The Visile - January 2023
Highlights from podcasts featuring GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, father of the iPod Tony Fadell, veteran Indian investor Alok Goyal, Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, and journalist Ezra Klein.
Hi, and welcome to The Visile!
In this issue of The Visile, we have:
GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij on open source business model, radical transparency, and building a remote-first company.
Father of the iPod and founder of Nest, Tony Fadell, on mission-driven assholes, Google losing the AI race, why Silicon Valley can’t innovate, and what went wrong at Nest.
Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, on building global SaaS businesses from India, finding your niche as an investor, and most promising future SaaS categories.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford professor and author of 7 Rules to Power, on getting out of your way to become powerful, not being vulnerable at work, and not letting authenticity get in the way of being an effective leader.
Ezra Klein and Judith Shulevitz on the importance of rest and disconnecting from the world as seen through the lens of the religious practice of the Sabbath.
But first, what’s The Visile?
The Visile curates highlights from five to seven tech and startup podcasts monthly, with additional commentary and transcript links. It is based on an earned secret - podcasts have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any content in the startup and tech world.
Most investors/founders are too busy to write long-form pieces as time is at a premium in the startup world, and even those who write cannot do it as frequently as they would like to. This is why podcasts matter.
Podcast hosts curate conversations, and founders/investors can unpack significant insights/value in just an hour on a podcast compared to many hours writing an essay. Even then, many see podcasts as secondary to other forms of content. The Visile is an experiment to change this perception.
With ~8000 words, think of The Visile as a mini-book to be savored slowly with a cup of hot tea or coffee on the weekend. You can download this issue as a pdf (link to light, print-friendly pdf) or read it online here rather than in your email app.
I hope you enjoy this issue. You can reach me anytime at thevisilenewsletter@gmail.com with your feedback.
- Rohit (say hello on Twitter)
Podcast: The Logan Bartlett Show (aka Cartoon Avatars)
Episode: GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij Talks Corporate Transparency, Open Source Philosophy & Remote Work
Sid Sijbrandij is the co-founder and CEO of GitLab. He spoke to Logan Bartlett, partner at Redpoint on building GitLab into a $6B public company. Here are some things that stood out for me:
GitLab originally attempted to make money by charging for support but found it to be a perverse incentive, so they began adding proprietary features on top of the open source code.
GitLab is also open core. So when I saw it, it was open source. All the code was available to everyone. And we started a company and we tried to charge people for support, but it's kind of like a perverse incentive, because if you charge for support when a customer comes with a problem, you can tell them how to fix it. The best thing is to also tell the documentation how to fix it, but then the next customer doesn't need your services anymore. So over time, we started doing something else. We started making proprietary features on top of the open source. Those proprietary features, if you use them, you have to pay us a subscription. You can still view the source code, you can still contribute to it and modify it.
They didn’t want to bundle DevOps point solutions as it misunderstood what the devs want but it’s the bundling that led to their massive success.
And then after a while, he said, look, this testing of code part and this source control part, they are really close to each other. We should really just have them in the same application. And I said, Paul, you're wrong. Like, that's not what our customers want. Our customers want separate applications that they can mix and match. And Dmitri also explained how the Unix philosophy requires you to have kind of different point solutions that you can combine. So we said no, and he persisted. He said, look, this makes sense. We'll save a lot of work. It will be better for our users. And we could see that we would save and work. We didn't see it was better for the users, but we agreed to it. And it turned out that it was much better for the users. You lose so much context as you hop to a new application, a new interface where not everyone might have access and everything else. And we stumbled across this secret. A secret not in the sense that we kept it hidden, secret in the sense that nobody believed it. And today it's common in the industry.
GitLab added a third layer to Amazon’s disagree and commit, where you can keep making your case even if you are executing a decision - disagree, commit, disagree.
And Camille now kind of has created an operating principle in GitLab, which is disagree, commit and disagree. Some other companies do disagree and commit really important that you can disagree. And then if a decision is made that you work to make that decision effective, even if you don't agree with it, that at GitLab, you can always keep making your case. As long as you execute on the decision, you can keep making the case that the decision is wrong. Because the most important decision in our history was something us as co founders said no to.
Contributors in an open source project aren’t frustrated because someone’s making a lot of money from their work but because they don’t know what’s happening to their work. Building radical transparency in an OSS company is a competitive advantage.
Yeah, we started with transparency because we were building a commercial company around an open source project. And what you typically see is that the wider community kind of becomes less active. You kind of push them away, because what fun is it contributing to a black hole. You contribute to a project, but you don't see all the inner workings of what happens.
I think that tension is not so much that people don't want other people to make money.
It's more like you don't see what happens and you don't understand what happens. And also, if the company makes a mistake, there's no kind of early warning signs like, oh, they really implemented something that doesn't make sense to me, and we wanted to reduce the odds of that happening.
Radical transparency gives you an advantage in recruiting as you self-select engineers who are already hugely in sync with your vision/values.
So we develop out in the open, and over time, it's gone from a way to interact with the wider community to a way to also recruit team members, because most companies, you're not very aware of how they operate before you join them. With GitLab, you have a much stronger sense of what our strategy is. You can even watch all our boring meetings by going to GitLab and filtered on YouTube. So it went from open source contributors to a talent branding advantage to now an advantage in the market.
Transparency also gives company an edge in PR/crisis management when its customers though angry can see/understand what the company is doing to get out of the hole.
…we did have 24 hours of downtime, which is an extremely long time for such a mission critical system on GitLab.com. And we made the decision to start a live stream, share the Google Doc that we were working in with the wider world. And that led to two things. It led to many more people being aware of it. So in some sense, it hurt us because this is not something you're proud of. The other sense was that was the first time probably a company did that. So there was a lot of empathy. Also, people could see what we were doing about it. And many times when there is an outage at companies, the number one frustration externally is like, okay, it's down. What are you doing about it? And when can I expect it to be up? So there was a much higher fidelity communication from our side.
While everyone is encouraged to give you suggestions on how they think something can be done better, you don’t have any obligation to respond to them/implement them/defend your actions, protecting your degrees of operational freedom.
The second principle is to allow everyone to contribute. We do that through things like iteration, reducing the scope of things and getting them out faster. Always allowing other people to give suggestions of what you should do in your role, but without the necessity to take them. I think you're able to combine the best of the speed of hierarchical organizations and the information that flows in consensus organizations. You always allow people to bring suggestions, but never require the recipient of them to acknowledge them or argue with them. So you don't have to defend your decisions, because if you would require that things start flying under the radar.
People are allowed and even encouraged to multitask during meetings to make the best use of their time.
we think it will be spectacular coincidence if 100% of a meeting is interesting to you. Probably not 100% is relevant to you and it's totally cool to do your email on the side, to do whatever you want on the side and it's okay to say oh, sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Can you repeat the question? That is not a problem. It's almost a badge of honor. You're apparently a good manager of. Your own time.
One way to do make a large fully-remote org work well is to formalize water cooler chat and ‘bumping’ into colleagues like you would do in a physical setting.
We believe that you should formalize informal communication. You mentioned the coffee chats. When you join GitLab, we're going to require you to pick five people and have a 25 minutes conversation with them. It's a bit awkward to send someone a calendar invite for coffee chat without an agenda, without a reason. Maybe you don't have to explain why you picked them, but it works really well and it's not something that necessarily has to happen around a water cooler. You can organize that. Informal communication.
Being remote opens up a much larger talent pool which means a company can be more opinionated about not just whom to hire but also where they stand on global issues.
what you see talent wise is that you can be much more opinionated as a company. You're dependent on whoever lives close to you. You're going to be a less explicit company because you don't want to alienate any potential people you recruit. Well, if you have a much broader set of people to recruit from, you can get more opinionated in what you stand for as a business.
Breaking up tasks into smaller activities makes measuring productivity easier and not harder, specifically in a fully-remote org.
…in engineering it is notoriously hard to measure productivity. What we do is we measure how many changes in the software that you make that went all the way to users and customers. And then the requirements for every change is that there's some benefit. Either you improved the documentation or you added some API or you made some flow better, but there has to be some customer benefit. And when we rolled it out, all our engineers said, you know what, this is super easy to game. I'll just make all my changes smaller. And we said Go for it. And we expected that the measurement might kind of stop being useful as people try to game it. But what we found so far, that it is a really good way to measure it. Because as people break up their work, it becomes easier to review, less risky to deploy, easier to communicate, coordination becomes easier. So it's beneficial if they break it up. We measure them not on an individual basis, but in their team to make sure that collaboration and making each other better is rewarded as well.
Click here for the transcript (AI generated)
Podcast: On with Kara Swisher
Episode: Peering into the Future with Tony Fadell
Tony Fadell is an ex-Apple exec who oversaw the development of iPod hardware/software/accessories and is the founder of Nest Labs, a smart home company that Google acquired for $3.2B in 2014. Here are some standout snippets from his conversation with journalist Kara Swisher.
Large companies in Silicon Valley (SV) have stopped being innovative and are making just incremental changes as they are being watched closely by regulators and have big reputations to protect.
In Silicon Valley, I think innovation, we have to really think about, well, where is the innovation really happening now? Is it happening in Silicon Valley? Sure, there's big business, but are those businesses in maintenance mode and optimization mode than really in innovation mode?
I think when we look at this, especially when it comes to AI. And this is what Google's issue is, that there's a lot of ethical issues around that that comes out with these. And you just saw Facebooks, they put out their AI engine and then they pulled it back. There's a lot of tentativeness around it because it's like they already have this fear of regulators, right? The regulators are already on top of them. They can't have them have too many more missteps or there's going to be more pressure applied to them. So you're going to see much more innovation from people outside of it.
Saying that people will be attending their office meetings in the metaverse all day is slapping old 2D tools into a 3D world and is not going to work. Metaverse’s adoption will come from new use cases that probably haven’t been invented yet.
You hear a lot of things from the meta Facebooks of the world that we're going to have meetings in it, we're going to do social, we're going to be in it all day. I think it's total bullshit.
You can't use the typical 2D tools to use today. It's really powerful. So you have to really look at what tools and what am I trying to do? Why am I trying to use these technologies, as opposed to just saying it's going to make a virtual meeting better? I don't believe that at all.
Google’s tentativeness on generative AI is the classic Innovator’s dilemma - they have class-leading AI tech but are worried about cannibalising their ad revenue.
Search doesn't make money. It's everything that comes from the search as a tool that makes money. So how do you monetize a chat GPT? We've already seen that. None of the voice interfaces, whether that's Apple, Siri or Google, hello, Google or Eddie the Amazon Alexa, none of those can be monetized. So how would you monetize a chat GPT? And Sam and those guys are trying to figure it out. And so even if Google puts this out, how will they monetize it? I think there's one which is they're timid like, where did this thing go and what could it do? 1st second of all, it's not real time. It's trained on data that's older. Right. It's not up to the seconds, which that can get fixed. It just takes a lot more processing and resources. And then there's how do we make sure that this thing gives actually good information? So I think there's all three of those things and they don't want to lose the search business because if they come out with it and it's a hit and they don't monetize it, what happens to their revenue?
When Google became Alphabet and carved out different companies, Nest got all the downsides of being a Google company (read: free perks for employees) and none of the upsides (read: platform access), which blocked Nest from becoming a successful acquisition for Google.
And what happened was for us specifically, was when we wanted to be part of Google, that was how we started. Then a year and a few months into it, they were like, oh no, you're out of Google now, and you're going to be using our services. And our headcount costs went up two and a half times, and our people were still doing the same things, but our headcount costs two and a half times more. And they're like, well, you got to make it profitable now. I said, Wait a second, I'm sitting here. We're not doing anything differently, and you're charging us more. And we never wanted all the buses and food and all this other stuff.
So all these extra perks were costing us, plus then the alphabetization was costing us money, and nobody at Google wanted to work with us anymore because you're a separate company. So it was the worst of everything. We couldn't optimize.
One of the things holding back smart home ecosystem is lack of regulations on how the data can be collected and used, given the highly sensitive nature of this data.
And so now it's then up to the trust, you trust the device, the company owners, whether that's Google or Amazon or whatever, to make sure they're not exploiting that data. And I think this is exactly where we need more and more regulation, to tell you the truth, because we need to hold these companies accountable if they do release our credentials, if they do use our data in wrong ways. There's got to be some kind of hard line there about that so that we can feel good about using these devices, because they will bring convenience and I believe a real necessary part of solving the climate crisis we're in without us going back to cave days.
A software layer that integrates time spent across digital devices into a single digital footprint can be really powerful for boosting productivity.
Well, I don't think it's a separate device. I think it's software on the device. And it's a software that's not just on your iPhone or your smartphone. It's also on your TV devices and on your gaming devices and all the other things that are in your world. So it's that whole worldview, right, to show you how much you're spending digitally. And then you can take that data, you get that data, and you can then put it through different types of apps or different types of things to try to get an analysis, like a 23 ANDME for your digital DNA, right, so that you can start to learn, and then we can start to learn and modulate.
With most of the innovative stuff being built by young founders, without kids/spouse, there are unhealthy second-order effects of their innovations.
So if we look at most of the companies that we know of today were founded by founders that were not married, right? And now I know, I've had conversations with some of them that once they've had kids, they're like, they think about things differently, and they would make different decisions differently now that they see this greater context. But sometimes that's what it takes to make that great company, because you don't want to have those boundaries. You want to have somebody, a younger audience snap it up and use it, and then do all the things they probably shouldn't be healthy members of society, right?
Mission-drive assholes vs. ego-centric assholes
the question is, if you're going to be really an asshole, I guess you could be really driving the point. Why are you needling people? Why is this are you doing you're.
I'm a needler. I'm a needler. I get in the detail, and that's what has made me successful and driven the team. But at the same time, are you doing it for your ego? Are you doing it for a mission that's customer driven? Steve was likethis. Steve Jobs like this. He did it for the customers. He did it for a better outcome. It wasn't to take people down and out. It was to drive a better solution.
mission driven asshole. I call it mission driven. So there's ego centric or ego driven asshole versus a mission driven asshole.
Click here for the transcript (AI generated)
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Podcast: 100x Entrepreneur
Episode: Top SaaS startups to watch in 2023 with Alok Goyal, Partner, Stellaris Venture Partners
Alok is a veteran investor in Indian SaaS startups, currently as a GP at Stellaris Venture Partners and earlier at Helion Ventures. Here he talks to Siddhartha Ahluwalia on the 100x Entrepreneur podcast.
The SaaS VC business in India has hit a PMF with the success of FreshWorks and Zoho and founders building SaaS companies in new categories from India and not just copy-pasting existing recipes in existing categories.
My actual summary of this is that I think we found a product market fit. I think it’s for the venture as a whole. For SaaS in particular, I think that’s the case. And while there will be skeptics for all these numbers, but the fact that we have created 15 to 20, unicorns, we did the first IPO in FreshWorks, Zoho crossing a billion dollars, just the number of companies that have crossed $100 million. I think, in many ways, I remember, when I joined McKinsey, we used to teach this, there used to be this cost curve that they used to show for manufacturing. And they used to call that the experience curve, saying that with every year of doing something, you get better incrementally by 10 to 15%. If you begin to compound that 10 to 15%, the result is actually pretty amazing. And I think if you look at 10 years, we have seen that compounding at a much higher rate than 10 to 15% that I would apply to it.
the big change I’m seeing is that there was one single thesis of building a SaaS company from India. And that thesis was an existing category. Because in an existing category, you can use inbound channels like a Google search, content marketing, to be able to build up demand and engine, sell it to SMBs, low price point, you can put remote salespeople, so inside sales from India 1/10, the cost, and therefore the unit economics of selling works out. And that was a recipe that you could go with. Today, you don’t need a recipe from India, I don’t think there is a kind of company you can’t build from India today.
Whatfix broke the mould of Indian SaaS companies selling to the SMBs and built a GTM motion to sell successfully to enterprises.
Whatfix in many ways has defied the patterns. And if I may confess, when I backed Whatfix, my thesis was very different from Whatfix has turned out to be. I should also confess that Whatfix was championed not by me, but initially by my analysts in Helion. I was not even prepared to see Whatfix in fact, I thought this doesn’t make any sense. And my analysts continued saying, Alok , can you just meet them once, and I declined that also, until one day, he gave me a demo himself, because I refused to even spend half an hour. He gave me a demo, I loved the demo so much, I said, I got to meet. And in my last 10 years, the fastest check I have written was what was fixed in three days from my first meeting. I wrote the check.
My thesis was that software is becoming complex enough that you need software to use software. But I thought that this is going to be SMB centric, they were selling for $1,000 price per customer.
…but they’ve defied that template today, they have 65, fortune 500 customers, They sell their landed revenue in enterprise accounts is not $100,000. So the go to market motion, which was my thesis, is actually not the way Whatfix is built today. And I’m just fortunate that I tagged along for the ride, and have learned from that process.
It takes 8 to 10 years for a new SaaS category to be recognized by the market aka as a SaaS founder, build for the long haul.
…in fact, recently, it’s one of those categories that nobody wanted to recognise, which is why there is no major Silicon Valley investor in this category.
The first major analyst is Forrester that came out with the full report in the sector. And that’s actually only a month back. Imagine, I’m now eight years into Whatfix that’s how long it has taken for it to be recognised as a category.
Building SaaS startups in India today is at the eye of two interesting but opposing trends.
One is I think just the secular growth of India SaaS and the reason I say that is that even when you build a startup there is a product market fit phase and then there is a growth phase. I think we have been in our product market fit phase for the last decade and I would say maybe beginning 2021 We have started the growth phase and I think that should mean that a lot more new SaaS companies will get created from India, like to say that one Sachin Tendulkar creates inspires 1000 others to become a cricketer
The countervailing force is clearly the down cycle that has begun. I don’t think we can now be dismissive about it. Clearly, in every down cycle, public markets are the ones that correct first. I was reading some stats, I think about a month, month and a half back that post. If you look at Q3 numbers in us, the public SaaS multiple is the median is 4.3x. Actually, and at least I believe that public markets always tend to overreact in both directions. And now they’re reacting on the downside. And I don’t think that’s the end of it yet. I think in every down cycle, initially, it’s the multiples that correct. And then it’s the earnings that correct. While the multiple stays the same. What that means is that we haven’t yet begun to see the revenue growth challenges for companies and profitability challenges for companies.
Freshworks and Zoho provided a playbook and curated an ecosystem for Indian SaaS startups to go from 10/20/50M range to 100M+ range.
…if you look at someone like a FreshWorks, and I’m going to pick them out, and maybe Zoho, they had nobody to borrow a template from, they had no advisors to go to, they broke these barriers, the very hard way. And as more and more companies are getting created, and they’re getting scaled, we’re seeing talent actually come into the ecosystem.
So for example, it took us a while to figure out how to do this zero to one journey, then it took us a while to figure out the one to 10 journey. Few companies have, as you said, have done the 10 to 100 journey as well. So there is a talent available that knows how to do that 10 200 as well. We used to struggle with that a lot in the past. And frankly, even while building Whatfix. I remember that when we were in the 10-15-20 million ARR range. Also, we used to wonder about that look, guys, we just don’t have the expertise on how to sort of go to that 50 to 100. But that has changed.
Building GTM team in the US is expensive and while it doesn’t provide the same advantage as it used to, with a weak job market in the US, right now it’s a good time to recruit some great folks.
I don’t think seed rounds enable you to build a team in the US. And again, I’m making a generic statement there will be exceptions to it. But 80 to 90% companies cannot build a go to market engine in the US. However, I’m not that worried about it. And the reason is that if you look at the remote sales as a capability, initially, the conventional way was, you can sell anything for $1000 $2,000, not more than became under $5,000, not more, then became $10,000, not more than 10 became 2020 became 3030 became 5050 has become 100 as well
Once you raise a Series A, I think that’s a better time to put people there. But again, you need to make a judgment call. Does your go to market motion require you to have a US team or it doesn’t require you to be. I don’t think every company needs to, you can probably go much further in your scale up before you need that kind of a team.
if you have cash in your bank today, and you need it to build your years, go to market. Today is the best time to hire some great people in the US.
The recent success of SaaS companies from India is not because of a labor cost arbitrage but the strength of the SaaS ecosystem with talent, investor maturity, and replicable playbook.
I actually think that the reason we are successful in SaaS from India is not because of any inherent India advantage. I personally don’t even believe in the cost advantage. I don’t think great SaaS companies are built, because you have lower cost, at least the lower end of the market.
I still think just because of increasing talent, increasing understanding of the US market, finding some early customers even in India who face the same problem as global customers face, we will see a lot more successful companies being created. But I don’t think it’s because of the cost.
I think we’ve built an ecosystem today. And that ecosystem includes not just the founders, as you found us too, because they have gone through a skill startup journey in the past. It includes early customers, it includes angels, it includes advisors, it includes capital. And it also includes foreign capital, which is now so keen to come to India
Most promising and least promising SaaS categories for Alok: most promising - DevTools; least promising - Process automation
my thesis is that the amount of new software that is getting created or needs to be created, the pace of growth of that is far higher than the number of new software developers. For that equation to add up, software productivity just has to go up. There's no other way or we will not have the software, right? So the demand exists, supply doesn't exist and so the supply has to scale faster. And the only way supply will scale faster is when developer productivity goes up. And all the tool sets for developers, therefore, I think is going to be a massive area of value creation
I think if largely process automation. Not that I will not back, but I'm going to ask myself probably five times as many questions as I did in the past.
What to to look for in a very early stage startup - does the founder have a spike?
We do, by the way, have a checklist. We have a fairly detailed founder framework that we go with. That framework is more to make sure that we are exploring different sides of the personality or the skill sets of the founder. But the core of what we are trying to achieve in that diligence is that is there a spike in this founder or not?
People succeed because there is some spike that they have that actually covers all their flaws.
To become a good investor, find your niche - what you are good at and double down on it. For Alok it’s meeting people, brainstorming, and building his thesis.
I think investing is very similar. I don’t think there is any unique background you need or any unique trait you need. For example, I derive energy from meeting people, I’m not the guy who is best at thinking alone. I actually enjoy thinking on a whiteboard with two other colleagues saying a statement negating myself just two minutes later iterating on it, but you just say Alok, think about this for an hour and come back. I’ll still have a blank sheet and not much to show for it.
So because I derived Energy from meeting people, at least, what I have done consistently over the last 10 years, I just meet a lot of founders, a lot of people in general in the ecosystem, trying to learn what has worked for them, what has not worked for them as well. And hopefully just improving my own thinking basis that.
Click here for the episode and transcript
Podcast: Play to Potential
Episode: Jeffrey Pfeffer
Jeffrey Pfeffer is a Stanford professor, who has written 16 books, teaches how to attain power that makes you successful in an organization, and has a knack of telling things without mincing any words. This podcast was a difficult one to read as it contradicted 9 out 10 leadership principles I have, but that’s why it makes a fascinating read.
What is power?
I define power as the ability to get things done against opposition which is inevitable in social context because different people have different preferences and different information and different roles and different rewards and different whatever.
There’s no value-neutral way to teach about power - how one uses it cannot govern how it is taught.
I do not think that I have either the knowledge nor actually frankly the right to tell people what they ought to do with their lives or how they ought to use the power that they have. I find a lot of the discussions on social media to be frankly either virtue signaling or worse that people say, you know, I believe I know what a good leader is and therefore, I am going to tell you Deepak what a good leader is, I am going to tell you what you need to do to be a good leader, and we have used success and good and all these other terms in a very sloppy fashion.
I do not think there are any safeguards. The idea that we can design safeguards, it is false certainty. The best safeguard, you know, I open the book with this quote which is attributed to me, I do not actually necessarily remember saying it but I could have, if power is to be used for good, more good people need power.
Being judgmental comes in the way of accumulating power, so to be a powerful leader, be less judgmental. Instead be curious and ask what excites people.
I think the leaders are judgmental. If you want to learn, you need to be less judgmental. The non-judgmental is in the service of learning. And also, the non-judgmental, and by the way this is true for Donald Trump, for Steve Jobs, for Elon Musk, all this judgment gets in the way of making critical relationships work. I mean Donald Trump's turnover in his cabinet is enormous. Steve Jobs lost enough people out of Apple Computer when he ran it to have staffed several companies. Many talented people have left Elon Musk’s operation. So, I think judgment drives people away and it hurt in the ability to manage critical relationships and judgment clearly gets in the way of learning.
be curious, not judgmental. And so, when you see things as opposed to getting all excited about them, it is much more helpful to ask how is it. Frankly, people are so excited by or upset by Donald Trump that they get so emotional that they are not able to understand the situation and deal with it strategically.
Don’t use self-depreciating adjectives like modesty and authenticity, at least when you are still on your way up on the career ladder, as they diminish power rather than amplifying it.
one thing that is the opposite of modesty, I think most people would agree on is narcissism, and the research on narcissism is quite clear. The higher you are in narcissism, the more likely you are to get hired, promoted and earn more money and at least by those measures, enjoy more career success. And Jim Collins who wrote about Level 5 leaders who are of course modest with a fierce determination, Jim and I talked and he by the way endorsed the last Power Book, I talked to him about that, he said, well, you know, it is interesting, most of the modest leaders I saw were modest once they were already CEOs. I am not so sure they were the level 5 leaders on their way to the top, and I think that is probably right.
many of the people by the way who claim to be modest and claim to be all these other things, authentic or whatever, if you actually did some due diligence, you would find, you know, and it is one of the things I talk about in the book in chapter 7, one of the things that happens when you have lots of power and lots of resources at your disposal, is you can tell your story.
No one will help you get over imposter syndrome but to be a powerful leader, you must. Build a personal board of directors to become more confident.
no one is going to give you more power than you are going to want to take or claim for yourself. And so, in order to have power, you have to believe that you deserve it. And certainly, a feeling that you are inadequate for the job or not up to the position, is not going to be helpful for you. People may see you more negatively than you see yourself but it is seldom the case they are going to see you more positively.
I think you get help. You get yourself a personal board of directors or an executive coach or friends or all of the above to help you through that. Human beings are social creatures. And so, the answer to almost everything is to rely on the humans in your environment to help you become what you want to become.
A powerful leader should seek feedback from people who are not affected by her power.
the most obvious answer to that question is to get feedback from people who do not depend upon the leaders’ decisions. So, when Gary Loveman was running Caesars, he got a lot of feedback about how important he was or not from his spouse.
when you build a personal board of directors, those people are not people who work for you or who are clients of yours or pardon me, suppliers of yours who depend upon your beneficence for their well-being.
There’s one person standing between you and your path to power - you. So get out of your way, by telling people that you aren’t working in your best interest but theirs.
Many people are programmed to get in their own way by thinking that certain things are inappropriate, they are not supposed to network, they are not supposed to develop and project a strong personal brand, they are not supposed to act and speak with power, they are supposed to follow the rules and conform to things and whatever. And so, to get them out of their own way, one of the strategies that my colleague Peter Belmi came up with which works pretty well, is to convince people that they are not acting for their own interests but they are acting for the good of the collectivity. And so, they are much more willing to do what they need to do if they think they are doing it for other people, not just themselves.
Showing your feelings at work gets in the way of achieving power and while authenticity is aligned with today’s ethos, organizations expect you to be effective at your work. Being authentic may even come across as being self-centered rather than organization-centric.
Authentic leadership which says, I get to show up and show my feelings and do whatever I want, is not very useful. If you want to be an effective leader, you need to know what the human beings on the other side of the interpersonal influence transaction want to need from you. So if your significant others left you, if your kids have acted up, if you have been given a horrible medical diagnosis, you know, I do not think, I mean obviously your friends care about this and your family cares about this, but your employees need you to show up with energy, they need you to show up with confidence, they need you to show up in a way that it tends to what they need from you, not what you need from yourself.
Adam Grant wrote this wonderful column Unless You're Oprah, 'Be Yourself' Is Terrible Advice which I think is probably right. Authentic leadership is very much consistent with the ethos of the age, and as I look at the ethos of the age, the ethos of the age is all about me, me, me, me, what is good for me, who am I, what are my feelings, what are my needs, what are my desires.
Showing vulnerability in organizations doesn’t work the same way as with your friends/families as people want to follow winners rather than people who say they don’t know what to do.
one thing that people confuse is showing vulnerability to your friends, showing vulnerability to your significant other, showing vulnerability to your children and showing vulnerability in the workplace. People have, and by the way to their detriment, have confused because a lot of them have gotten their butts fired, have confused the office or the workplace with their house, you know, with their life. There is a demarcation between work and the rest of life
So Herminia Ibarra, now teaches at London Business School, has an article in the Harvard Business Review about authenticity for many years ago in which a woman is appointed to a leadership role in a pharmaceutical firm and the woman who suffers a little bit of imposter syndrome or whatever goes in and basically tells the people that she has now been appointed to lead, that she is not sure kind of why she got the job and she is not sure that she is really going to be good at the job and basically signals a bunch of self- disclosure of ‘vulnerability’ and of course, it did not work out well for her.
People want to associate with winners, people want to associate with success. Nobody says, oh my God, this company is going bankrupt, we need to give them more money, I need to go work for them because I can turn them around.
The Ikea effect of commitment and networking
he said many companies believe that what you want to do if you are trying to build relationships with customers or clients or whatever, if you throw them a fancy dinner and give them a good gift bag, he said the problem is that everybody, beyond a certain level, has already gone to too many fancy dinners and received too many gift bags which they are just going to throw away anyway. So, Jon Levy with the influencer dinners, when you get invited to his dinner and I am going to another one on the 20th of this month, you will cook, nobody is going to serve you a damn thing, you are going to show up and with the 11 other people at the dinner, you are going to chop food and cook. And that of course gives you more commitment and more involvement and you build trust.
many people believe that they can outsource their networking. So, if I am a friend of Deepak and Deepak has a huge network, I can basically say, well, I will just use Deepak’s network. The research shows that that is not true. That if I want to use my network, if I want to connect people, if I want to bring different organizations or different groups of people who could profit from being in contact with each other together, I need to know them directly, I cannot really outsource my networking.
A leader needs to be effective at delivering work and not just liked by the employees though these are not two mutually exclusive conditions - you can be liked and effective at the same time.
In the words of my friend Gary Loveman, if you want to be liked get a dog, a dog will love you unconditionally. Your job as a leader is not to win a popularity contest, your job as a leader is to make things happen.
we get confused, this idea of being liked versus being effective. And there is not a trade-off between them. You can be liked and effective, you can be unliked and ineffective, all combinations are possible, but you need to prioritize being effective because that is what you are hired to do.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show
Episode: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Award-winning journalist talks to author Judith Shulevitz on Sabbath, the ancient Jew practice of taking complete rest on Sunday. However, in today’s productivity-obsessed world, where the things we do when we are resting are awfully similar to the things we do when working, can there be a way to truly rest? Equally importantly how can one go about creating a way to spend a full seventh of their lives not doing what the world expects from them. While the podcast is closely linked to the practice of Sabbath, below I interpret it in my own way to answer the question - why can’t I ever feel at rest?
To take rest, first frame rules that create a space for taking rest and elevate the ordinary task of resting to an extraordinary experience.
I would argue that they’re trying to create meaning. I think of all the rules around the Sabbath telling you to stop doing things, which are the should-nots, as creating a kind of frame.
These are things that create meaning. They bound time and say this is going to be special. Now we’re going to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary. Because the ordinary stuff of a Sabbath isn’t that extraordinary, right? You’re supposed to have a meal. The Jewish Sabbath has a big Friday night meal. Sometimes it’s a big lunch after synagogue. The Christian Sabbath had a big old Sunday lunch
If the onus of rest comes down only to you, you’ll berate yourself every time you think you should rest but can’t. But you need to become ok with it.
I would say that I actually don’t agree with Heschel there because he frames it in an individualist perspective, right? It’s on you, Ezra. You have to stop working. And if you don’t, you feel bad.
there isn’t any way you’re going to get to this kind of rest by yourself. That’s the fundamental message of my book.
the great lesson I learned from writing this book was, I don’t have to yell at myself for not doing it.
You can’t rest alone, you need a community of like-minded people to take rest with you.
Another way of thinking of the rules is as a giant mutual noncompete clause or a solution to the problem of collective action. So let’s take it in the modern world. If I run a store and everyone else is going to keep their store open on Saturday or on Sunday, it’s very hard for me to shut my store down. I’m not going to be able to compete. I’m going to lose business to someone else. But if everyone’s shutting their store down, then I’m cool. I’m good.
I can’t do it until I become part of a community that does it, that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive.
So if there isn’t a rhythm to the week, if there isn’t time set aside for everyone to stop working, everyone in your family, everyone in your friend group, everyone on your block
It’s important to evolve your thinking from taking rest to ‘making’ rest, which means creating a framework to sop and reflect on your life.
then on the seventh day, God rests. But God doesn’t just rest. He makes rest, which seems like a contradiction in terms. God is making something. God is making rest. So the rabbis say, well, how can that be? And how can God be making something that isn’t? And the answer is God was creating this system of meaning, which is based on stopping and looking back over what God had created to say, is that good? And it turns out it was good.
I want to get at the distinction between rest, as defined by something you’re not doing — rest is I’m not working — versus rest as a kind of state I’m achieving.
You can’t really rest without finding a way to celebrate rest, to feel it’s special.
It’s bringing something in that is different, that is special. And in order to do that, you have to create the space for it.
and the fourth is really the most important — make it festive. Make it fun. Fill it with things. Fill it with meals. Fill it with long walks.
What are the odds of you helping others in need are not linked to your personality but to the speed at which you lead your life.
…along the way, as they were going to the building, they passed someone slumped against a wall in very obvious distress. And they wanted to know who would stop. And what they found is the people who would stop were the ones who had plenty of time. Some of the ones who were on time but shouldn’t dawdle did stop, some didn’t. The ones who were in a rush did not stop.
…they concluded that it wasn’t a factor of personality. It wasn’t a factor of cultural conditioning. It wasn’t that they knew the good Samaritan story. It was the situation they found themselves in, how fast they felt they had to go.
Living life at top-gear speed also makes you less likely to help yourself.
When I’m hurrying, the likelihood that I will stop and help myself is dramatically lower.
There’s a deep sense of the morality towards oneself that can begin to fail the faster time is going. Down to whether or not I’m going to the doctor to get things checked out, how I treat my family, et cetera. And at the same time, I don’t think there’s much argument that we have technologically begun to speed up our lives.
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