performance over time is challenging. It's challenging in any industry.
It's certainly challenging where disruption and innovations happening constantly but that in capacity to change and continuously change and to embrace change before it happens to you.
You know it's a trait saying but it's so true how do you cannibalize yourself before someone else cannibalizes you?
And it's an unnatural act when things are going well, right?
To challenge yourself to do it better, to do it differently because every instinct the world says I want to just keep doing what we're doing because it looks like it's working.
And so you know, I think that vibrance it's something you practice so well right when things are going well the leaders got to be tougher.
And when things are tough that's when the leaders gotta hold up and be supportive of an organization. And I think it's hard to sustain performance over time and in a strange way you only get better when you have those ups and downs. Well, everybody has ups and downs.
[...]
Mentoring
John Donahoe: [...] you were, you are an extraordinary mentor and talk to us a little bit about how you think about mentoring? How you practice mentoring? How well you know?
Maynard Webb: Yeah. Well, I think to go back to what I said a few minutes ago. There's not enough talent in the ecosystem, period.
And so it's our obligation when you have the opportunity to work with somebody to do everything you can to make them as great as they can be and make sure that they know that the only limiter to where they're going to go is themselves.
And I always tried to be first and foremost trustworthy. You know because if you're not trustworthy and somebody has to worry about what are your motives or what's in it for you? Why is he doing this or why is he being nice and why is he asking these questions and then he's going to go takes up the nice side and use it against me... You're not going to have really good relationships.
And so I just felt almost moral obligation as I still do to help people because I was helped and I had people willing to invest in me we when I had no reason for anybody to invest in me. And so I'm just trying to help people every day along their path and their journey.
And... but I think as you started with trust then you ask questions and you try to make sure first of all I always wanted to know if the person was open to advice. Because if they weren't, I really didn't want to open up and waste cycles with somebody that didn't want it. [/Transcript]
4) [Inc.com] Greg Satell: This Famous General Says We Need to Redefine Leadership - Leading is about managing ecosystems, not any specific actions or traits.
Source: https://www.inc.com/greg-satell/general-stanley-mcchrystals-new-book-explodes-myths-of-leadership.html
[Excerpt] Throughout his career, McChrystal was groomed to be a leader. First as West Point, then officers training, Special Forces training and steadily through his rise to the upper echelons of the US military, he was trained to empower and motivate those under his charge as well as to navigate a complex network of superior officers and partner agencies.
Yet over time he began to realize that much of what he learned was infused with three myths. The first, which he calls the "Formulaic Myth," reflects our desire to boil leadership down to a static checklist. However, any serious study of great leaders will find that they are an incredibly diverse group and their success is highly dependent on context and circumstance.
The second myth, which he calls the "Attribution Myth," focuses far too much responsibility for success or failure on the leader. In reality, as McChrystal realized when he examined his own record, there are always myriad factors at work, with the decisions and capabilities of the leader being only partly responsible for outcomes.
Finally, the "Results Myth" assumes that we judge leaders based on objective results when, in fact, we tend to revere leaders more for what they symbolize than for any action or outcome. For example, Robert E. Lee is widely regarded as one of the great leaders in history, even though he delivered unmistakably poor outcomes, made many questionable decisions and often showed poor judgment.
The truth is that effective leadership is, in large part, driven by perception or, as McChrystal put it, on their ability to craft "a visceral sense of the possible." When leaders are perceived as effective, people assume that their decision are wise and act accordingly. If, on the other hand, a leader's actions and judgment are questioned, it becomes hard to get anything done. [/Excerpt]
5) [Product Management Insider] Richard Banfield: It’s Time To Get Real About Digital Transformation - Enterprises are struggling because they are using yesterday’s paradigms to solve today’s problems. Let’s fix that.
Source: https://medium.com/pminsider/its-time-to-get-real-about-digital-transformation-a268a186844d
[Excerpt] “(transformation happens)…not around process, but rather organizing humans in a way that allows us the opportunity to remain agile in a changing environment.” - Nate Walkingshaw, CXO of Pluralsight
#We’re using the wrong mindset for an entirely new set of problems.#
Or as Rob Wolcott, Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Kellogg likes to say about companies dealing with a changing environment, “You take the new thing and shove it into the old paradigm”.
It’s my strong opinion, backed by dozens of interviews, that companies embarking on a digital transformation are trying to apply company level strategies to a product level problem. As my friends over at Radical Product have eloquently said about this situation, “These are completely different classes of problem. It makes perfect sense that the same framework would not apply to both”.
Who Leads Digital Transformation? The first paradigm that needs to be questioned is the one that digital transformation is an executive level initiative. While this is true in terms of aligning the company and the resource allocation, it’s implementation happens at the product level.
Once the product organization has established it’s own Product Vision and Product Strategy, the executive leadership needs to support that with the company-level capabilities and resources. [/Excerpt]
6) [Inc.com] Answer by Graeme Austen on Quora: The 1 Habit That Can Make the Most Positive Impact on Your Life - Exercise is a keystone habit.
Source: https://www.inc.com/quora/the-1-habit-that-can-make-the-most-positive-impact-on-your-life.html
[Excerpt] Studies show that when people focus on changing a single behavior at a time, the likelihood that they'll retain their new habit for a year or more is around 80 percent.
And those who try to change two or more behaviors at once? Success rates drop as low as 20 percent.
Why Exercise? Two reasons.
First, exercise doesn't require a large time investment. The Mayo Clinic recommends 20 minutes of exercise per day. Instead of hopping on Instagram or your email first thing in the morning -- do this ... then hop on Instagram.
Second, exercise is a keystone habit. If you're not familiar, keystone habits are good habits that lead to the development of other good habits (made popular by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit).
Here is an excerpt from the book on exercise:
"When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why ... 'Exercise spills over,' said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. 'There's something about it that makes other good habits easier.'" (p. 109) [/Excerpt]
[Excerpt] Southeast Asia has the fastest growing Internet economy in the world – second only to China and America, and large enough to rival India.
These were among the comments made to reporters by Rajan Anandan, Google’s vice president for India and Southeast Asia, at a press event for the e-Conomy SEA 2018 report, which analysed the Internet economy in six Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
The report, based on research conducted by Google and Temasek, looked at the Internet economy across four areas: ride-hailing, online media (advertising, gaming, subscription music and video on demand), online travel, and e-commerce.
Key takeaways from the report:
e-Conomy SEA 2018, a research report by Google and Temasek, valued Southeast Asia’s Internet economy at US$72 billion this year.
- This is well over double its US$32 billion value in 2015.
- By 2025, the industry will be worth an estimated US$240 billion.
- Currently, the three biggest Southeast Asian markets are Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore
8) [Business Insider] The cloud-computing market is set to double to $116 billion by 2021 — these 3 charts show why that's probably good news only for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-cloud-computing-market-forecast-aws-microsoft-azure-google-cloud-2018-11/?IR=T
[Excerpt] It's still early days in cloud computing, the hottest sector in the gigantic business-technology market. But the window of opportunity for companies to grab a piece of it is closing fast.
That's the word from Goldman Sachs, which just released its quarterly report on the cloud market. The good news — according to the analysts Heather Bellini, Heath Terry, Piyush Mubayi, Caroline Liu, Mark Grant, and Ted Lin — is that the market for cloud services will continue to grow by at least 20% a year through 2021.
The bad news? A growing percentage of that spending will go to just four players: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba.
"We continue to expect that the public cloud landscape will consolidate into an oligopolistic market structure," the Goldman Sachs analysts said in the report.
That trend represents a big move in real dollars as well as percentages. Enterprise companies spent about $47 billion last year on the core cloud services, according to Goldman Sachs. The firm expects that amount to grow to $62 billion this year and to $116 billion by 2021.
Frequently, with a rapidly expanding market there's room for plenty of competitors to flourish. But that's not what Goldman Sachs expects.
The cloud market has already started to consolidate, and that trend will only become more pronounced in the coming years, the analysts predicted. Basically, only the biggest players — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and the Chinese giant Alibaba Cloud — have the resources to offer differentiated services and continue to build out the data-server infrastructure needed to compete, they said.
The analysts focused on the core cloud services — infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where companies such as Amazon offer computing processing power, and platform as a service (PaaS), where Microsoft and other companies offer a kind of cloud-based operating system on which people can build and run applications — as well as the non-cloud enterprise-tech services with which they directly compete.
The combined amount that companies spend on cloud services and on the non-cloud ones that are direct competitors represents the total potential market for cloud services.
As cloud spending expands, it does so in part by eating into money companies used to spend on such things as maintaining and running applications on their own servers.
Last year, spending on cloud services accounted for about 8% of the total potential market. That should jump to about 15% by 2021, Goldman Sachs estimated. In other words, a growing portion of corporate IT budgets is likely to go to the cloud. [/Excerpt]
9) Other reading/learning during week 47:
https://hbr.org/2016/08/what-to-do-when-youve-made-a-bad-decision
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612437/what-is-machine-learning-we-drew-you-another-flowchart/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612434/one-of-the-fathers-of-ai-is-worried-about-its-future/
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/11/16/the-end-of-the-beginning
https://hbrascend.org/topics/most-managers-do-not-know-how-to-coach-people-but-they-can-learn/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffboss/2018/07/28/4-leadership-lessons-that-leaders-say-they-wish-they-had-learned-sooner/
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/rest-is-the-new-soap-97ff6c09896d
https://hbr.org/2018/08/research-business-school-really-does-influence-how-students-make-decisions-later-on
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