Advice from Claire Hughes-Johnson Former COO at Stripe & Former VP at Google [X]

When it comes to organizational “operating systems”, the most common thing that companies get wrong is they don't consistently use their systems–especially the leaders. Sometimes, at bigger companies, the company has built a process but the leadership team doesn't really participate in the process; whether that's performance feedback, goal setting, or something else. That lack of participation undermines the whole thing. 

As a leader, you have to believe in the way you're going to run things and you’ve got to do it yourself. It’s not rocket science here; It's about adherence, consistency, a belief that this is the way we run things above all. 

There are two parts to my operating system. Part one is the foundational stuff: your mission, your vision, your long-term goals document. Every team should know why they exist and what they are going for in the long term. A lot of teams start with our quarterly goals. Well, your quarterly goals don't matter if you don't know where you're ultimately trying to get to. 

The second part is your month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year, tracking. Google uses OKRs (objectives and key results) as their tracking methodology – and it worked so long for Google because the leadership team really believed in it and used it. 

You have to have measurement metrics that matter. The world is moving so fast these days, plans will evolve and you’ll have to revisit your operating system and metrics. There are many ways you might structure what I call your operating cadence, and even your internal comms cadence around that, but the most important thing is that you have one and that you actually do it. That's it. The secret sauce is actually doing it.

Reflect: What is one change you can make based on the above insight in the next 30-days?

Connect: Who would benefit from hearing the above insight at work and at home, and when can you connect to share your reflections?

MJ Demarcos Great Advice

 

I leveraged my superpower, and that superpower is decision-making.

I'm living a dream, and when I reflect on my choices, it boils down to this:

Hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life.

What were some of the hard decisions? Here are just a few:

The hard decision to take the road less traveled and be an entrepreneur where peer pressure, academia, and media promoted a job culture. The easy decision would have been to get a job and pave the way to an unfulfilled life with a seemingly secure paycheck. The hard decision not to get wrapped up in my emotions and get married young to the wrong woman at a time when I was still "finding myself." The easy decision would be to succumb to my emotional impatience and get married fast, only to get divorced years later while enduring the financial turmoil that comes from it. The hard decision to leave cold Chicago for sunny Arizona with no job and no money. The easy decision would be to stay and argue that my friends and family are in Chitown! The easy decision would have eroded my happiness, motivation, and zest for life.   The hard decision to save and invest a lot of my outsized earnings when I was in my thirties. Instead of buying a fleet of Lambos, I bought one every few years. As such, I can still live the same luxurious life with zero financial stress for the rest of my life. The easy decision would have been to spend everything, avoiding tax burdens and the long game. The hard decision to change my diet. After suffering many chronic health issues in my 30s and early 40s, I made the hard decision to change what I shove into my mouth, which requires daily, if not hourly, discipline. The easy decision would be to continue eating whatever I wanted (the standard American diet), while neglecting the consequences. The hard decision to make fitness a priority in my life. The easy decision to sit on the couch and play video games.   The hard decision to continually educate myself. The easy decision would be to binge Netflix and continually entertain myself like the average person.

Every day, you face numerous choices, from the trivial to the complex. However, the hard decisions are the ones that require courage and sacrifice. Ultimately these are the ones that pave the way for a more comfortable life. This may seem paradoxical, but there's tremendous power in embracing the tough choices as they force you to confront your fears, shortcomings, and even your deepest desires. The hard decisions compel you to face reality and take responsibility for your circumstances. Choosing to end a toxic relationship, quitting a job to pursue a dream, or accepting a move to a new city for better opportunities are all examples of hard decisions that initially brought me discomfort but eventually led to personal growth and an easier life.

Hard decisions require courage and sacrifice and pave the way for a more comfortable life.

The power of hard choices lies in their transformative nature. They reshape your life, push you out of your comfort zones and test your resilience. This doesn't mean the path after the hard decision will be smooth, but it ensures that you move forward instead of staying stagnant. In the process, they develop your problem-solving abilities, enhance your emotional intelligence, and increase your adaptability. These invaluable skills make life more manageable with less anxiety and stress. Less of those = better life. The ex-coach of the Phoenix Suns, Monty Williams, always said, "Everything you want is on the other side of hard." Hard is making the hard choices because they often involve risk and/or sacrifice. Risk is a necessary ingredient for growth and success. Making tough choices often means sacrificing short-term comfort for long-term gain. In doing so, we learn to manage and mitigate risk and understand that failure is not fatal but an opportunity to learn and grow.

Failure is not fatal.

Everything you want is on the other side of HARD.

Difficult choices often pave the path to an easier life.

Whether you agree or not, your superpower is your ability to decide.

To choose.

To work daily toward a life you want to live.

I recognized my superpower young— the idea that I was the architect of my life through choice—and it transformed my life into a dream. Making the easy decisions would have made it hard.

Decide to make the hard decisions.

Or let the easy decisions create a hard life.

Maximize your mindset with these tips

 

1. How can you better adopt a “systems” mindset to maximize your creative output while minimizing your time and effort?
   Self-improvement and personal development are about improving your memory, mind, thinking, and decisions. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I want to produce better results over time. I want to achieve bigger goals while working less and putting in less effort; that’s leverage. When I think about the long-term vision of my life, I’m tired of trying to become this superhuman optimized machine-like entity.
   
   Instead, I want to create systems. And so your job is not to do the work; your job is to create the systems that do the work. It’s a decoupling of the value you’re creating from the hours you’re putting into your business and career. It’s such a subtle but huge shift; that’s what a second brain is. It’s a system; it’s a point of leverage for you to create, be more productive, and make more creative outputs, decisions, and experiences without having to just pour in more and more of your own time and effort.
    
2. How can you create a second brain to better unlock your creative potential?
   A second brain is a system of personal knowledge management. It’s not as simple as downloading an app; you need three things to build a second brain: the tool, the behavior, and the mindset. 
    
   • The Tool: The best tool is the simple notes app you likely already have on your digital devices. The power of note-taking comes in its informality. How many great ideas come from a whiteboard session, all these scribbles and crazy diagrams, and suddenly something emerges. Creativity cannot be rigid and precise; it needs to be messy and somewhat chaotic. We can have that kind of messiness and chaos while also benefiting from the incredible capabilities of technology if we get those ideas and capture them digitally. 
      
   • The Behavior: The four-part framework is called code. C-O-D-E stands for capture, organize, distill, and express. Think of it as a production line you adopt as a part of your daily routine. Four things have to happen:
     • Capture: It has to be saved digitally somewhere that you can access
     • Organize: It has to be organized to know what's important, what's not, or what's important in a given situation. 
     • Distill: It has to be boiled down to the essence
     • Express: This is communication. It's to express yourself, your ideas, tell your story, share your message, and make an impact. 
        
   • The Mindset: People must put aside the note-taking they learned in school and consider note-taking as a companion to their ongoing learning. There’s a big return on investment here: the notes you take can become part of your lifelong learning of projects and goals. Your second brain is like the map of everything you’re undergoing on your journey that you might want to reference in the future, which is a much more long-term perspective.
      
3. How can you better filter what you capture and what you leave behind to maximize saving only the most transformative insights?
   The best filter requires a simple adjustment toward what is surprising and what resonates with you. You can’t use too much energy or intellectual effort at the capture stage because not much value is created there. Instead, the value is created when you organize, distill, and express. You need capture to be so low effort and frictionless that it is much more effective over the long term to use emotions like surprise or resonance to decide what to keep.
   
   I see how people read and highlight. They’re highlighting every remotely good idea, stuff they already know and agree with. Instead, save very sparingly. Only keep the highlights that blow your mind—the ones that are so surprising they make you stop and sit back, almost like you’re in shock. 
   
   Your second brain is like a CliffsNotes, a portable collection you have of the key points to remind you that they exist and what they are. Once you’ve retrieved it, you can spend all the time you want going back and finding all the details, but the key is finding that genuinely moving piece of information and capturing it effortlessly.
    
4. How can you implement the PARA framework to supercharge organizing your digital life?
   CODE is how to take action and move information from input to output. PARA is how you store things. It’s the organizational hierarchy, but the key is instead of a vast system, like a library with categories and subcategories, there are only four categories:
   
   P - Projects which are currently active
   A - Areas of ongoing responsibilities in your work and life 
   R - Resources that you’re collecting
   A - Archives are everything from the past that is no longer active
   
   It’s a simple hierarchy. There’s a project folder and then a folder for each project. There are two levels. You can’t go down more than two levels. You can start this in 60 seconds. Go into your notes app, or whatever program you’re using, and create one folder for each active project you’re working on. This exercise is really powerful. People are like, “What’s the big deal? I know what I’m working on.” I would suggest you don’t. You have projects in the back of your mind and projects on the back burner; you have projects that you’re working on actively that you haven’t even identified as a project. Making a project list is one of the most powerful exercises to organize your digital life.
    
5. How can you leverage the “just in time” approach to maximize executing successful projects?
   A question a lot of people have is when do you do your organizing? You’ve captured all these notes. Do you sit down once a day, once a week, or once a month? 
   
   My approach to executing projects is called “just in time”. I have no regular cadence because the ideal time to sit down and organize your notes is not on any schedule. It’s the moment you decide to start a project. Think about it. If you’re coming out of a meeting with your boss, they’ve said, “okay, it’s time to redesign the website. This is a top priority project”. The minute that project comes into existence, suddenly, you know what you’re trying to do. Suddenly you have goals, constraints, and you know what the competing priorities are. Five minutes earlier, when that project was not started, what basis would you even organize your notes? According to what?

4 actionable takeaways and advice for August 2022

 4 Actionable Takeaways

Take 60 seconds to answer one or more of the following questions -- we also highly encourage you to try this with colleagues and/or loved ones! 

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1. How can you reframe your thinking about the future of geopolitics and strategic competition to maximize the good you can do?
   Whether citizens of different countries, business leaders, or policymakers, we often hear a lot of fatalism in discussions of where the world is going. We hear that competition that leads to conflict and strategic frictions between countries is inevitable. We see that our geopolitical environment is becoming more turbulent but it’s important, as individuals, that we remember our agency and that the world's fate is not just about these abstract structural forces. The structural forces we talk about are ultimately driven by people. The decisions we make determine the decisions that nations make and, therefore, the trajectory of the world.
   
   It’s important to push back against the sense of fatalism. As a community and as individuals, we need to know we can make a difference, we need to know we have the power to reclaim that sense of agency and say, how can we make this world better?
    
2. How can you leverage the concepts of the great power competition and transatlantic challenges to make better decisions for your business, community, and life?
   You need to understand two big buckets if you want to learn more about the world and make better decisions for your business, community, and life.
   
   The first bucket is the notion of a great power competition which affects politics, business, and our day-to-day lives. It focuses on the United States, China, and Russia- three nuclear-armed powers possessing substantial economies. The United States and China alone account for over 40% of the world’s economy, and have different visions geopolitically and strategically for the world. Whatever your station in life, whatever your vocation, you must focus on what the United States and China are doing.
   
   At the end of the Cold War, the United States had a particular vision for how it wanted the world to evolve. There was triumphalism in US policymaking and an underestimation that other countries could become more powerful, have different ideologies, and the ability and willingness to push back. We’re seeing this with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And so, the competitive dynamics between these three great powers concern anyone because they affect geopolitics, which means they affect business.
   
   The second bucket is what I call transnational challenges—climate change, pandemic disease, macroeconomic stability, energy insecurity, and so on. One of the concerns is that if these three powers allow their competitive dynamics to dominate their relationships, they not only think about cooperation on those transnational challenges as a fool’s errand, but they think cooperation is a demonstration of strategic weakness.
   
   Suppose national-level governments are increasingly preoccupied with competitive dynamics and unwilling to cooperate, but these challenges are only growing in severity and complexity. Is there a role other actors and communities play in pushing the ball forward and thinking more creatively about diplomacy? There’s a real challenge, but I also believe there’s a real opportunity for communities to move the needle and think creatively about diplomacy going forward.
    
3. How can you further overcome the challenges preventing you from becoming a deeply engaged citizen?
   There are three things to focus on to diminish the feelings of isolation and remain a deeply engaged citizen:
    
   • Remember that most trends are going in the right direction: The rate of extreme poverty and child malnutrition is much lower today than it was several decades ago, and life expectancy is much higher. In many ways, the world is safer, more prosperous, and healthier than it was a few decades ago. 
      
   • Restore the sense of community: People feel much more anonymous than they did two years ago. Individuals worldwide report dramatically higher rates of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection. When we have a community, we restore that sense of togetherness and that we’re not fighting the good fight alone.
      
   • Consume more positive news: Axios published an article about how news consumption has declined tremendously. People feel the news is grim. How do we push back on that narrative? The media plays an important role in amplifying good news, spotlighting good trends, and showcasing individuals making a difference. There’s a website called Good News Network, which shares the good news stories you don’t hear about. We need more of those websites. We need to raise those voices and profiles to have a more objective lens.
      
4. How can you focus on what you do best, and doing it better, to project quiet confidence to your allies and partners?
   Complacency isn’t good for long-term competitiveness or business leaders, but alarmism and consternation aren’t good either. Instead, focus on doing what you do best and doing it better. You want to look inward and say, “How can we become a more dynamic version of our best selves?” Let’s focus on what the power of our example looks like in practice. How can you recommit to renewal at home and abroad and articulate a positive, affirmative forward-looking vision that speaks to your aspirations more than your anxieties? 
   
   When you can do that, you’ll be able to mobilize the public. People are more excited when you tell them, “Here’s what we are going to do,” as opposed to just what we’re going to oppose. At a time of intense and growing political polarization, we need a shared project that can galvanize the American people to help them transcend their divisions and project quiet confidence to our allies and partners. 
    
   

Key Learnings & Advice

 From the leading educational series the Ivy's newsletter here are some of the top take aways from March 2022 - April 2022 video education series:

1. A Radical New Way to Negotiate with Barry Nalebuff
   I think a lot of people think of negotiation like Listerine. I hate it, but I use it. And it doesn't have to be that way. There's two activities in negotiation. You want to create value and you want to capture value, war and peace. In Tolstoy it's seven years of war, seven years of peace. Here, it's simultaneous war and peace. How do you figure out how to cooperate with somebody while at the same time being careful that you don't get taken advantage of? So that's the trick and ultimately that's the new way of negotiating, which is to agree up front to split the pie fairly by splitting the surplus value generated by the deal equally. Now we can focus our attention on how to make the pie bigger.
    
2. Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts with Neil Hoyne
   The biggest limitation companies set on themselves is that they don’t allow their employees to learn more about their customers. What you really want to focus on is not only what questions you want answered, but how you empower people in your organization to ask more of those questions. If you have a hypothesis, how many steps do you have to go through to ask questions about it to your customers? How can you reduce the number of steps required to ask such questions, so that your colleagues can ask your customers more questions, and get more insights to elevate your business?
    
3. How to Master Conflict Resolution in High-Stakes Relationships with Jayson Gaddis
   Becoming a better listener is one of the biggest factors in cultivating successful relationships, both business and personal. My acronym for that is LUFU: listen until they feel understood. With LUFU, people feel seen, heard, understood, supported and they feel like you know them. In the most stressful moments, all of our tools and resources go out the window. If you can triple down on listening until people feel understood, it’s going to go a long way to not only avoid conflict but to prepare you better for the future when it does happen.
    
4. How to Create a Transformative Culture of Belonging at work with Ruchika Tulshyan
   Research shows purpose, belonging, values, and aligning with an organization's mission could even be enough to have millennials take a pay cut, just to find an organization where they belong, feel like they're valued, and their values align with the organization's mission. What's at stake is that when we do not have that, we see a great resignation taking place, the great realignment. We're seeing people leave the workforce in droves and create a different future for themselves.
    
5. How to Break Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward with Britt Frank
   Your sense of smell goes offline when your brain perceives danger. For a simple cue to let your brain know you’re okay, smell something. I carry with me these little essential oil bottles everywhere I go. Logically I know that I'm safe, but we often discount that even when we know we are safe, parts of our brains are going, ah, danger, danger, with every stressor and change of scenery. So smell something, touch something, fidget with something. I would make sure that there are things to fidget with at every desk of every employee at your company. You will maximize productivity when you can kind of calm down the survival brain with physical sensations. 
    
6. How Women of Color Can Redefine Corporate Power with Deepa Purushothaman
   Women of color are in a moment when we are questioning if we want to stay in these corporate structures and workplaces in general. Many of us are leaving to create businesses that have cultures that see and recognize us. We need to stay in these structures and make them better, because the data shows as the workplace becomes more diverse, it becomes stronger. What’s at stake for leaders is that if you don’t find ways to keep us, you’re going to lose our insights and innovation.
    
7. How to Do Hard Things the Human Way with Jacqueline Carter
   Hard conversations require time. Giving people feedback and then having to leave immediately afterwards without giving them a chance to respond will not get you positive results. Make sure that your schedule isn’t booked back to back, and create space for that person to respond.
    
8. Full Out: Leadership Lessons with Global Netflix Sensation Monica Aldama
   When people feel noticed, heard, and appreciated, you can get a lot more out of them than people even realize. We all want to feel appreciated and feel seen. The way that you treat people will ultimately lead to what you're able to get out of them. Respect cannot be demanded, no matter how much you yell or criticize, and if you think those power words are making you more powerful, they're not. They're just disconnecting you from the people that you're trying to lead.
    
9. How to Unlock Strategic Innovation by Reimagining Design with Kevin G. Bethune
   Play, creativity, and willingness to fail is imperative for today’s business owners. Have the creative courage to take a step forward, experiment, workshop, and rewire your organization to create a little bit more capacity for strategic innovation conversations. Invite more voices around the table. Look at the team makeup and ensure that you’re championing diversity, equity, inclusion. Take creative, optimistic actions that you might not have considered doing in previous circumstances, and see what comes about.
    
10. How Big Ethical Questions Can Supercharge Your Relationships with Susan Liautaud
    No CEO can know everything that's going on in a workplace, but they can be responsible for the ethics infrastructure and culture that is put in place. Choose one particular ethics objective for every team and manager's performance evaluation. This will allow the CEO to be responsible for oversight, making sure there's proper auditing in place, and doing everything possible to create a culture where people feel free to speak up if they have concerns. Organizational ethics work is about trying to deter and trying to detect early.
     
11. How to Master Superior Management with Roger L. Martin
    The population in general is asking more of corporations today. The era of having winners and losers is over. For example, Walmart is now doing a much better job than it was 10 or 15 years ago in this. It used to be, if we can win, even though many of our employees are living below the poverty line doing precarious work, that’s fine. That’s gone. You can’t get away with that as a corporation anymore. Over the next five to ten years there will be more regulations to stop them from behaving that way, and corporations need to prepare for that.

This Entrepreneur Article Resonates

Some great quotes and lines in this piece:

creativity happens when the constraints get applied

Don't use the word failure. Instead, you should call it “the successful discovery of something that did not work." This will lead to something that does work and figuring out how to fix issues in a time of panic.


Chaos and failure are powerful tools that forced entrepreneurs can keep in their tool belt. They teach us how to pivot and adapt—and those are essential skills for any entrepreneur,

https://qz.com/work/2063563/what-forced-entrepreneurs-teach-us-about-succeeding-in-business

It should be noted here that forced entrepreneurs face a lot of pressure. There’s no plan B, no option to quit; they need their business to succeed. If there was ever a recipe for anxiety, that sounds like it.

When you have no choice but to survive, you get really resourceful.

A friend of mine often says, “creativity happens when the constraints get applied.” To really feel these constraints, you have to act like an owner.

Burn the boats? So what does that mean. It's adapt or die. If you don't survive on your mission you can't go back on the boat and head home because it doesn't exist.


“burn the boats”? The story goes that during the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519, Spanish commander Hernán Cortés deliberately destroyed his own ships so that his men would have only two options: conquer or die."



Pivot & Adapt to succeed.

Be Exceptional and Avoid Market Risks

The best way to hedge against a market risk in a downturn like the great recession of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic is to be exceptional.

"The surest safeguard against market conditions, be they good or bad, is having truly exceptional work. “Great material fetches great prices in any kind of market" note for business, art, food, or anything during these times. Be exceptional."

Whatever the business or personality you drive make it stand out and you will be okay in any market conditions.

Advice Measure to Better Understand Yourself

Reach more goals by measuring the things that you want to achieve. Whether its weight loss, charitable work, or in business you measure to discover and find out where and how you can improve. The more you find out the better you can begin to understand and see where you're at and from there you can improve.

When you measure you start to see what you are spending time on and if it's improving or declining. Ignore the things that don't matter. Imagine if we all measured ourselves to do at least 3 hours of charitable work a week or we measured to each give an extra $50.00 a week to a charitable cause to make the world a better place. Imagine if we did that? We would become more accountable to ourselves.

For a more in depth non TLDR version please Read James Clear's advice on Focus here.