3/ Pre-order for this book started last July. Customers received via email a chapter every 2 weeks for six months. Now, you can buy it in eBook form.
4/ Paperbacks should also become available soon on Amazon. But this time I won't release the Kindle on Amazon's website.
You can get the Kindle file at the link above, it's cheaper for you than it would have been on Amazon, and I get a much higher share of royalty. Win-win.
5/ The book starts with the principle that TEAMS ARE ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS. Their members do not just act but also react.
Over time, they do more of what their work environment rewards and makes easy, and do less of what is hard or goes unrewarded.
Examples below.
6/ If an employee does something good and you do not let him know, he will be less likely to do it again.
If you wait for his yearly performance review to acknowledge the good he did, MEANWHILE, he will think he did it for nothing and lose motivation.
7/ If you reward efforts rather than results, over time you will get more displays of efforts and less results.
OTOH, you do not want to reward pure results only, without also caring about how they were obtained. Otherwise you'll get short-term growth and long-term problems.
8/ In the book, I explain in practical terms how to ensure that your team feels motivated and engaged.
No secret technique, only common-sense actions and principles.
At the end of each chapter, concrete action points.
Those who put too much ego in their car do things that are good for their car (eg spending Saturdays afternoon washing it) rather than things which are good for them (eg hanging out with their friends and family).
We do what is good for what we invested our ego in.
1/4
2/ Those who put too much ego in their job stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for their job.
Those who put too much ego in their political party stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for their party
3/ Those who put too much ego into racial discrimination stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for racial discrimination.
When Twitter banned Trump, I wrote that even though I don't like Trump and thought that the world would be better off without him, I was also against its censorship for fear of a slippery slope.
3 weeks later, did it happen?
Yes. Examples & implications 👇
1/8
2/ After Twitter, FB banned him. Then, Google suspended Parler from its store, Apple did it too, and finally Amazon banned it from its infrastructure.
3/ Two comments:
– What looks inconsequential if one small company does it is very consequential if all major players do it.
– It started with banning a few bad apples, it ended up with banning full categories of users.
(the latter should give the chills; also see tweet #5)
A common scenario at the office:
– The manager sets an unclear task
– The employee does it, but not well enough
– Because of the lack of clarity, the employee thinks he did it well enough
– Now the manager faces two options, both bad:
(Thread 1/7)
2/ Either the manager accepts how the employee did the task (sending the message that subpar performance is okay and lowering standards across the team),
Or he tells the employee he didn't deliver on an unclear objective, pissing him off and/or demotivating him.
3/ Lack of clarity is a problem that:
– Always comes to bite you back
– And you will have to address it at some point, willingly or unwillingly
2/ In the quoted thread, I made the example of a skier participating to a championship made of 10 races.
3/ In a single race, the consequences of him breaking his knee are "just" that he loses that race.
Conversely, in a championship, the consequences of him breaking his knee during a race is that he loses that race AND ALL FOLLOWING ONES (because he cannot participate to them).
In school, if you partially complete a checklist, you get partial points
In life, there are checklists that give full points if partially completed and others that give no points
Much frustration comes from misunderstanding the kind of list you're dealing with
(examples below)
2/ Example #1: a checklist for authorship success could be:
– have a great idea
– write it down clearly
– promote it effectively
Only having a great idea is not sufficient. Worse, because of the lack of any success, you might learn the wrong lesson that it's a bad idea.
3/ Example #2: the checklist to write the perfect book has probably a hundred items on it. And yet, it's possible to achieve great success by only completing well a few.
But some might think that because their book doesn't check all the marks it isn't ready.
Economies of scale, and in particular large countries, have many pros (negotiation leverage, coordination for defense, lower transaction costs, some economies of scale) but also many cons.
Here are some:
(thread, 1/12)
2/ LESS INNOVATION
Many separate entities can undertake many more experiments than a single large one, even though the large one has a larger budget.
In innovation, you just have to be right once.
2B/ Decentralized innovation allows for many experiments to be made, and capital to be allocated to what works rather than to what makes sense.
"The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent." – @rorysutherland