The Weekly: Edition #41 - April 17, 2020
Responsibility
"Uneasy is the head that wears the crown." - William Shakespeare, King Henry IV
In times like the present, taking responsibility for past or present decisions has never been harder to swallow nor easier to shirk. Pending corporate bailouts prove it. This week we'd like to highlight an open letter by the CEO of Carta, Henry Ward, for admirably taking responsibility as the leader and CEO for making the difficult decision to layoff employees.
One of the hardest parts of being a leader is the consistency with which you find yourself standing between a rock (shareholders) and a hard place (employees).
"In a town hall a couple of weeks ago I said that there were two perspectives when making decisions about layoffs. The first is the shareholder perspective where reducing costs and protecting cash are what matters most in a recession. The second is the employee perspective where nothing is more important than saving jobs and helping employees as the world heads into unemployment levels the world has not seen since the Great Depression. In each of these two perspectives, shareholders and employees have clear visions that are both unambiguous and morally correct even while at the same time being diametrically opposed. That is the conundrum for CEO's. CEO's sit between shareholders and employees and wish they could do both."
As a leader, you can avoid the pain your decisions cause, or you can rise to the occasion and ease the burden of those most affected.
"Every CEO who is planning a layoff has to address this moral conflict. I chose to manage my conflict by taking the shareholder perspective in deciding who (and how many) should leave and taking the employee perspective on how to help those who leave."
A great leader will find a way to deliver on promises made.
"Third, if you have been with us for less than one year, we have removed your cliff and extended your PTE to 1 year from today. You joined Carta to create owners and to become one. Everyone affected today will be an owner of Carta."
The one who passes the judgement should swing the sword.
"Once the lists were created, they were sent to me for approval. It is important that all of you know I personally reviewed every list and every person. If you are one of those affected it is because I decided it. Your manager did not. For the majority of you it was quite the contrary. Your manager fought to keep you and I overrode them. They are blameless. If today is your last day, there is only one person to blame and it is me."
Taking responsibility is easy when stakes are low. But that is not the case at present. True leaders handle difficult decisions with as much equanimity, responsibility, and ownership as possible. Over the long run, there are only a small handful of important decisions that will define you as a leader. It starts with taking ownership.
The team at Permanent Equity wants to know how you have been affected through the COVID-19 outbreak. Whether you are an employer, an employee, or recently laid off, we put together a few surveys and hope you will take 3 minutes to share your recent experiences with us:
- for business owners
- for employees
- for those that have lost their job
Remote working trends report: meetings (Microsoft)
+ "Researchers like Dr. Fiona Kerr have found that eye contact and physical connection with another human increases dopamine and decreases the stress hormone cortisol. Her research shows that you can even physically calm someone down simply by looking them in the eye. So as the world works remotely, it is no surprise people are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more than before many of us began working from home full-time. We’ve also seen total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March."
Google Meet supports two million new users each day (Google)
+ "Last month, we made advanced Google Meet video-conferencing capabilities available at no cost to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers. We’ve now extended that availability to September 30, 2020 to ensure businesses, organizations, institutions, and educators continue to be supported during this time."
Build a better small business budget (Permanent Equity)
+ "We wrote and intended to release the following article about small business budgeting before the spread of COVID-19 became the full-blown crisis that it is today. While we’re all operating amid uncertainty, it’s still important -- perhaps even more important -- to have a financial plan that is realistic, simple, dynamic, logical, and useful, which is why we are still opting to share it. Given the current reality, a stretch budget isn’t something most businesses would find useful to put together right now, but an austerity budget focused on cash flow is highly relevant."
US Jobless claims top 20 million since start of shutdown (WSJ)
+ "Since mid-March about 13% of the labor force has sought jobless assistance, far outpacing any prior four-week stretch on record. The latest weekly data from the Labor Department released Thursday suggests that the wave of workers filing for benefits has passed its peak, with the total new number of claims filed in the week ended April 11 declining from higher totals that approached 7 million in each of the prior two weeks."
Wealth tips for founders (Daniel Gross)
+ This is a tidy list of tips and tricks for optimizing personal and business finances for founders.
7 behavioral shifts that will persist past the pandemic (Mohanbir Sawhney)
+ "My wife is a portfolio manager for an investment firm. She typically spends an hour in each direction to commute to work, even though she mostly works on a computer or phone connected to a network. Once she acquired the necessary hardware and set up her private workspace at home, she is more productive than she was before. She is also more relaxed without the stress of commuting. Her firm is now considering allowing employees to work from home permanently at least one day a week."
COVID-19 and forced experiments (Benedict Evans)
+ "Every time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud."
Global impacts of COVID-19 (Luke Wroblewski)
+ The virus outbreak is affecting every aspect of life: education, crime, work, transportation, traffic, pollution, sleep, exercise, the environment, consumption and more.
Lettuce left to die in California fields as produce demand withers under COVID-19 (Forbes)
+ "Normally at this time of year his farms that sprawl across more than 10,000 acres in California, Arizona and Mexico, would be sending out 120,000 boxes of iceberg lettuce, romaine, green and red leaf lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower a week. About 70% of that would be going to food service companies and 30% to supermarkets. “We’re lucky if we harvest much over 60% of what we have ready and scheduled to harvest the last couple weeks.”"
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