I have managed, started and run companies, and helped thousands of people on hundreds of teams. Or at least have tried to.

I now believe people fall into 7 learning styles.

Here's what they are. I think learning this might save you 10 years of pain... Now, right off the bat, I have to say that this is my own theory and experience. Trying to help colleagues, superiors, reports, clients, and friends, I see a very clear pattern.

In hopes this helps you navigate the confusing and often frustrating world of managing, here we go...

Product is the only role that has a "pinned dependency."

Executives depend on sales, marketing, and customer retention for success to be possible.

All of those depend on product for success to be possible.

Product depends on executives for success to be possible.

Great… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Just to be totally clear:

Executives need sales, marketing and customer success to meet revenue targets.

Sales, marketing, and customer success need product to be awesome or everything they do is harder or impossible.

Product needs executives to support their efforts to make… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Many leaders truly do not believe that people are driven by purpose, human connection, and culture. They don't trust that these tools would work.

The question is whether they can learn, how quickly, or whether they will live in darkness their entire careers. This is the thesis behind the company I wanted to start and what keeps me going all day, every day.

I have learned so far that there are different learning styles. For simplicity, let's make it 3:

1. Eager learners
2. Resistant learners
3. Defensive non-learners

Ideas are just the start. They are never perfect, but they are also almost never fully terrible.

Ideas have 5 parts:
1. The reason they came up
2. A stab at what is being suggested
3. Strong but incomplete thoughts
4. Incorrect assumptions
5. Blind spots

Always understand 1… 1 is almost never fully wrong. Even if 2-5 are all insane, 1 can still be great.

2 should not be shot on site, ever. Stop being a jerk about ideas and killing them before diving in. That makes you look much stupider than you are trying to make the idea (or person) look.

I think it’s clear to me now I would absolutely hate to climb the product manager career ladder. Sounds filled with immense bullshit. Being an entrepreneur may have actually been easier. I can’t imagine having to report to someone who thinks product is some sort of process, who sets insane goals there’s nothing my actions could affect, or who wants me to be a project manager. It’s almost like these people want the products to progress as clumsily as possible.

Very few teams really know what high-performance is. So I figured I'd do a quick writeup this morning to illustrate exactly what high-performance teams are, how they think, and how it's different than any other team.

Let's get started. Fundamentally, performance is about the ability to achieve. It's hard to call a team high-performance if they can't reach goals.

But let's remember something important here: teams are going to have many at-bats. So winning games isn't about hitting the first ball. That's luck.

Most advice is about behavior change. And most advice doesn't work.

That's because underneath any person's behavior, you have their motivational systems. There are five. By understanding these 5, you will transform your ability to change your behaviors and impact others... The 5 motivational systems (in order of how a person uses them) are:

1. Personality
2. Mindset
3. Skillset
4. Culture / Social Pressure
5. Incentives

Here's the right way to motivate a human:

Threat = when nothing else works
Stress = when falling behind
Happiness = when stealing them from an unhappy place
Reward = when they are in it for themselves
Connection = when they are in it for others
Purpose = when you want the best Mastery in leadership is starting from the bottom and working up if things fail.

Blundered leadership is starting from the top and working down if things fail.

When someone creates value, there is an expansion of wealth.

When someone doesn’t create value, there is a redistribution of wealth.

It took me until today to realize this is why I hold such disdain for the mediocre consultancies and product companies I used to compete with. I hate that this comes across as negativity or competitiveness. It’s actually coming from compassion.

When a company relies on a partner to help them, especially when that company is not expert in things like analytics, development, and technical stuff, it’s hard to watch…

Here is how human motivation really works.

Forget all of the management books of spells. Here is what is actually happening in people's brains, and it's you may feel it's clear to see that many of today's most popular ways of motivating people are not the best ways. Quick orientation to the tables:

The top is personality and how different kinds of people are motivated.

The second is the brain and what fundamentally motivates our brains.

The third is neurochemical and what changes how we feel.

You must find your purpose within society, not within your career.

Careers are nested inside the needs of others’ careers which are nested inside the needs of investors or owners.

You must see your impact outside of that system to truly feel purpose. Great owners make that easy If you need help getting started, shift perspective from what your boss, colleagues and company are asking of you to what the customer and market and world are asking of you.

The more you notice a rift between those two things, the more that the nested needs are interfering.

The brain gravitates toward positive feelings and away from negative feelings.

This is obvious, I know.

But it gives us a great tool to understand and prevent our own bias.

Here are 4 categories of bias and how we can overcome them… What should we remember?

The brain wants the pleasant feeling of seeing ourselves positively as we replay the past. This gets in the way of introspection, which is uncomfortable analysis of the role we played in various situations, especially when we goofed up.

We are probably the most sophisticated company in the world when it comes to understanding corporate culture. That isn't to brag, it's to set up a key point and offer some help. Read on if you want some clarity on what culture is and how to build a great one.
👇 Overwhelmingly, there are two kinds of cultures that prevail. Operator cultures and visionary cultures.

There are probably 9 operator cultures for every 1 visionary culture, just to give a sense of how often we see each.

Disagreeable people are typically more successful in their careers.

But it’s not just because they are disagreeable. Let’s deconstruct this a bit in a short thread, and I’ll be covering more of this through June.

Follow along if you’re an agreeable person who wants to learn… So let’s start learning about a few things disagreeable people are more likely to do. Some of these are good things. Some aren’t so great.

Team function is a measurable and optimizable phenomenon. And it's specific to the context. Most teams get to a functional state and stop. They feel like productivity is self-validating.

Then, they enter a loop of staying in a productive state too long, letting the atrophy occur, finding themselves in a state of falling behind, and getting back to a productive state.

Compassion is the answer to this question.

Quantifiable and zero question it is humanity’s North Star leading metric.

The lagging metrics are numerous. GDP growth, percentage below the poverty line, disease levels, quality of life (various measures), equality, opportunity...

https://twitter.com/mwiyas/status/1382073001320022020

Interesting that so many metrics are lagging metrics (outcomes) rather than leading (inputs).

We have a contorted view of reality and it can lead to some pretty messy situations when our KPIs are outcomes...

I wanted to share a key idea that helps us all understand talent better.

Talent is really hard to understand. The reason for that is surprisingly simple: as a person becomes better at what they do, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why.

Let's walk through this... The first thing we do is gain skill. We learn how to talk, write, do math, maybe write code, build, design, etc.

With those skills in our memory, we can begin to make.

If you can’t tell what a person does all day at work, it’s because they work in the metaphysical space rather than the physical... They build and reshape thinking, not action.

The ones improving thinking are our most valuable people. The ones harming our thinking are our worst.

Action is in the middle.

Once a businessperson learns statistics, they finally realize that most people aren’t anything like “most people.”

Here’s what that means and why it’s important... We think most people who interact with our business look a certain way. Most people are male. Most people are 18-24. Most people liked Jurassic Park.

These are averages, not majorities.

PTO is a great approach to busting up the silly Pavlovian reward systems around “maximum busyness.”

But they need to be supplemented with equally effective systems for avoiding busyness while at work, too. Promotion needs a similar evolution. Here’s what I do...

https://twitter.com/kvlly/status/1366038686085881856

It’s called OVP for opportunity, voice, promotion.

Most companies are PVO. We promote people first, which gives them voice and opportunity.

That’s why 82% of people promoted to any form of management fail. It’s a dumb way to go about it.

Generalizations are unintelligent by their nature. Here’s how to translate any generalization into actual, usable truth.

Start with this idea. Every generalization is a simplification of a statistic.

Men are taller than women.
Women are better at multitasking than men... Behind those statements are statistics. They might look like...

...the average man is x’y” and the average woman is a’b”

And behind those averages are distributions, often normal distributions...