Your Dada's American Dream

It is time I told you boys the story of how we came to America.

Your Dada was the first of our Indian family to arrive here, by way of Ottawa and Chicago. But similar to the histories of many immigrants, his story doesn't begin in North America, it begins on the shores of a distant land, halfway across the world.

Bombay is a city on the sea. I have never been there, but I have heard of its vista many times. Your Dada loved the sea, although I'm not sure whether he's always loved the water or if he began to love it because he moved to Bombay. Which is not where our family is from, by the way - we are not Mumbaikars, ancestrally - but it is where the tale of our family coming to America begins.

Your Dada was at university for engineering there. He was in a hallway, probably on his way to some class, and a forgotten piece of paper was strewn across the floor ahead of him. This paper, at least from the way he told me the story, made quite an impression on him. As it turns out, the paper was a list, of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada that offered scholarships for foreign students.

And the idea to leave India in search of a better life, was probably a seed in his head before this moment. But this forgotten piece of paper is what caused that seed to take root, strongly, in his mind.

Your Anil Dada was a longtime friend of my Papa. They went to school and college together. And Anil Dada once told me that Papa's nickname among his school friends was Ghoda. It's the hindi word for horse. And that's what your Dada was, a work horse. Once that paper came across his path, and that idea of a scholarship rooted in his mind, it was only a matter of time before he got here.

And despite your Dada facing extraordinarily difficult circumstances, here we are.

If you could ask him yourself about why he came here, as I have tried to, he'd tell you that he came here "for a better life." I've thought many years about what he meant. It's a haunting thing to wonder - about what drives your father - because it is after all, an inevitable part of what drives his sons.

When he said a better life, I think he meant prosperity. And part of that means wealth. But prosperity - in the way I think your Dada meant it, and the way I mean it here in this letter - is not only wealth. It is much more than that.

Prosperity is thriving. It is reaching the height of our potential as human beings. Prosperity is creating surplus, and then having the honor of spreading it humbly and generously to others. Prosperity is what’s beyond the essentials needed to have our physical bodies survive - it is the jewels of knowledge, culture, art, virtue, and the audacity to dream of a better life. For ourselves, yes, but more importantly for ourselves and others.

In America, prosperity is intervening to end a world war. It is vaccines and splicing the gene. It is going to the moon and brokering peace on earth. It is bringing children out of hunger and into love. It is the freedom to think beyond our daily bread and our tired and our poor. It is seeking to understand the mysteries of our universe.

American prosperity, I believe, is so much bigger than riches and spoils. American prosperity is the idea of creating the surplus we need so that we can then set our sights higher: on challenging the injustices of the present and enriching the future we may never ourselves benefit from, but others might. This unique notion of American prosperity - a prosperity that is for ourselves and others is what I think your Dada thought of when he contemplated a better life. A dream he ventured across the ocean and into an unknown land to be part of.

Because in America we are not just handed a brush and asked to paint something, we as a people, are driven to create the canvas on which others, namely our children, can paint. In America, we are called not just to be the consumers of prosperity, but to also be its producers.

Prosperity for ourselves and others.

I tell you all this because yesterday was an interesting day.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris became the President and Vice President-elect of the United States, our country.

This is what your Dadi said to me in a text message last night:

Me: Did you watch Biden’s speech?
Dadi: Yes. Biden & Harris both speech was outstanding. I am happy. First time in my life I enjoyed president results.
Me: It’s crazy how much of a difference it feels because our VP is half Indian. It feels like we belong here now.
Dadi: Yes beta. You, Bo & Myles will touch the sky in this country. I see that. Papa’s dream will come true.

This week, 74 Million Americans asked someone who looks like you, and who looks like me, and who looks like mommy to serve the nation. 74 Million.

But why I tell you both this is not because I want to emphasize that some barrier has been broken and a glass ceiling has been shattered, though it has. I want to tell you what that ceiling shattering means.

It would be easy for us to feel today that this ceiling shattering is an opportunity for us individually to grow and thrive and become more prosperous, because an invisible barrier is now gone. That the broken ceiling is for us.

That is not the lesson of today.

The lesson of the day is that there is no more doubt that we belong here, and that does provide us more opportunity. But there are no more excuses to be made out of not belonging, either. We can no longer claim to feel that we don't belong and let it be a reason we don't contribute.

The lesson of today - with the shattered glass of broken ceilings - is that we have an invitation and obligation to live out the broad, ever expanding notion of American prosperity - a dream your Dada risked everything for - not just for ourselves, but for ourselves and others.

How we make big decisions in our household

This is how we, meaning Robyn and I, make decisions in our household. It’s a technique that I learned from Prof. Maxim Sytch during our intro Management and Organizations class in business school. In his course, we learned about how to make good decisions, even though we humans have cognitive biases. It’s a process.

The key to making good decisions is to think about the criteria we should be using to make the decision, before evaluating the decision itself.

To this day, it’s one of the most foundational and important skills I’ve ever learned. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Capital, talks about this concept a lot too.

Lately, I have been thinking about how we make voting decisions (we generally make them poorly), and I will dig into that later - without advocating for a particular candidate. But before that, let’s talk about buying a house to setup the concept.

How we bought a house

To buy a house could’ve seen a bunch of houses and made a pro and con list with the ones we liked. The problem with that approach is that not all pros and cons are equally important. And when you make a list of pros and cons, it’s hard not to think of each factor as being equivalent.

If we hadn’t thought about which factors mattered most, in advance, we would’ve been susceptible to getting hustled by someone trying to sell their house on the factors they wanted to emphasize, rather than the ones we cared most about.

More concretely, this scorecard is we used to make our decision:

This logic is fairly simple. We created a list - in advance - of all the factors of the house we wanted to score against (not all are displayed here). As we attended showings of each house, we scored each house on a simple scale of 0 to 3.

Deciding the scoring criteria in advance was helpful, because important things like “commute”, “proximity to greenspace”, and “neighbors” were not obvious to us as important considerations until we started making a list.

You can’t see this directly from the image, but there’s a very simple weighting to create the weighted average. The average of all the house features (like bathroom power outlets, move-in ready, etc.) are weighted at 50%. Then our very subjective criteria of “feels like home” (which was a feeling of coziness, and being able to imagine raising a family there) was 50%.

This is not a perfect scorecard. In fact, in retrospect it’s quite flawed because the weighting is not specific or particularly robust.

But notice this: check out the scoring of houses D and E. If we looked only at the average of house features, house E was a better choice. When we included the “feels like home” weighting, house D was a better choice. And guess what we ended up picking - house D. If not for this scorecard, we might’ve ended up in the wrong house!

Either way, house E would’ve been a lovely place to live, but we often think how lucky we are to have landed where we did. The scorecard prevented us from making a lesser choice, based on the factors that mattered to us.

Job Hunting

The most recent time I used this decision-making approach (and actually wrote out a scorecard) was when I was job hunting. Here’s the scorecard I used then:

You can see that this scorecard is a little more robust. Every factor is individually weighted. I started by scoring my current job, and then all other alternatives. And, thank goodness I listed out a set of weighted criteria because:

• There was a time I was thinking about taking over my family’s small business. It was really attractive because it was lucrative and I could be an entrepreneur. But when I scored it, it became obvious that I would never be able to see my family because I’d have to commute 1.25 hours every day. The scorecard prevented me from making a switch for the wrong reasons.

• During my job search, I found a really cool job that I had a good shot at. But when I scored it, even though it sounded great and was pretty high status, it was a bad fit because of skill set. When I became really honest with myself (Robyn helped me do that) I walked away from the final round interview. The scorecard prevented me from making a switch out of desperation and because my ego really wanted a flashy title.

• You can see some greyed out factors. Those were factors I had from previous job searches. By being specific about factors, I realized that my life had changed and that some factors didn’t apply anymore. It was okay to use new criteria for a new situation! This realization was huge.

The moral of these two stories is simple - thinking about the factors to consider and putting a weight on them in advance was a way to make a less-biased decision. In our house decision or my job search, we could’ve talked ourselves into anything - so much played into our biases, egos, and the expectations of others we felt we had to live up to. Making the scorecard thoughtfully in advance helped us keep our heads right when the pressure was on.

The Lesson

Robyn and I now have repeated this process over and over, every time we make an important decision. We don’t start with the decision. We start with asking ourselves, “what are the criteria we should use when making this decision? What are the most important criteria?”. We learned that this was a way that made it much more likely that we’d make a good decision.

We used this approach when deciding when we would send our kids back to day care (or not). We used this approach when deciding how to negotiate interpersonal conflict with family and friends. The decision, we learned, is all in the criteria and the weightings. Once we debate those, we quickly figure out what data we still need to make a decision. Once we plug those data gaps, and put them into our decision scorecard, the decision becomes very easy.

And now that we’ve put this approach of really debating criteria into regular practice, it’s easier to apply the approach, on the fly, for littler decisions.

In fact, if you want to give this approach a test run, here’s something to try. The next time you’re choosing a basic item while grocery shopping (like soup, salad dressing, or pasta sauce) try to lay out some criteria and weights. It will feel oddly challenging, but the results of your reflection may surprise you.

The Lesson for Voting

As I said at the top, I’ve been thinking a lot about this for voting. The most important parts of this post are already covered, so if you’re not interested in hearing about how this applies to voting, please stop now. Thank you for reading this far, if you have done so.

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It seems to me that for the vast majority of my life I debated the pros and cons, and perhaps policy stances, when deciding who to vote for. Which as we saw above, is not a great decision making process because it’s pretty easy to fall into my own biases. This election, I tried something different. Let’s take the presidential race for example.

I knew that I would be biased for/against certain candidates. So I forced myself to think about the criteria to vote for President in advance. I didn’t do a formal scoring on a piece of paper, but here’s a representation of my rough model (without weights):

• Executive / Managerial Skill - will they be able to effectively run the executive branch?

  • Can they pick a competent team to fill appointments?

  • Are they able to hold other managers accountable for results?

  • Are they able to cast a clear vision for the organization?

  • Do they seem to understand operations, metrics, scorecards, and other managerial systems?

  • Do they even care about their role as the chief executive of a workforce with hundreds of thousands of people?

• Political Skill - will they be able to form coalitions with the Congress, the States, industry, interest groups, and other nations to solve important problems?

  • Are they able to build rapport with stakeholders and constituents?

  • Do they understand how to use public politics, the press, and the bully pulpit effectively?

  • Do they understand public opinion and how to navigate it?

  • Do they have a demonstrated past of forming effective coalitions?

• Character and Integrity - are they fit to wield tremendous amounts of power?

  • Are they going to follow the law? (e.g., others won’t abide by the law if the President doesn’t)

  • Do they embody the virtues and culture I hope for the whole country to have?

  • Will they do the right thing, even when it’s difficult or not convenient? Do they have the courage do what’s right, even if it means being unpopular?

  • Do they admit when they are wrong, adjust, adapt, move on, and do better next time?

  • Are they able to have good judgement during a crisis?

• Intent - assuming they are able to accomplish results ethically, would they move the country in a direction that I agree with?

  • Do they prioritize effective government?

  • Do they prioritize government integrity?

  • Do they prioritize long-term problems like infrastructure, climate, R&D, and budget?

  • Do they see the world through the lens of freedom, welfare, and American families thriving?

I thought about what my scorecard of criteria was for weeks. I honestly considered both candidates (I hope). And I came to a decision. And, I had a much different set of criteria for other races, because the criteria I would use to evaluate a Senator, a Judge, a University Regent, or a Prosecutor is much different than what I would use for the presidency.

I don’t say all this to try to convince anyone to vote for a certain candidate for any office (I would happily do that in person, and if you know me, you’ve probably voted already anyway so I’ve missed my opportunity even if that’s what I wanted to do).

What I would suggest though is that the lesson of buying a house and job hunting applies to voting. What we should be debating is not individual choices (and getting into nasty fights about those candidates), we might do better by debating what the right criteria are. What I would hope is that you challenge my criteria of factors as being correct or bogus, and submit your own criteria to the same scrutiny.

That’s the kind of debate I want to seed. It’s what I think would move us out of pettiness and polarization. Actual candidates matter, but maybe it would advance the conversation more if we put individual candidates aside for a minute and talked about our scorecards - and then tried to thoughtfully learn from and persuade each other about what we think the correct criteria should be.

Talking about decision criteria has completely transformed how Robyn and I make decisions in our marriage and for our family, I suspect that it could have similarly transformative effects in our civic lives.

A Covid-19 Family Continuity Plan

For four months, when day schools were closed, we treaded water and tried our best to work with our boys at home. It will probably be 2-3 years before I fully process what just happened to us (assuming there’s not more weird stuff to come, which is probably wishful thinking).

A few weeks ago, we sent our kids back to school, and that was a really hard decision. A week or two after we sent our boys back to school, we had the presence of mind to think through what we would do if we needed to pull the kids out of school again. We made a sort of a family continuity plan.

Robyn and I had to put our family continuity plan practice last week. I highly recommend you talk about this with your spouse / partner. Ours is geared toward decisions around kids, but the underlying principles are generally applicable.

I have not shared all of our “answers” - but message me separately if that’s something that would be helpful for you to talk about. Instead, I’ve shared the framework we developed for making decisions for our family.

I hope it is helpful to you. Our framework is at the bottom of this post.

This most demanding part of this exercise was not figuring out what was best for our family. That was easy. And we’re lucky - we can work from home or pull our kids from school if we need to. I acknowledge that’s not a luxury everyone has.

The hardest part of our exercise was to answer a different question: what do we owe other families?

Robyn and I grappled with this question explicitly. Because in this pandemic especially, our decisions don’t just affect our immediate friends and family, our decisions affect the other families at our childrens’ school - most of whom we don’t know personally. But because of the nature of this virus, we depend on them and they depend on us.

And what makes this question hard is that it compelled us to prepare to make real sacrifices, like potentially pulling the kids from school (again) or isoloating from our friends and family (again).

We certainly didn’t write this plan down when we discussed it a few weeks ago. But we had to execute the plan last week, and talking about it before was extremely helpful. This plan - which is a reconstruction of our lived experience - helped us to live out the values we believe matter, and the value we expect of others.

Again, it’s tailored to our circumstances, but I hope it’s helpful to you.

Family Continuity Plan and Framework for Decision Making

Core Principles for Making Decisions

• Avoid becoming infected

• Avoid become an asymptomic vector of the disease

• If there is reason to contemplate it, assume we or others are infected until data proves otherwise

• Make decisions quickly, communicate transparently

Triggers

• If there is a likely exposure at work

• If there is a Covid exposure within our school community

• If there is a Covid exposure within our friends and family that live locally

• If there is a substantial change in local case / death data (e.g., government mandates change)

Questions to Ask

• What are the facts?

• Who was exposed to whom, and when?

• What was the nature of the exposure? Was transmission possible or highly unlikely?

• Has anyone involved taken a test? What were the results? When were the tests taken?

• Were we exposed when someone was likely infectious?

• Is anyone showing symptoms?

• Where have we been since exposure who have we seen?

Evaluate answers above against pre-determined core principles. If necessary, execute relevant steps in the protocol.

Protocol

• Take a deep breath.

• Who do we need to notify to prevent spread? School, work, family, friends? Contact them.

• Do we need immediate medical attention? Seek it.

• Do we need to take a test to determine our health status? Schedule It.

• Do we need supplies? Provision them, and request help if necessary.

• Determine who will manage child care if kids are pulled from school.

• Come up with a workable schedule for managing work and home responsibilities.

  • Cancel / reschedule necessary social events.

  • Cancel / reschedule necessary work meetings.

  • Determine minimum home responsibilities / chores.

  • Reset expectations on bigger projects (e.g., yard, home improvement)

• Set a schedule for check-in on information updates. This is important so we do not overconsume information in a crisis.

• Lay out key milestones for next 2-3 weeks. What are big events that cannot be messed up.

• Determine level of information the kids need to know and can understand. Explain what is necessary.

• Determine criteria that have to be met to return to previous activities. Document them so it’s not as easy to “cheat” if things are difficult.

• Take a deep breath.

Temperature Check

I look forward to Erik’s annual e-mail. One year, several years ago, he asked a question about relationships. I wrote him this letter. It’s a tool Robyn and I learned about from our wonderful friends Jeff and Laura. It’s something we’re religious about and it’s worked for us. We’ve missed our weekly temperature check less than 5 times in our whole relationship, I’d estimate.

Hope it’s helpful to you.

June 12, 2014

Robyn and I set aside time every week to talk about our relationship. We setup a structure, called temperature check, that we modified from some great friends of ours - they are married and have a kid. It's worked well for them. This check-in happens every week on Sunday...it's something we have committed to. You don't have to do it weekly, that's just the pace that works for us.

Anyway, we take turns sharing on each of the following topics, in this order. We also alternate who speaks first for each topic on a weekly basis:

1 - Appreciations: We talk about what we've been appreciating about the other recently. These could be small (e.g., I appreciate that you swept the floor) or large (e.g., I appreciate that you stayed up with me all night when my family's dog was sick). We always use "I messages"..."I appreciated it when you..."

2 - Issues: We talk about issues that we're having. It could be a self-issue (e.g., I'm having a hard time staying up so late), an issue about the other (e.g., I'm worried about how stressed you are at work), or mutual (e.g., I think we're not spending enough time with our families). Or it could be anything else. The key is, these issues can't be humongous. When we have bigger issues we say, I have this issue, let's set a time to talk about it. Temperature check is not designed for huge conversations, it's a check-in. Hopefully if you bring up small issues early, you have fewer big blow-ups.

3 - Requests for Change: We talk about small requests for the others. Keyword - small. (e.g., could you please not use metal utensils on teflon pans) That example is smaller than our average, but you get the idea.

4 - Other stuff: It's often easy to forget that your partner has his / her own stuff going on that affects them. We take the end of temperature check to catch up on all the news from other spheres of life outside our marriage. Work, family, ideas we have, societal issues we're thinking about, books we're reading, friend news...whatever. It's nice to know this stuff because it contextualizes where your partner is coming from and what external factors are affecting your relationship.

5 - Logistics: Finally, we discuss logistics for the week. Different meetings, social plans we have, grocery lists, whatever. It makes sure we have time to spend with each other and we both have the right expectations about the other's activity and stress levels. It's a chore, but it prevents us from squabbling about little stuff.

A note: Remember about all this, it's really important to create a safe environment to have this discussion. Listen actively, don't allow distractions, commit to it every week, and empathize with the other person. Temperature check is useless if it's not in a completely open and safe forum.

Hope this helps!

Thinking about my life backward from the very end I'm speeding toward

When I envision it in my head, I hope my final moments alive on this Earth are surrounded by my family. As many of them as possible, and I hope that means I don’t outlive my kids and maybe not my wife either. I hope that it’s peaceful and not too painful. I hope it’s at least a few decades from now, too. At the same time, I hope that moment isn’t one whose arrival I’ve cheated and delayed at great personal cost.

And amidst that scene, when my life is waning, I think about the last few minutes - the last few breaths, even - and how I want them to feel. The regrets that I hope I don’t have and what my life looks like from a vantage point at the very end.

This is a concept Robyn and I have talked about, in a general sense. And our conclusions are pretty simple.

At the end of our life, we don’t imagine wishing we would’ve spent more time working or wishing we had made more money. Or wishing we would’ve spent less time with our kids and our family. We won’t wish we would’ve drank more alcohol, or wish we had spent less time together. We won’t wish that we had been more popular or powerful, or conclude that we had wasted too much time praying. At the end of life, we won’t ever wish that we had put less effort toward being kind and loving toward other living things.

When my Papa went ahead, the part of me that wanted to be a king died with him. King of a company, king of my neighborhood, king of my peers, or even just king of my own backyard. For my whole life, I had wanted to be the king of something, but once he passed, I just didn’t care anymore.

Being the last person by my father’s side, in his final moments, changed everything. I stopped thinking of my life from beginning to the end, and I instead started thinking about it from the end - the very end - to the beginning. And when I did that, being a king didn’t matter much anymore.

And I feel such tension now with parts of American culture. I don’t care about being the big fish in the pond like I used to (and I used to). But I feel like the culture around me signals that competition, fame, talent, status, and wealth is the point. That I should care about those things.

I don’t want to be that person anymore because to be honest, that final moment doesn’t feel far away anymore. My father was older than 60, but he was a young man. And the final moment doesn’t just feel closer than it used to, it feels like it’s coming faster. Like I’m speeding toward it. Like we’re all speeding toward it, faster and faster.

And I don’t know what my conclusion is here. Maybe I don’t have one yet. I guess I hope writing and sharing this, reveals that I can’t be the only one feeling this tearing between the way I want to anchor my life, versus the way I see the brazen and competitive parts of American culture telling me to. Because at the end, the very very end, I want to leave this Earth without wondering whether I had missed the point, wishing I had changed something sooner.

The Paradox of Becoming a Father

I have only been a father for about three and a half weeks, but I already know enough to tell you that it's really hard. So hard, that'd I think it's fair to say that at least half the time (probably more) it feels impossible.

I feel guilty saying that because fatherhood is supposed to be the most amazing experience, and the day you become a father is the best day of your life, with the exception maybe of the day you got married. No, guilty is the wrong word - I feel like a wuss and a traitor saying this.

By the way, fatherhood is the most amazing, joyous thing I've ever done and becoming a papa was the best moment of my life, with our wedding day as an exception.

Which is the paradox - fatherhood is both the best and most debilitating feeling I've ever had.

It's hard in ways that I didn't expect. I expected to be exhausted, and I expected to feel like I was doing everything wrong. I expected to have a cluttered house. I expected having to cut tremendous amounts of time away from hobbies, exercise, and mindless entertainment.

I didn't expect feeling invisible and dispensable to most people (my wife and a handful of others being an exception to this - Robyn has made me feel indispensable, valued, and loved) and then embarrassed about feeling like my needs were overlooked. I didn't expect how much grief I still had stirring around my heart over the loss of my own father. I didn't expect that I wouldn't have a euphoric moment the moment our son was born and feel an instant connection of unconditional love like in the movies (I didn't). I didn't expect how having a baby immediately changes your relationship with your parents and immediate family. I didn't expect to feel as alone as I did.

And to be honest, I thought our kid wouldn't be one of those that cried inconsolably - he'd be an exception to the rule...obviously. Which luckily, he's not colicky by any means, but he is a newborn and newborns cry fairly often, sometimes for reasons that are not immediately obvious. (Full disclosure: I also didn't expect just how many diapers one sub-ten-pound human could fill in a day. It's unreal).

But I also didn't expect how much more I could love my wife now that she is a mother. I didn't think the outpouring of love we've received from family, medical professionals, friends, colleagues, neighbors we barely know, and even some strangers was possible, but it's real. I didn't expect how natural it feels to be with your own child and how quickly innate instincts take over.

That is the paradox of becoming a father, I suppose. It's so unbelievably trying, while still being better than just about any other season of your life.

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I wanted to share this because I felt blindsided by how impossibly hard the first few weeks of fatherhood would feel. This is my attempt to help any to-be fathers out there be a little more prepared than I was.

If there are any fathers out there than want to chat (or guest post!!), share blogs, or even just lend some advice to others in the comments - let's do it. Fatherhood is so hard and so important, I'll take all the help I can get and I think others would too.

How To Actually Build A Culture - What I've Learned

Most companies I’ve come across are copycats. Their founders and executives look at how other companies do business and mimic the work environments (a composition of a company's habits, rituals, and practices) they like. In effect, they try to copy the culture of organizations they’ve seen before. On it's face, this is a fool's errand because most people haven't been in a high-functioning organization or team to begin with.

Even worse, it's reckless to mimic a different company's work environment, even if it is high-functioning. Why? Because those practices might not work well in a different business environment. Instead, the curators of a company’s culture – which are most often its founders and executives – should evolve their company’s work environment to fit the context in which they operate.

Animals and plants have been doing this for centuries. Camels and cacti, for example, have evolved to deal with water scarcity because they live in the desert. Bears have lots of fur and hibernate in the winter because that's what they need to survive in a colder climate. Animals and plants evolve to their habitat.

Companies, or even individual teams, should do what animals do – evolve their work environments to fit their habitat. Just like it doesn’t make sense for a camel to try to mimic a bear, it doesn’t make sense for a company in one “habitat” to mimic the culture of a company with a different business environment.

What's My Company or Team's Habitat?

I’ve found that the answers to two questions give reasonable insight to what a company’s “habitat” is and what that habitat requires of its work environment. After all, if you’re in a position to shape the culture of a company or team, it’s hard to do that without what your business environment requires. Here are the two questions:

1. What do your customers reward – execution or innovation?

2. What is the operating context in your market niche – simple & stable or complex & dynamic?

These two questions yield 4 basic “habitats” that each require a company or team’s work environment to emphasize different attributes - Coordination, Discipline, Motivation, or Learning:

(For help on how to determine your company or team’s habitat, click to this supplementary post).

How to Evolve A Culture

Correctly identifying your company or team’s habitat is one challenge, and evolving its culture to fit that habitat is quite another. I think the way to do this is choosing something – a moment in the day, an interaction, an artifact – and experimenting with it. Some colleagues and I put pen to paper on this concept in Work Environment Redesign.

I’d recommend experimenting with something small and mundane that’s done a certain way because “it’s the way we’ve always done it.” My favorite example is reimagining standing meetings. Here’s how the agenda of a standing team meeting could look for companies and teams in different habitats.

Lot's of little things can be evolved to fit a company's habitat - annual reports, branding, how customers are greeted, physical space, how recruits are interviewed, etc. Even if you only experiment with only one or two aspects of your work environment at a time, you’d be surprised how much your company or team’s culture can evolve even in a few months.

One more nuance I'd like to point out is that this model implies that a company's culture shouldn't be permanent. If a company's business environment changes, so should its work environment.

If you have stories or experiences to share with others about evolving your company or team’s work environment and culture – I’d love to hear about them in the comments (or a guest post)!

A Case For Quitting Your Career

In the middle of January, I found myself in the most unexpected of places - the intensive care unit waiting room of a hospital in Philadelphia. My father was very ill and my mind was (obviously) racing. I don't know exactly why - maybe my reaction to the stress was to distract myself by thinking about something else - but while I was there I marveled at the medical devices being used as part of his treatment. And I don't know why, but I started to ask myself, "why do so few smart people I know want to work for medical device companies?"

In addition to reflecting on this myself, I put a few questions related to this topic onto facebook and soaked up what people wrote. Anecdotally, it seems as if there's a mismatch of talent in our country. A disproportionately small amount of the world's bright talents tend to enter industries which have a disproportionately high impact on human society.

But why?

After reflecting on some of the reasons which might be deterring more smart people from taking their talents to an area of greater purpose, here's my no-pulled-punches, call to action to my smart friends: you can quit your career. Join those of us on wacky, non-standard paths.

Taking a pay cut is not that bad
I'll be the first to admit that I grumble about my student loan debt all the time. I'll also readily admit that I'm very lucky to make a good living - my pocketbook is modest, but not hurting. That said though, I took a pretty hefty pay cut when I started my current job. But to all my MBA / Law friends there who feel conflicted about those strategy consulting, I-banking, corporate, big law jobs...don't worry. It's not that bad to live on a budget, especially if your budget is still substantially higher than the income of the average American family. The pay cut is nothing to be afraid of. And besides, a high-paying job or glitzy perks are usually a good indicator that the company is making up for something else about the job that really sucks.

You're not actually learning that much more
Prestigious firms like to talk about how much you learn while working for them. I think that's misleading. First of all, people in smaller or scrappier organizations tend to learn a lot, very quickly because they're thrust with more responsibility. Second of all, I think how much you learn at work has much more to do with your own disposition than the company. People who take risks, work hard, and have a learning mindset learn wherever they go. If you need a perfect company culture to learn, you'd probably get just as much of a boost in learning by staying put and changing your attitude.

You don't need a name on your resume to prove that you've made it
One of the things I've learned is that someone's resume or educational pedigree isn't a good indicator of who I'd pick to be on my team. As many folks who responded to my facebook questions pointed out - there are many kind of intelligence and there are smart people all over the place...that didn't go to elite schools or work for top firms. Don't think you need to work for a so-called prestigious firm to "make it." At the end of the day, your deeds and results prove your character and your talent. Not a line on a resume.

Doing hard stuff is not that scary
I wouldn't have admitted this at the time, but working at a cushy company was really easy, stress-free, work. At the end of the day, my actions didn't have measurable consequences on real people. It's certainly hard to work in gnarly, complex, environments fraught with problems - which tends to be the case in consequential industries. My father said, "There are many problems, but there are also many solutions." I think that wisdom applies here, too.

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Of course I realize that my examples are hyperbolic. And of course, I'm not suggesting that everyone quit their jobs, move to Portland, and become sustainable food-truck owners, inner-city teachers, design-thinking consultants, non-profit staffers, or anything else that fits this rosy picture of a impact-driven career. I'm also not trying to suggest that the world doesn't need bankers, consultants, corporate lawyers, or people to start cutsy billion-dollar tech companies that don't really serve anyone but the affluent.

What I am saying, though, is that there are too many really bright people (at least among people I know) that are in jobs that are an insult to their talent and that the world would probably be better off if those people did something more consequential.

I don't normally soapbox (anymore) in blog posts and I'm normally not so poignant. I get that, and I get it if anyone reading this feels taken aback or offended by this post. I sincerely apologize for that.

But here's what really gets me, and why I am so vigorous in my passion for this idea. It goes back to when I was in the ICU in Pennsylvania, after spending the last few hours of my father's life at his bedside.

I kept thinking, If more of the world's smartest people chose to build medical devices instead of being consultants and investment bankers, would my papa still be with us?

Three Pre-Requisites for Intimacy

My last roommate, Divya, and I were talking about relationships a few weeks ago. During that conversation, I was vibing with her about three pre-requisites I discovered, to even be capable of an intimate, committed relationship.

First, I accepted my best self and quit trying to be my "ideal" self. No happy person can fulfill a false persona for an indefinite period of time. Eventually, with your partner, your true self will shine through. Consequently, it's practical to just be yourself from the beginning so there are no surprises.

Doing so is not easy, even though "being yourself" is proverbial wisdom. In society and culture we're surrounded by messages that talk about how to be an "ideal" lover, worker, and partner instead of ourselves. Fashion magazines, books (like Neil Strauss's "The Game"), blog posts on LinkedIn, etc. have checklists on how to be an ideal person to others. We're constantly nudged into being someone else, often subliminally. That makes it hard to "just be yourself."

Accepting my best self required me to stop trying to be the center of every social network, and constantly trying to be everyone's friend. It also required me to place less emphasis on being the best consultant at my company and considering myself a success only if I gained admission to the most prestigious graduate schools in the country.

Second, I allowed myself to feel deserving of love. After all, if you can't accept love it's basically impossible to give it. About 2 and a half years ago, everything in life was going well - I had a good salary, a good enough GMAT score, and lots of fun times with friends - but I felt guilty about it, especially about relationships. I didn't feel like I was worthy of being loved. In retrospect, pursuing extrinsic things (i.e., career, money, social status) was probably something I was doing so that I would feel accomplished enough to deserve love. I was in a terrible mental state and was driving myself to be crazier by the day.

I was lucky though, a few close friends and my family pulled me back and just gave me love without me even asking for it. They told me I was worthy of love (from other people and from God). They gave me books to read so that I could re-wire my brain. Everyone has a different process for realizing that they were worthy of being loved, and I was lucky to have a lot of support through it.

These two realizations have to come early on (or before) a relationship. My third realization came after starting a relationship with Robyn.

Third, I started to find joy in making sacrifices for my partner. Not just compromise or acceptance in sacrifice, but joy. Relationships (of any flavor) don't work without sacrifice. If they're not joyful, they aren't additive to the energy of the relationship, they're subtractive. Given the choice, why not be joyful about sacrifice? For Robyn and I, finding in joy in sacrifice was a virtuous sacrifice for our relationship.

Here's an example. I'm very messy about having clothes strewn about in my apartment. Robyn isn't ever upset with me about it, but she's definitely not amused by messy clothes. Knowing that she would rather have laundry taken care of neatly, I started to make an effort to put my clothes where they belong. This is something Robyn presumably appreciated so it made me happy. Because it made me happy, it became a habit, which made Robyn even more happy. Now, we're in an upward spiral of sacrifice and appreciation in more than just the realm of laundry. None of it would've happened, however, if either of us didn't find joy in the smallest of sacrifices.

To have intimacy, I discovered at least three pre-requisites: accepting yourself, accepting love, and finding joy in sacrifice for others.

The funny thing is, they have very little to do with "knowing what you want", "trying out lots of people", finding "the one" or other externally-focused cliches. Rather, these three truths I've discovered have to do entirely with changing yourself.

Photo Credit

Reframing How I View My Job, Career

I've begun thinking about my job and career differently; my perspective has evolved throughout and because of business school. I used to think about the job that I would like, even a job that I would be good at. A job that gave me the lifestyle, purpose, happiness, and pay I wanted. My "dream" job.

In retrospect, I consider that a self-centered view of my job and career.

But, I've learned in the past few years that true happiness comes from serving others, not yourself (the data is incontrovertible). That's helped me rethink how I make decisions about my job and career.

I figure, if happiness comes from being other-focused and how I view my career is self-focused, I probably won't be happy. As a result, I've decided to view my career in an other-focused way.

Now, instead of asking myself questions like, "What kind of job will I like?", I ask myself a different question that's more other-focused. I ask myself: "In my life, who am I excited to serve? Who's the customer I care about?" This reframing has changed how I've viewed my job after business school, a lot.

I think there are a lot of legitimate ways to answer this question, and what I've found is that it's most important is to be honest with yourself.

For example, I've chosen a job where I get to serve people in the City I live in. My customers are the current and future residents of the City of Detroit. But my "customer" is also my family. I chose a job that affords me a good (not lavish) lifestyle but allows me not to travel every week. It's a job that I'll likely have stress from, but it will be one that energizes me with optimism - I won't take negative emotion back to my family.

Maybe the customers you care about are other people in your company. Maybe it's the hungry or sick. Maybe it's CEOs. Maybe it's small businesses. I don't know, only you do. But what I'm saying, is that it's worth figuring out who you care about serving rather than figuring out what you like. If you're not excited to serve your "customer", you probably won't be happy.

Like most decisions, reframing the question I asked when considering a job / career change made a huge difference.

Why I Reflect

There are some things you can learn from a book or video - like how to make sushi, the history of Puerto Rico, or the varying methods for valuing a company. I'd argue that there are other things - like leading a team, comforting others, or making decisions in a crisis - that can only be discovered through experience. I'd argue further that the most important skills for having a good life can't be learned from a book. 

It stymies me that reflection isn't a cornerstone of every learning enterprise on the planet.

Reflection is the key that unlocks tacit knowledge, the type of knowledge that can only be discovered through experience. Acquiring tacit knowledge is different than learning from a book because it takes more than memorization of the mind and body. Instead, it takes having new experiences, failing or succeeding, and internalizing what you learn. Tacit knowledge doesn't stick if you don't internalize it, and that internalization only happens through reflection.

Ironically, reflection is something that can be learned from a book or video and practiced. For a reason unknown to me, it just doesn't seem important enough to make part of the core body of explicit knowledge we learn in school. I think that's a monumental miss.

An ethics lesson from the Shawshank Redemption

One of my favorite quotes from any movie is from the Shawshank Redemption. In the film, the character played by Tim Robbins (Andy) says you either "get busy livin' or get busy dyin'." It gets me every time. [Here's a link to the video clip]

It's obviously an inspiring scene, but it also brings an interesting observation about human behavior to light - we have a hard time staying where we are.

Andy suggests that as we go through life, we can't stay at the same equilibrium indefinitely. Rather, he says, we either get better or get worse. There's no such thing as staying where you are.

And so it is with acting ethically. I do not think ethics is as simple as drawing a line in the sand saying "I will not cross this line". If that's how we chose to manage ethical behavior we will always lurk toward acting unethically. In real life, it doesn't work for ethics to be a standard.

Rather, ethics is a practice. We have to constantly strive to be more ethical and live our ethics more fully. It's something we must work on every single day. If we don't do that, we'll surely become more unethical as time passes.

Ethics isn't something that can be maintained as a status quo. We must either get busy being more ethical or get busy being less ethical. There's no in between.

Skills vs. Capabilities

"We need people with more skills!" cried the HR Manager and her cadre of business representatives. Without the right skills, they said, "we can't deliver our products and services!"

Yes, of course. But maybe those that are looking for "skills" are pursuing the wrong goal.

I think there's a monumental difference between skills and capabilities. Skills are something that you get better at practicing over and over. It's a finite ability that can be used under a fixed set of constraints in a narrow set of environments. A skill is something you learn to do and go do it. You repeat it over and over and get better at it and do it the same way every time.

A capability is different, I'd say. A capability isn't a specific skill that fits in a given situation. It's an deep-rooted ability which can be applied in many contexts. It's something you train and have to learn to do in context. It's not an isolated skill, it's an ability that flows in and out as the environment demands it.

Take tennis for example. An open-stanced forehand groundstroke is a skill. It is only usable when the ball is on a specific side of your body and works better on certain court types and when a certain type of ball is hit to you. You practice it and you get better at it. As a result, you try to control the environment so that you can use that shot...so your skill is in a relevant context. Either that or you learn more skills so that you have more options to choose from as you control your environment.

Moving your feet to position correctly to the ball applies to any shot you take in a tennis match: a serve, a volley, a groundstroke, an approach shot, and overhead smash...anything. Moreover, it's an ability that applies to many different sports like basketball, football, soccer, or volleyball to name a few. It's something you train and focus on as part of other actions and motions. You learn the fundamentals and you get better at applying a capability in various circumstances. It's something you use differently as the environment changes. In fact, you use capabilities to adapt to a changing environment.

I'd venture to say that the organizational world is one we have less control over than previous generations and we'll probably continue to lose control of the environment around us. As this happens, capabilities will become more relevant than skills, because skills will become obselete. Some days your business will require an open-stanced forehand ground strokes and other days you won't even be competing on a tennis court, figuratively.

So that raises a question. Is your organization's HR department (or schools, or business leaders, more importantly) cultivating skills or cultivating capabilities? Do they even understand the difference?

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