Category: Uncategorized

Beware of the commitment and consistency bias. The fundamental driving force for this bias is the wrongful identification with a false none existent self.

This bias inhibits the ability to do a 180 degree turn in the face of contradictory data which might signal a bad prior decision.

In some instances it leads to the shooting of the messenger.

Its effects also inevitably triggers off the loss aversion bias.

When tripped up in this series of psychological traps expect to see a mega cluster fuck…

Overview

• Success depends on a large part on mindset.
• Focus the results you plan to achieve rather than the number of hours you work.
• Results are what matter most to your employers, clients and colleagues
• Personal productivity = quantity and quality of your results in achieving your own objectives
• Actively carve out time to think as opposed to constantly reacting

Personal Objectives

• How to rank Your personal Objectives
  • What you want to do (Supply)
  • What you are good at (Supply)
  • What the world needs you for (Demand)
    • focus on economic fundamentals
    • be open to new developments
• Time categories
  • Career Aims (5+ years)
  • Yearly objectives (3-24 months)
  • Weekly targets (1 week or less)

Planning steps

• Know what you are good at and go after targets from your position of strength
• Set/write down goals and expected outcomes with explicit priorities. Be relentless about applying the 80/20 rule
• Clearly define the hypothesis behind each goal
• Tie long goals to actionable short term targets
  • rank your targets
    • rank = who requested X implied importance
  • Differentiate between
    • Enabling Targets: helps you accomplished your objectives
    • Assigned Targets: give to you

Control

• Goal management
  • revise hypothesis as new data becomes available
• Time management
  • monitor where you are spending your time
  • Project into the ideal future 365 days from now to visualize how your ideal time allocation will look like
  • start calibrating your time allocation towards that ideal configuration
  • address mis-alignment between goals and time allocation
• Keep your ego in check
  • unchecked ego results in misallocation of time and resources
  • catch procrastination
    • is it to do with your fear of failure
• Task execution
  • figure out how to do the same items more efficiently
  • figure out which tasks can be done in a quick-and-dirty way
  • constantly seek to free up time for more important stuff
• Good management system
  • proactively achieving priorities
  • avert crisis before it ever gets the chance to happen
• Habits
  • observe habits
  • cultivate new habits to displace old ones
  • avoid the narrative fallacy

Execution

• Low priority task – only handle it once
  • accepting imperfection
  • avoid micro-management
  • more so as you start moving up the ladder and need to delegate more
• Incoming Requests
  • decide promptly either to offer response or ignore it
  • ignore 80% of all incoming requests
• Avoid context switching
• All appointments in one place
  • purpose
  • importance

Dealing with meetings

• if it is purely about information sharing – try to do so via email
• don’t have it drag for too long
• avoid distractions
• avoid complex powerpoint slide
• be very clear about your objectives – don’t use fluffy terms

Personal skills

• Reading
  • Know your purpose
  • read fewer words
  • Do in order: conclusion, beginning, middle
  • Grasp the structure of the reading. scan materials quickly to get the gist. Only do deep dives if required
• Writing
  •  know your audience
• speaking
  •  know your audience
  • make sure line of argument is crystal clear
  • less information is more
  • introduction, body and conclusion

Delegation

• Never delegate the recruitment of your own lieutenants
  • make your own reference calls
• Ability to lead multiple small teams in multiple large projects
• Each employee needs their own space – autonomy
• foster trust
  • they need to trust you are working towards shared goals
• maintain open line of communications
  • be willing to listen
  • spend more time listening than talking
• establish accurate metrics
  • establish priority of metrics
  • there is academic literature on good versus a bad metric
• Make sure your team knows you are offering suggestions not order
• give effective feedback
  • address behavior
  • feeling humiliated causes decreased productivity

Communicating upwards

• Content and style
• agree what you should be doing
• understand their preferences
• elicit for feedback
• Managing cautious managers
  • talk them through your intended plan before executing

Leadership skills

• inherently transferable and always in demand
• Exercising creativity and judgment in resolving tough problems
• Practise integrity

Family time

• Always make sure to reserve time aside for family
• set clear boundaries
• embrace and work around constrains

SAAS based solutions don’t scale well in terms of cost.

There is a threshold beyond which it makes more economic sense to build and maintain your own in-house infrastructure.

A key criteria for consideration is how critical the function is to the core of the business.

At a much larger scale of operation, priorly less important function becomes more critical.

It is another application of the generalized Pareto Principle

Operating at every moment in the alignment with fundamental truths allows the possibility of transcending the falsely perceived self thus emancipation from the relentless cycles of greed and fear.

• majority of ecommerce searches for items below USD75 are now going directly to Amazon.com instead of search
• majority of ecommerce searches for items above USD2,000 are heading directly to the premium sites
• Google’s Ads revenue is on a long term downward trajectory
• Google ought to be concern about this specific trajectory as Jeff Bezos is able to take a long term horizon which would cause most google engineers to be bored

• On 1st May 2018, Facebook announced the launching of a dating app
• Short term: Loss aversion, reversion to mean scenario
  • Market reacted by 24% drop
  • still to be observed – extent of reversion to mean
  • Match.com earnings reports happening on 9th May 2018
• Mid term: impact will be material
  • Facebook has established unassailable position with unfair advantage with its ownership of the social graph

• Stock dropped by 35
• Recovered in 10 days
• growth:
  • Earnings – 141.7% increase yoy
  • Revenue – 30.3% increase yoy
• Reference strategy for trading in this Wall Street versus Company scenario

• Share price dropped by 43% within 1 day
• Reference strategy for trading in this Wall Street versus Company scenario

Professor Aaker from Stanford University

• Specialist in branding
• Blonde hair
• Framework
  • Brand identity
  • Brand positioning
  • Brand architecture
• Was professor of Bruno

Suggested reading:

• No logo, Naomi Klen –
  • Theme: Realism versus aspiration

Qualitative and quantitive research

• Methodologies
  • Structured interview
  • Ethnographic research
  • Focus group
  • Web research – quantitative research
• Additional resources
  • Stanford continuing education
  • Berkeley extension

Profile assessment

• Not very creative
  • relies to heavily on reinforcement learning
  • to build up inductive reasoning
• Suggestions
  • Start building more methods of acquiring insights
  • don’t just heavily rely on books
    • start utilizing your other senses
  • figure out other forms of proxies
• Find a quick way/proxy to get to the best source
  • Examples
    • Bilbliography – trustful
    • Get a mentor who is in the business – use his experience
    • Ask for references from experts in the field
    • Ask for references from the seller in the book shop