Steve Jobs once said you cannot connect the dots forwards, only backwards. He didn’t know in advance he would co-found Apple and Pixar.

So how can we maximise our chances of being successful?

“Develop rare and valuable skills” (Cal Newport) through “study and practice” (Dr Strange) to become “disciples of experience” (Leonardo Da Vinci).

I’d also add keep trying and stay humble as “it’s easy to get high on your own supply” (Elon Musk).

Some books I enjoyed to help you with your learning:

1) The hard thing about hard things: Building a business when there are no easy answers.

Key takeaway: Hardship is the norm in life/business, not the exception, but “like 3D chess there’s always a move”. Rather than running, the path to success is “Face the pain”, “Don’t quit” and “Embrace the struggle”.

2) What you do is who you are.

Key takeaway: Horowitz talks about figures in history who redefined culture, including a slave who helped achieve independence for Haiti, a reformed prisoner who led a gang to self-improvement and he even includes Ghegis Khan who created one of the largest empires ever as an example of a leader who united disparate tribes under one banner.

He could also have included religious figures such as Jesus or Buddha. No I’m not preaching to you, but what I am saying is if you want people to follow you and embrace your culture, live by example.

3) How Google Works.

Key takeaway: Assemble smart creative people, focus on scaling/innovation (think: 10X not 10%), consider what will be true in 5 years time/work backwards, look for technical insights (e.g. ads could be based on relevance) rather than “faster horses”, and remember Google wasn’t the first to do search or email, they just did it better.

4) Trillion Dollar Coach.

Key takeaway: The book is about Bill Campbell’s approach to creating great companies: Treat people right, be a good friend/colleague, focus on the team, get the company working in service to creating a great product.

In 1:1s/reviews look at improving performance on the job, relationships with peers, managing/leading people to do great things and focus on innovation.

5) Working Backwards. Insights, stories and secrets from inside Amazon.

Key takeaway(s):
-Be customer obsessed (the first of 14 Amazon leadership principles).
-Before a meeting, prepare a (six page) document with the relevant information. At the start, everyone reads the document before the discussion begins.
-When thinking about a new product/service, prepare a Press Release of what you’d expect to see with an FAQ. Then evaluate the idea based on that.
-Have autonomous, single-threaded, accountable and self-funding teams of small size (can they be fed by 2 large pizzas?).
-Work out for your business a “flywheel”. E.g. for Amazon they identified that improving the selection, customer experience, traffic, sellers, lower cost structure and lower prices would all increase growth.
-Aim to raise the standard of hiring by having an independent “bar-raiser” person for every new hire who supports the recruitment process/quality and has the power of veto.

6) The Everything Store.

Key takeaways: The story Amazon and very good, but more biographical. Bezos famously said: “You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three”.

Amazon focussed on frugality, initially seating staff at desks made of cheap doors.

Amazon pushed their suppliers hard on price, so that if they didn’t get favourable terms they would remove products from their recommendations engine or sell items at full RRP.

Amazon sought to improve on books/disrupt their own business with an e-book device (now known as the Kindle).

7) Anyone Can Do It: My story.

Key takeaway: Duncan Bannatyne, whilst not liking to be conned (nearly turning down a deal over some exaggerated expenses) and aggressively defending his ice cream business turf when competitors came in (all the Ice Cream vans would park near the intruder), saw business as making things better for people. For example, when he went into the care home business, although he opted for cheaper locations, he built rooms for residents with en-suite bathrooms.

He also had a formula for where to locate Bannatyne’s gyms/leisure centres – he doesn’t give all the details but suffice to say he looks at the opportunities/demographics of the local area.

Additionally, when he didn’t know something about a rule, he simply found/got information from the government (leaflets (or web in the modern era)).

8) Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance.

Key takeaway: Although much is known about Musk’s work ethic, he also sought good value. For example he went to Russia to assess buying a rocket, before deciding his company could build one cheaper. He also had an engineer find out how much an “electromechanical actuator” would cost. He got a quote back for $120,000. Elon said “That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.”

9) The Lean Startup.

Key takeaways: A startup exists in extreme uncertainty and the job of staff is to learn fast what works through a “build-measure-learn” experimentation process.

Ries thought his company (IMVU) should integrate with instant messaging tools, but when he asked actual users, they didn’t value that feature.

“Positive changes in metrics became the quantitative validation that our learning was real.”

There are vanity metrics (e.g. how many cumulative hits does a website get since launch) vs cohort metrics (e.g. of the users in March who clicked an ad, how many registered but didn’t log in, logged in, had one conversation, had five conversations or paid). Naturally the focus should be on improving cohort metrics and this can be done by learning what the user/customer wants.

10) The Personal MBA.

Key takeaways: Too much to mention, however in essence you can get a long way with self-study. Below are a few ideas from the value delivery section I enjoyed

Have products/services you can duplicate/scale such as a movie/book that can be made once and the data copied as much as desired.

Multiplication is duplication of an entire system (such as Starbucks store) or Domino’s franchise.

Accumulation is similar to the well known concept of compounding interest or doing something 1% better every day. Essentially lots of slight tweaks to improve every iteration cycle or as per the Toyota production system where employees make 1 million improvements per year accumulate to become a vast improvement/competitive advantage/barrier to entry over time.

It’s often a good idea to invest in force multiplier tools. For example a hammer is many times better than using your hands to put a nail in a wall and would be especially worthwhile for businesses where they add value through putting up pictures for example.

11) Turn the Ship Around.

Key takeaways: “Don’t brief, certify”. So when a member of staff is required to perform an action, rather than you telling them the steps, have them tell you what they will do.

“Leader, Leader” – As captain of a nuclear submarine, Marquet had his staff doing the work state what they were going to do (as if in his role) and he replied when that action was good “Very well”, encouraging all members of the crew to think at the higher level and not simply be told by him what to do.

Additionally to stop red tag events, staff were encouraged to speak out loud the steps they would take e.g. “I intend to…”

12) The 10% Entrepreneur.

Key takeaway: Quitting your job to do a business is risky and often a hybrid approach of working a full time role whilst contributing to a side hustle can be fun and rewarding. You can contribute money, your network or work “sweat equity”. McGinnis also encourages you to be rewarded in the form of equity/ownership, which unlike a salary, is a more valuable reward assuming the enterprise succeeds.

13) High Output Management.

Key takeaways:

When raw materials (for example eggs) are cooked (processed) and combined with buttered toast and coffee (assembled) they become more valuable as a complete breakfast. We work back from the time of delivery we aim for and offset the production of the other items in the breakfast against the limiting step (e.g. eggs because they take longest/are most difficult/expensive and are arguably the most important feature). It is preferable/cheaper to identify any defects with your components at the earliest/lowest value stage possible through testing, though this can add costs/delays. Build the production around the most expensive feature and look to deploy your resources in the most cost effective way.

Use a stagger chart for key metrics. For example if a forecast is made in January for incoming orders for Jan, Feb, March and April, in February, you can put the actual sales for Jan and the revised forecast for Feb, March and April, plus the new forecast for May.

Set objectives that test for both quantity/output but also be paired with quality metrics. For example how much area a cleaner has cleaned with a manager inspecting how clean the area is.

A Manager seeks to elicit the best performance from his/her reports.

A CEO splits their time between gathering information, decision making, being a role model, nudging people in the desired direction and so on. “A manager must keep many balls in the air… and shift his energy and attention to activities that will most increase the output of his organization/move to the point where his leverage will be greatest.”

You can have dual reporting lines. For example in one job I reported to an IT manager but with a dotted line to Agile, reflecting that I was required to be accountable/adding value to both.

Training is something managers should deliver themselves to their staff and is a high leverage activity – e.g. a 1% performance improvement for 10 staff would equate to the company gaining 200 hours extra in the next year.

14) Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh who was Zappos CEO.

Key takeaway: Hsieh states the importance of having values for a company (like Bezos/Amazon) and lists the ones for Zappos that include “Deliver WOW through service”. Hsieh encouraged growth through internal training schemes and talks about how he prioritized customer service (e.g. free upgraded delivery for orders to exceed expectations and if a customer doesn’t find what they are looking for on Zappos’s website, an agent would look up who did have it in stock and direct them to their competitor). It worked – Amazon purchased Zappos for circa $1.2bn in 2009.

15) Kanban by David Anderson.

Key takeaways: During Cherry Blossom season, Anderson was given tokens for him and his family when visiting the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace and returned them when they left. He discovered when all the tokens have been issued, no one else can be admitted until one is returned.

This is an example of a Kanban system where the focus for Engineers (or almost any other industry) is on limiting work in progress by setting a cap on how much work can be in the system at a particular stage/status at the same time to focus staff on finishing priority work faster, more predictably and reduce context switching. Additionally Kanban is concerned with visualising work using a board (can be a physical one with post it notes or a digital board such as Jira/Trello) and then mapping out the column names/workflow such as “Backlog, Ready, In Progress, Done” that work items progress though.

Work items in the backlog are groomed/refined and ranked regularly (perhaps by product owners/stakeholders or the team itself) so that an Engineer or other worker can “pull” work in from the earlier columns as there is spare capacity (for example if the WIP limit in the In Progress column is 4 and the current number of work items are 3, there is space for 1 new work item). This contrasts with a “push” system where work is thrust upon the worker in a more ad-hoc and uncontrolled manner, that can lead to overburdened staff, stress and delays.

The focus is on keeping the bottleneck resource (such an Engineer pulling work into “In Progress”) fully busy/exploited, but potentially having slack capacity for other stages in the Workflow (for example a QA tester might have spare time whilst waiting for a Dev engineer to send work over), to optimise for flow/speed of delivery.

He did discuss adding a strategic expedite swimlane/class of service, where a work item is prioritised above the existing work that worked for his stakeholders however this is a contentious area in Agile circles (see Drunk Agile/Agile for Humans Youtube channels) because it can slow down all the other work in the system, encourage everything to be expedited and reduce predictability/flow.

Instead Drunk Agile suggested either finishing an item quickly to make space for the new work or temporarily breaching WIP, accepting the time/flow trade-offs.

I would also add in my encounters with Agile practitioners some have said “estimation is waste”/use real past data instead.

16) Scrum by Jeff Sutherland.

Key takeaway(s): Scrum (taken from Rugby where teams work towards a goal) is about organising work into one week to one month Sprints, with an objective, that delivers a finished (demonstrable) increment, rather than using Waterfall trying to plan a Project top-down (that is usually unrealistic). The Inspect and adapt cycle asks us to stop, solicit feedback, review what we’ve done and ask is what we’re doing still worthwhile and look at ways to do it better/remove impediments (waste) to produce faster. After a few Sprints teams begin to understand their velocity/capacity for work each sprints.

-80% of the value in a software project comes from 20% of the work. Order the backlog of work accordingly.

-Sutherland discourages staff working too long because you actually get less done. He claims the optimum is between 30-40 hours a week for Scrum. Tired employees can distract others and make mistakes. Don’t measure hours, measure output.

-Teams that implement scrum typically achieve higher quality and 300-400% improved productivity. Some can get as high as 800% faster. They are given objectives from management, but have the autonomy to figure out the “how” themselves.

-To improve performance, work the team, not the individual.

-Instead of having multiple hand-offs to role based teams have a single cross-functional team takes ownership of delivery of the product from start to finish.

-Teams typically are around 7 people in size plus or minus 2. Teams larger than 9 people actually slow down as communication channels increase.

-Scrum Masters seek to remove impediments from their team to support continuous improvement.

-Sutherland cites the Milgram experiment where people were told by an authority figure to send an increasing electric shock to someone (played by an actor), until the person stopped responding. Almost everyone obeyed. “We’re all capable of becoming Nazis”. So don’t blame the person, blame the system and change it to Scrum.

-Visualise work in columns on post it notes on board (e.g. To Do, Doing, Done) and hold 15 minute “daily scrums” with everyone on the team to discuss what you did yesterday to help the team finish the sprint, what you’ll do today to help the team finish the sprint and what obstacles are getting in the team’s way?

-Multi-tasking is costly. Someone with 1 Project loses 0% time to context-switching, 2 Projects 20%, 3 Projects 40%, 4 Projects 60% and 5 Projects 75%. Doing 3 hypothetical Projects at the same time, all starting in January would take until July. Doing 1 Project at a time, the three Projects would be done in May. So avoid waste by not having too much work in process (e.g. finish one job before starting the next). Another form of waste is having too much inventory (he gives the example of General Motors having $7.5bn of unsold motors in 2012, so they made redundancies. Tying up resources in items that aren’t delivering value you won’t have the resources to do other things like marketing or trying new ideas).

-Aim to do things right first time. Engineers should aim to fix bugs in their code as soon as possible. It takes 24 times as long trying to fix a bug 3 weeks later vs on the same day of coding.

-How do you eat an elephant? “One bite at a time”. Identify the work to be done, set a definition of done and prioritize what will be most valuable. Plan in just enough detail for the next increment of value. The rest can be estimated in larger chunks.

-The Fibonacci sequence (e.g. 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21) is where the previous two numbers are added together to get the next value. It can be used to estimate a work item. Everyone on the team doing the work gets a set of cards with those numbers on them and they play “planning poker” where each member lays face-down the card they think is the size/complexity of the work (1 is smallest, 21 is a big piece of work). Then they reveal their cards and either average the result or for big outliers, the staff explain why the think something is simpler or more complex and people do a new round/average the results.

-Write work in the form of user stories e.g. As a customer… I require… so that…

-Scrum teams should have a product owner that uses working prototypes/demonstrable functionality at the end of each sprint to gather feedback early/often from internal/external customers to understand whether the team is delivering value/increase this next sprint.

-Happiness comes from the journey/effort to succeed not the destination (similar to the Experience Sampling Measure by Csikszentmihalyi/Larson’s Experience Sampling Method study mentioned in Deep Work (see later)) so ask the team how happy they are in their role, in the company and what could improve it next sprint. Note don’t use negative scores to punish them, but to help them become happier/achieve for the company.

-Be wary of a “happiness bubble” where people stop improving/coast and performance can decline. Instead the objective is to keep improving.

-Nonetheless Sutherland cites Zappos as an example company that excelled through making their staff happiness a priority.

Both Kanban and Scrum Agile systems help teams focus on what matters.

17) So good they can’t ignore you.

Key takeaway: Instead of introspective searching for a “passion” (such as a monk might), instead develop rare and valuable skills that give you value (“career capital”) that allows you to increase your wealth and freedom (for example being able to work fewer hours a week). When looking to move forward in your career, take small bets – so for example instead of quitting a job to do Yoga Instruction after having taken a 4 week course (where you have limited career capital and higher risk of failure), consider how to grow from your current position to something that builds on your strengths. For example in my career at one stage I made a transition from being a (web) support analyst to a full time Jira administrator, having had a positive introduction to the tool earlier in my career.

Cal goes on to say that doing (highly) skilled labour enriches your experience and enjoyment of work and leads to passion.

Note to give you an alternative perspective, when I shared this idea with a friend, he countered with sunk cost fallacy (the notion that if you’ve spent time or money on something you don’t want/of little value, you shouldn’t necessarily continue (such as when Intel pivoted from the memory chip business to microprocessors or Netflix shifting from mailing DVDs to internet streaming)). My suggestion would be to write a narrative that makes sense to you.

Cal’s Deep Life Podcast talks about money as a neutral indicator of value/establishing proof that an idea is worth pursuing.

Also in a youtube video Cal states Bill Mckibben “..systematically over a period of almost 10 years built up a rare and valuable skill and then used that skill as leverage to take control of his working life and shift it in directions that resonated with him”. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0

Additionally during Agile training I once attended, the instructor cited an example of open source Projects that people do for free in their spare time “because it’s fun” and “because you get better at it”.

This is all for now, I may return to this list later and expand, but I hope you enjoyed reading/got some inspiration.