Summer time, what easy book can I read while getting some tan? Limitless looked pretty interesting and indeed it was a good choice.
I like reading about interesting people and how they achieved what they achieved and Ajaz summarized a lot of such stories in his book.
A few interesting notes I took:
- Ford (Henry) decided to raise salary for his workers to roughly double the average on the market and on top of that (or was it rather savings?) reduce the working hours from nine to eight. Not just he hired better people, but in a few months these people started to buy the cars for themselves in droves;
- his magic number and theory about 95% – when you make things to order, 80% of people has no clue what they want, 15% will think they need to say something and only 5% have preferences and reasons. Design for those 95% and you’ll save them hussles and simplify the live for you;
- if you stop looking at business from the single perspective of brilliant individuals a different picture emerges, successful leaders are often so because they are highly empathetic and social networks have always been essential to business – says study by Tom Byers, Heleen Kist and Robert Sutton. And my friend Paul rightly told me something very similar, that we should really sign all the CzechDreamin‚s emails by all our names as it isn’t just about me;
- Steve Jobs realized that to endure you have to put as much effort into making friends as you do into overcoming enemies as the nicer guy really does finish first;
- the very best organizations cultivate and perpetuate enthusiasm for the new and the different by constantly adapting their administrative systems as they grow and change;
- Disney’s organizational chart takes the form of a circle with departments that reports to each other clustered closed by, so instead of rigid teirs of management, where the leader’s sensibility trickles down rank by rank, the circular chart expresses an objective of absolute interconnectedness;
- talking about things has many virtues, but one of its drawbacks is that it prevents you from getting on and actually doing them = organizations that achieve maximum internal communication and operational clarity with minimal verbiage are so often the very same ones who developer and deliver results most rapidly and efficiently;
- looks like Pixar introduced daily stand-ups after their close fuck-up while introducing two movies to cineamas at the same time. The main reason for this daily check was to minimise the chances of last-minute panics, unforeseen problems and long-term misunderstandings. And it also tackled the natural human tendency to keep one’s work under wraps until it’s impressive enough to show off before potentially critical audiences – not sure I ever saw similar goals on a stand-ups I attended, this approach looks like something I might really enjoy;
- at Netflix Reed Hastings wanted to hire high-performence, who aren’t afraid to take risk but whom will leave once to company will become over regulated and slow. And it isn’t that they make less mistakes, it is about the speed with which they will remedy them as missing out on an opportunity can be far worse than temporarily messing up;
- Atul Gawande had great question why only athletes and singers continue to work with their coaches even after they succeeded in their fields. Why we don’t see it with other professionals (for example doctors) as well, why they typically stop once they finish their formal training?
I really enjoyed reading all those stories from completely different fields, also pretty amazing how similar they are once you look from the right angle. Want to read as well? Get the book on Amazon and enjoy.