Create your business culture

(Photo credit @cowomen)

Last fall, Tim Ferriss interviewed Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The initial topic was Ben’s new book What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.  For anyone who wants to nerd out on ancient history and how it connects to building a company today, this talk will be very informative. 

• Podcast episode with transcript 

• Highlights:

  • “One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of actions.”

  • How do you distinguish between leadership and management? Leadership is the art of getting people to follow you (and as Colin Powell said, if only out of curiosity.) Have a vision, be inspiring, create a feeling among people that you care about them, their goals and objectives. Management is about operationalizing that vision that you articulated and communicating with the right people to get things done. Leadership is a little more on the creative side, management requires a little more discipline and systematization. 

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9,000-Year-Old Burial of Female Hunter Upends Beliefs About Prehistoric Gender Roles

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Cultivating patience as a leader

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1. Discover how you can cultivate patience as a leader.

   • This is something that I continuously struggle with, especially in tech, as there is always a competing motivation to move quickly to stay competitive. The NVIDIA CEO is a master of patience. 

   • HBR defines two key ways for leaders to develop patience: redefine the meaning of speed and be grateful to others

   • Take it from Navy Seals: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”

   • Cultivate a meditation practice to help you let go of impatience. At Harvard, I worked with HBS professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George - and he is a big advocate that mindfulness helps you be a better leader. 

#random

These Mathematicians Think the Universe May Be Conscious 🤯 

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Balancing being nimble with moving forward in your career

(Photo credit @veklabs)

Whether you are kicking off a job search or working at your dream tech job, a skill that you should continue to develop is how to balance being nimble with moving forward. Especially in tech, it’s really hard to maintain a strategic, forward-looking focus, while also reacting and pivoting from the challenges of the day. As a job seeker, you need to be flexible to network when a contact is available, yet also get in your daily job applications & interview prep. Same thing holds for when you are ‘balancing many spinning plates’ at your job.

Want to learn more?

• The Best Strategic Leaders Balance Agility and Consistency: John (the author) is a former student of mine and wrote a great article on this (complete with 2x2 matrices!)

• Leadership and the art of plate spinning - I love the analogy of ‘envelope leadership’ for setting wide boundaries but allowing wide creativity inside the boundaries.

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