Idea Surplus Disorder #75

Good morning, and happy Monday! Welcome to Idea Surplus Disorder.

In this week's edition: five year runs, AI teaching, asynch meeting, avoiding risk, disruption vs. obsoletism, scarce creativity, weird writing, Everest drones, Gotye, and more.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!

An "Unreasonable" Request

I have a favor to ask: we still need more Thinksgiving Business Teams. If you run or know a business that might be interested, please share this video with them and ask them to reach out to me to learn more.

September SuperCollider

Join us next month at SuperCollider, where we'll share a dozen ways to "hack" your culture and make work better. Sign up for Friday, September 6th!

Ideas + Insights

Hiring a new leader? Make sure they've got at least one five-year run behind them:

Hire leaders with at least one 5+ year run. This is my number one. I don’t even care if the company ended up working out. Just that they dug in and gave it 110% over a sustained period of time. First, obviously, there’s a class of exec that hops every couple years their whole career, and you want to avoid those. Also, any 5+ year run will include tough years and WFIO moments, and the fact that they stuck it out is critical evidence that they don’t quit when it gets hard. Most importantly, during a long run, they played many roles, lived with the long-term consequences of their decisions, drove success but also owned big L’s, got promoted but also got passed over, had to change strategies and try again. This is the real experience. You don’t get it in a 2-3 year “tour of duty.”

Also, when you're interviewing:

Listen hard for “lightly positive” references. Usually when someone doesn’t work out for job performance reasons, no one wants to add insult to injury by being a negative reference for their future job searches. So those candidates get a lot of “lightly positive” references. A lot of “they were a solid A-/B+” or “they were a fine team player” or “well, they weren’t the right fit for us, but I think they’d be a great fit for you.” These comments don’t have to be disqualifying on their own. But if most or all the calls sound like this, it’s not going to be a good hire.

This one isn't just for the teachers out there, but it is especially for the teachers. A list of education-centric resources for bringing AI into your assignments from José Antonio Bowen.

There is a lot of great reading in this list of the best weird blog posts.

What happens when avoiding risk overtakes serving customers as your primary mission?

The equation would change if the focus instead were on value creation. If you asked daily: “who did I create value for today”, you’d get to very different behavior. If every half-yearly plan identified “how much value will be generated in the world”, then that would lead to different thinking. I’d work harder if I could create more value and have more impact. But I won’t work harder to prevent people from making mistakes — it is easier and more effective to work slower and slow them down. Just ask a few more clarifications and schedule another round of meetings two weeks from now.

“Respect each other” is translated into “find a way to include and agree with every person’s opinion”. In an inclusive culture (good —it doesn’t withhold information and opportunity) with very distributed ownership (bad), you rapidly get to needing approval from many people before any decision can be made. If this were an algorithm, we’d call it “most cautious wins” and there is almost always someone who is cautious tending to should-do-nothing. Add in that often the people involved have wildly different knowledge and capability and skin-in-the-game, and there’s always going to be someone uncomfortable enough to want to do nothing. Therefore any decision out of the existing pre-approved plan or diverging from conventional wisdom is near impossible to achieve, just as the existing pre-approved plan is near impossible to change.

We're blinded just how fast AI is progressing. This post has some mind-blowing examples of where we've come in the last 18 months.

Creativity shouldn't be so scarce:

Creativity is scarce because of censorship. Not in the usual sense of that word—the cops closing down a strip show, or some government official collecting and burning politically offensive books—but rather in the sense of “discouragement,” of telling those who have creative ideas that the ideas aren’t really interesting, that they aren’t sensible, that they’re a little (or more than a little) crazy, and suggesting that it would better just to forget about them. “Nice try, but no cigar,” about captures this response to unusual ideas.

All the reasons for ignoring unusual solutions to problems operate because they are based in organizational realities. “It’s not practical,” often given as a reason for not taking up some original or unusual way of doing things, means that the idea will run afoul of organizational agreements and solutions that satisfy the welter of interests the organization’s activity must satisfy. Where the “must” comes from is an important question.

Creativity is also, and perhaps even more pervasively, scarce because of self-censorship. In many situations, people with creative or original ideas say to themselves, “This is not worth pursuing any further, no one else will be interested, I’m just wasting my time.”

Instead of focusing only on disruption, how might you think about obsoletism instead?

An even cursory examination of tech history makes it clear that “obsoletion” — where a cheaper, single-purpose product is replaced by a more expensive, general purpose product — is just as common as “disruption” — even more so, in fact.

Just a few examples (think about it, and you’ll come up with a bunch more): the typewriter and word processor were obsoleted by the PC; typesetting was obsoleted by the Mac and desktop publishing; the newspaper was obsoleted by the Internet; the CD player was obsoleted by the iPod; and the iPod was obsoleted by the iPhone.

I love this question from Jason Little, author of Lean Change Management:

Suppose you went to bed and overnight, a miracle occurred. What are some of things you would notice that would tell you things are better?

Tired of requests for "just a few minutes" of your time? Here's a few ways to respond that keep work asynch:

One of the biggest unlocks in my productivity has been learning how to pivot a meeting request into an email conversation. The majority of the time this becomes a five-minute task versus a 30- to 60-minute meeting.

Here’s a reply template you can steal/tweak for when someone sends you a meeting invite:

“Happy to help! Could we start async over email? What are you most looking for my input on?”

It’s so easy to schedule a meeting. No sweat off that person’s back to send that invite. It’s also kinda fun to hang out and avoid your work for a bit, and sitting in a meeting feels like you’re working.

The worst part is that it isn’t just the meeting time itself you’re wasting. It’s also the time before the meeting, when you aren’t able to go deep on anything (it’s almost meeting time!), and the time after the meeting, when you have to rebuild context on whatever you were doing.

Mind blown: Ideas are alive.

Fun Finds

• Why Gotye Quit
• Read as few contemporary books as possible.
• TableFlipper (keep refreshing the browser on this one).
• Sun vs. Moon (moon is winning)
• Everest Drone Climb
• The 100 Best Movies of the 2000's.

Words of Wisdom

“The harder you look, the more you see and the more you get back.” — Andrew Marr

"To experience time travel, read. To achieve immortality, write." – James Clear

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” – David Lynch

"Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want." – Bob Dylan

“If you like music, you like silence.” — David Hockney

"Progress is being aware when there is a storm happening inside of you and remaining calm as it passes by." – Yung Pueblo

"Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur's indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be-and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway." – Steven Pressfield

"For a relationship to succeed, the frequency of positive comments has to outweigh negative remarks by about five to one. In other words, it takes five positive remarks to undo the harm caused by a single criticism." – Richard Wiseman

"When people annoy you, think: what if this is the last time we meet?" – Srikumar

"A man is about as big as the things that make him angry." – Winston Churchill