Personal mastery
Meta skills towards continual self improvement. Self awareness, learning, unlearning, emotional intelligence, discipline, commitment, adaptability, clarity, good judgment
Personal mastery
Meta skills towards continual self improvement. Self awareness, learning, unlearning, emotional intelligence, discipline, commitment, adaptability, clarity, good judgment
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
IN THE VERY early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of
... See moreWinston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.
There’s a cognitive bias that is coming into play when we do this. It’s called the curse of knowledge.55 Once we know something (like we do in this situation, we have a wealth of discovery work that supports our point of view), it’s hard for us to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge. In fact, our conclusions—our roadmaps, our
... See moreWe learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often
... See moreTheodore Roosevelt's famous speech, “The Man in the Arena”: The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows
... See moreat scale, it is very common to have some significant number of product teams that are there in support of the other product teams. These are often called platform product teams, or shared services product teams. They are very high leverage, but they are a little different in that they generally don't directly serve customers. They serve customers
... See moreBe a Good Citizen As you assemble your network of support, be careful not to adopt a “take” mentality. Wharton professor Adam Grant has explored the roles of “givers” and “takers” in his research.