The Long Way Round

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." - Lao Tzu

Young leaders are often easy to spot. They are full of energy, hard-charging, see the way forward, put plans in motion, and delegate accordingly. But with this top down approach to leadership, they often run into issues around team buy-in. If the plan is sound, but team buy-in is lacking, the execution will suffer. A great plan with bad execution is still just that - a badly executed plan. And a bad plan with great execution goes no further - it's just a bad plan.

More experienced leaders tend to see the best way forward, but recognize that not everyone will be on the same page if change is involved. The salty veteran will know how best to coax her team strategically into rowing in the same direction. They will take the indirect route in leading the team, laying the groundwork and sowing the seeds with individual team members to get buy-in.

The best way to get someone on board with an idea or a strategic plan is to let them think it is their own. The best leaders know how to maneuver in a situation to help a team arrive at the best strategic conclusion. They ask the right questions that guide the discussion rather than leading the discussion with their opinion. They may establish the intent and goal of an initiative, but they empower their team to determine the method of achieving the end goal by asking the right questions, giving their team autonomy, and ceding ownership of the initiative to their team.

Most young executives tend to default to traditional, direct, top-down leadership. But more experienced leaders will resort to a bottom up, indirect, empowerment approach. Traditional leaders give orders from the top, and the team can't operate until communication is given. An indirect, decentralized leadership approach leads to a bottom up approach that is decentralized in nature because the leader's intent is known but the ownership for accomplishing the task is squarely with the team on the ground.

Here are a few thoughts for young leaders on how to lead like a veteran:

1) Ask the right questions, even if you believe you know the answer.

2) Establish the intent of a project but ask your team to establish the methods to achieve the goal - even if you have a preferred strategy in mind. Guide the discussion, offer feedback, and commit to your team's approach.

3) Avoid direct confrontation. Commit to revisiting an issue one on one, find the common ground (the end goal in mind), and try to discover what is causing the disagreement. Coercion will win you the battle but lose you the war and cost you leadership capital in the long run with your team.

4) Get in the trenches. Walk the floor. Ride in the truck. Build relationships with your team.

5) "The longest way round is the shortest way home." Ask, don't tell. Watch, don't show. Convince, don't coerce. Often, an indirect, collaborative, decentralized approach to leadership will allow you to achieve your goal much faster than a direct, coercive, top down approach.

Figure out the right hybrid work strategy for your company (Harvard Business Review)
+ "What’s the real cost of hybrid working for our bottom line and our ability to deliver on our promises? How much flexibility do employees want and need? Who should make the decision about who does and doesn’t get to work remotely? Can we maintain our culture if people aren’t spending as much time together in the office? How can we effectively onboard new employees remotely? These are complex challenges requiring leaders to meet varied criteria while considering multiple stakeholders in the context of a volatile, uncertain, and complex environment. Before you can figure out the particulars of hybrid work, though, you must start with an understanding of what makes conversations about hybridity so difficult."

Are we returning to the office? Or is the future remote? (a16z)
+ "However, while it’s clear that our work models changed in the past 18 months, it’s less clear what the long-term model (or models) for working will be — or what will be the most effective and competitive. We have heard plenty of speculation on the subject, but in reality, only 29% of workplaces were back to the office in May 2021, and we are still in the early stages of workplace experiments with hybrid and remote-first models. At a16z, as at many other companies, we view the changes the pandemic brought about as an opportunity to rethink how we work and what’s best for our team today and in the future. As part of this exercise, we also surveyed 226 CEOs in our portfolio — representing early and late stage startups across bio, consumer, crypto, enterprise, and fintech — about their future location and remote work plans."

Stripe: thinking like a civilization (The Generalist)
+ "In Patrick and John Collison, Stripe has two framers thinking at a civilization-level. This is rare, even among tech’s boldest executives. With the exception of Musk, Bezos, and Buterin, no founder is constructing an empire with quite the same thousand-year stare or detailed, architectural love as the Siblings Stripe. (Even Zuckerberg, lover of Augustus Caesar, is perhaps too absorbed with accumulating personal power to qualify). More than anything else it is this horizonal focus that defines Stripe, guiding its remarkable recruitment, celebrated culture, and sophisticated product strategy."

Seven high frequency indicators for the economy (Calculated Risk)
+ 7 indicators that show how travel, entertainment, discretionary spending, and the consumer are recovering as the pandemic subsides.

Spring numbers show 'dramatic' drop in college enrollment (NPR)
+ "Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse. "That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen."

Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution (Derek Thompson)
+ "This year, two international teams of economists published papers that offer very different impressions of the future of remote work. The first team looked at an unnamed Asian tech company that went remote during the pandemic. Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Working hours went up while productivity plummeted. Uninterrupted work time cratered and mentorship evaporated. Naturally, workers with children at home were the worst off. The second team surveyed more than 30,000 Americans over the past few months and found that workers were overwhelmingly satisfied with their work-from-home experience. Most people said it exceeded their expectations. “Employees will enjoy large benefits from greater remote work” after the pandemic, the paper’s authors predicted. They said that productivity would surge in the post-pandemic economy, “due to re-optimized working arrangements” at some of the economy’s most successful white-collar companies."

The 25 micro habits of high-impact managers (First Round)
+ "It got us thinking — what are the little daily habits that often go unnoticed, but when linked together add up to form an incredibly strong chain between manager and direct report? To that end, we spent the past few weeks reaching out to folks all across the First Round community for their take on this question: What are the small things a great manager has done that have stood out to you across your career? What follows is a can’t-miss list of 25 targeted tactics for upping your management game — no rote training sessions required."

Another day in Katerradise (Construction Physics)
+ "Last week the construction startup Katerra declared that it was shuttering it’s US operations, putting another L on the board for Softbank’s Vision Fund. It is walking away from numerous in-progress construction projects, its employees are being let go, and its assets are being sold. The immediate cause of Katerra’s bankruptcy seems to be the bankruptcy of Greensill Capital, another Softbank-backed startup. At the beginning of 2021, under severe financial strain, Katerra underwent a recapitalization that cut its valuation by 90% (from $4 billion down to $400 million). As part of this, Katerra negotiated away a $440 million debt owed to Greensill, a supply chain finance company. But a few months later, Greensill itself went bankrupt, and the owners of this debt (Credit Suisse) are claiming that Katerra still owes it, which is apparently preventing the company from getting construction bonding. Since the debt is more than the current value of the company, that obviously presents a challenge."

The mystery of the $113M deli (New York Times)
+ "In a letter to his investors this April, David Einhorn, founder of the hedge fund Greenlight Capital and a well-known short-seller, complained that the stock market was in a state of “quasi anarchy.” As one piece of evidence, he pointed to Elon Musk, whose commentary on Twitter, Einhorn said, amounted to market manipulation. “The laws don’t apply to him, and he can do whatever he wants,” Einhorn noted. As another example, he cited a restaurant in rural New Jersey called Your Hometown Deli, which despite making $13,976 in revenue last year had somehow attained a value of $113 million on the stock market."

The crystal hunters of Chamonix (Outside)
+ "The origin of these crystals began 15 million years ago, when a solution of hot, salty water filled cavities that were created in Mont Blanc’s granite by tectonic movement. This solution became saturated with silica, which would, in time, form quartz crystals—silicon dioxide. The process occurred under extremely high pressures around 7.5 miles below the earth’s surface, with the solution reaching temperatures above 800 degrees Fahrenheit. As the Alps rose, crystallization slowly began on the grains of quartz contained in the walls of the cavities, becoming the pockets cristalliers seek out. The first people to climb high in the Alps, as long ago as the 16th century, were hunting either chamois—a goatlike animal—or crystals. Those first cristalliers sold their wares to chandelier-makers in Turin or Geneva. Louis XIV, who ruled France from 1643 to 1715, reportedly owned a “smoky quartz from the Savoy glaciers.” By the 19th century, new sources of crystal emerged in Brazil and Madagascar, and crystal hunting in the Alps waned."

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