Leadership Archives - Walt Kruhoeffer

Author: Patrick Bet-David

My Rating: 4/5

Summary: A very tactical and practical way to think about becoming a successful entrepreneur.

My Takeaways

Great business leaders think like chess grandmasters.

5 moves is the right amount because it’s the sweet spot for thoughtful strategy with action and thinking too many moves ahead can lead to analysis paralysis.

The 5 Moves

Master knowing yourself.
Master the ability to reason
Master building the right team.
Master strategy to scale
Master power plays

MOVE #1: UNDERSTAND YOURSELF

To be the best you can be, you must first know who you want to be, where you wish to go, and what factors should drive your decisions. Bet-David breaks this down into 3 parts:

• Knowing who you want to be (including your deepest desires, core beliefs and values) and start behaving as if you were already that person.

• Knowing where you are now, by being totally honest with yourself on your strengths/weaknesses, what motivates you, and what you truly want (not what you think you should want).

• Knowing your ideal path. Does entrepreneurship really suit you? Or are you better off striking out as an intrapreneur within your company?

MOVE #2: SOLVE PROBLEMS EFFECTIVELY

To achieve success and fulfillment, you must handle thousands of problems and decisions. Hone your problem-solving skills to get better outcomes and pre-empt problems in the future. This requires that you:

• Learn how to process issues rigorously. Bet-David shares the “Investment-Time-Return formula” you can use to optimize your resources, and how to take full responsibility for your desired outcomes.

• Learn to “Solve for X”, i.e. find and address the root causes or underlying issues behind a problem or situation.

MOVE #3: BUILD A WINNING TEAM

No matter how brilliant you are, you can’t do everything alone. Surround yourself with the right people who can address your weaknesses and blind spots, multiply your strengths, and help you and your business to grow.

This move probably warrants a book all by itself. Bet-David addresses several key aspects, including:

• How to hire and retain the right people. This involves attracting the right talents and advisers, having a robust recruitment process, and developing an attractive compensation plan to retain people.

• How to build a winning culture. This involves establishing common values, principles and beliefs, translating them into concrete behaviors in your daily work, building trust, developing a succession plan, encouraging constructive conflict, and tailoring your approach to each team member’s love languages and motivators.

MOVE #4: STRATEGIZE TO SCALE UP

There are several strategic elements that determine if your business will grow, stagnate, or even collapse. To scale up and achieve exponential growth, you must:

• Raise and use capital wisely, to generate both linear and exponential growth.

• Grow your people alongside the company. Demand the best from people, hold them accountable for their own career or life goals, role-model the expected levels of rigor and accountability, and track the key metrics in your business.

MOVE #5: GET GOOD AT POWER PLAYS

Power plays can determine if you emerge a winner or loser. Master your strategic maneuvers to beat established incumbents, frame your story, and leverage social media. This move is about:

• Finding the right levers so you can beat the giants (i.e. the huge, established market leaders in your industry) who have much more resources, experience and capital than you. Bet-David advocates using social media as a key marketing tool to engage your audience, shape your story and influence public opinion.

• Learning to negotiate, sell, and influence. This requires that you do your homework before every major meeting, build strategic partnerships, and progressively develop your negotiation skills and power

Be of value to others, in order to get value from them. (Example. Patrick visited the son in prison of a person he wanted to leverage contacts.)

Don’t be afraid to promote yourself on social media and sell yourself, because nobody else will

Successful people use pain as a motivator

Create a clear picture of future state.

Act consistent with your future truth.

Act like a great company long before you become one.

Know what drives you. Common reasons are advancement, madness (having an enemy) individuality, lifestyle, purpose

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Create a company culture that fosters intraprenuership and creative thinking. (.I.e. Google %20rule)

Blue Ocean Strategy / New category

Don’t try to beat competitors at their strengths since that is a losing game.

Identify the competitive edge

Know how to process issues. Life is always throwing out issues.

People who process info badly play the victim and don’t take responsibility, good processors take responsibility

Deep level processors look be north the surface for the root causes, as opposed to the quick fix.

Going silent during a crisis is the easy choice.

Know your all in risk.

People are curious

Prevent problems before they become big.

Need to develop a system for making decisions and a methodology that will increase the probability of success

5 why’s

Think about how you can benefit others

Have employees think like owners and structure an incentive plan so it’s a win-win for the employee and company

Build a company with principles. (Cites Ray Dalio’s book several times)

Establish a company code

Build a company culture that not only embraces friction, but creates it (with love).

The reason to develop trust is to speed up every element of conducting your business

Figure out indemnification so that you can’t be sued

Document everything

Seek advice from people who know the theory, witness and application

Build processes to scale your business

Build speed into everything you do.

Look for strategies to compress timeframes.

Use data analytics

Stay paranoid

Author: Liz Wiseman

My Rating: 5/5

Summary: A book that explores why some leaders drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others amplify it to produce better results.

My Takeaways

There are 2 types of people: Multipliers and diminishers

Multipliers look beyond their own genius by extracting the genius from others.

Multipliers get 2x more from people because they extend and grow intelligence from others.

People reported that they got smarter from multipliers

Diminishers believe their genies is a rare bread and that they need to solve problems.

Multipliers believe intelligence can be cultivated. They find ways to stretch the individual and bring the right people together in an environment that lets them figure it out.

Multipliers challenge people and consult with others.

set a safe environment
Are debate makers that generate buy-in
Hold people accountable with high standards
Assumes people are smart
Talent magnet and that leverages people’s contributions at their highest point
Liberator who creates a safe environment for people to do their best work.
Challenger that defines an opportunity that challenges people to stretch
Investor who gives other people ownership and invests in their success

Diminishers are

micromanagers
Assumes people won’t figure it out with me
Tyrant who creates a tense environment
Know it all
Decision maker

Multipliers have a hard edge that expect great things

Multipliers don’t play small and have a great sense of humor. See comedy in error. Puts others at ease and allows others to be them selves. Use humor to create comfort

Diminishers don’t know they are diminishers.

Multipliers get 2x more from their resources compared to diminishers.

Multipliers are genius makers

Diminishers are empire builders who hoard resources

Multipliers bring out the best in others by creating an environment that brings out people best.

Liberators create space, pressure instead of stress

Multipliers demand peoples best work by defending the standard, distinguishing best work vs outcome

Multipliers generate rapid learning cycles. They admit and share mistakes.

Peoples best effort must be given not taken

Liberators have soft opinions. Soft opinions are perspectives you have to offer and ideas for others to consider.

Hard opinions are perspectives that are clear and emphatic. Offer these sparingly.

Multipliers play the role of the challenger if they don’t know the answer. As opposed to diminishers who believe their team’s capabilities stop at the leader’s knowledge.

Multipliers set a challenge by asking tough questions, and then give the team space to come up with the answer.

Multipliers stretch and test their team

Multipliers make goal setting collaborative so it makes the goal more tangible for the team.

Multipliers argue all sides of the decision

Frame issues. Find the right issue to formulate the right questions for others to solve.
Spark the debate. Make the question engaging and fact based and educational
Reclassify the decision making process

Multipliers are investors who give their people ownership they need to produce results independent of the leader by doing the following.

Defining ownership. (Name the lead, give owners for the end goal and stretch the role.)
Invest resources. Do this by teaching and coaching
Hold people accountable. Expect complete work and the consequences.

Be an investor by giving others 51% of the vote and asking for the solution to a problem.

Micromanagers get people who expect to be told what to do.

Investors get people who take initiative.

Multipliers can become accidental diminishers.

Multipliers get 2X more out of their teams compared to diminishers. This equates to more output from the same number of resources instead of additional additional resources to get more output.

Effective multipliers generally have at least 3 of the 5 multiplier traits outlined in this book. They neutralize a weakness and top off a strength.

You can run mini experiments within your organization to adopt a multiplier mindset and build a multiplier culture..

Spotlight multiplier moments and integrate business metrics to achieve a multiplier mindset.