Create your business culture

(Photo credit @cowomen)

Last fall, Tim Ferriss interviewed Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The initial topic was Ben’s new book What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.  For anyone who wants to nerd out on ancient history and how it connects to building a company today, this talk will be very informative. 

• Podcast episode with transcript 

• Highlights:

  • “One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of actions.”

  • How do you distinguish between leadership and management? Leadership is the art of getting people to follow you (and as Colin Powell said, if only out of curiosity.) Have a vision, be inspiring, create a feeling among people that you care about them, their goals and objectives. Management is about operationalizing that vision that you articulated and communicating with the right people to get things done. Leadership is a little more on the creative side, management requires a little more discipline and systematization. 

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#random

9,000-Year-Old Burial of Female Hunter Upends Beliefs About Prehistoric Gender Roles

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Start writing a 'Guide to Working With Me'​

(Photo credit @hannaholinger)

Once you’ve been in the workforce for a little while, you’ll start to realize that you have certain quirks, habits, and approaches as part of your workstyle.

• Maybe grammatical errors just drive your detail-oriented sensibilities nuts, and can sometimes cause you to overreact?

• Maybe you are a “see the forest” 🌳🌲🌳 person working on a team of people who “only see this leaf 🍁 right in front of me”?

• Maybe you need documents shared with you in advance so you can review them & be prepared with questions/comments, vs reviewing documents cold during an important meeting?

A great career strategy is to start morphing those quirks & habits into a “best practices for working with me” document, aka your 'Guide to Working with Me'

🅰️ Your 'best practices' doc can let your teammates and your manager know about your quirks and preferences, and also to understand them, which will also help you function better as a team.

🅱️ As you create this type of doc, you will continue to learn more about your own work style and preferences. As a job seeker, you can use this knowledge to help you find a better team or workplace culture fit. AND it will help you to come up with better answers to interview questions about manager preferences, greatest weakness, and other 'dreaded' interview questions.

For Managers

• A 'best practices for working with me' guide can be an incredibly helpful tool for each member of your team to develop because it helps surface potential problems for team collaboration before you hit them. It can also identify areas for improvement for each team member that you can help coach them on, or help guide them to seek out additional training opportunities.

• Sharing your blueprint with your team can also help them figure out how to best work with you and avoid pitfalls of communication.

HERE ARE A FEW EXAMPLES OF THESE ‘BLUEPRINTS’:

• Luc Levesque, Shopify VP on why this is important and his blueprint

• Josh Elman

• Blueprints from leaders across the tech industry

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#random

Back in the day, the Shoes video had its viral moment (with 67M views & counting) and made many of my MIT students laugh -- and the team is back with the Masks video. Dumb but worth it.

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Cultivating patience as a leader

(Photo credit @markusspiske)

1. Discover how you can cultivate patience as a leader.

   • This is something that I continuously struggle with, especially in tech, as there is always a competing motivation to move quickly to stay competitive. The NVIDIA CEO is a master of patience. 

   • HBR defines two key ways for leaders to develop patience: redefine the meaning of speed and be grateful to others

   • Take it from Navy Seals: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”

   • Cultivate a meditation practice to help you let go of impatience. At Harvard, I worked with HBS professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George - and he is a big advocate that mindfulness helps you be a better leader. 

#random

These Mathematicians Think the Universe May Be Conscious 🤯 

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