Hastings’ Success, Cote’s Reflections and Cognitive Biases
Try this experiment - cut your mobile access for 45 mins in the morning and equally at the tail end of the day. How does that affect how much you read on the phone, i.e. are you consuming marginally less or substantially less?
When I did this experiment, which has been going on for the last two weeks, I read substantially less on the phone. That meant that I became even more selective.
With that background, here are some of the best pieces that I came across:
Netflix is riding on a wave of success. Its share prices are peaking, and subscribers growing. As it grows though, the challenge to keep innovating is fast becoming a critical one – or so this piece in The Economist claims. It touches upon the famed culture of Netflix, which is based on the concept ‘hire the best and let them get on with it’. Average net sales per employee is a heady $2.6mil. While it has worked as Netflix has grown organically in the Silicon Valley, it will not remain so as it becomes more global, adds more employees, and potentially acquires other players. Some cracks have already started to appear, as the (desirable) attrition rate has fallen and working from home is not turning out to be fun. But there is no denying that Hastings has managed to create and (so far) retain a culture that will inspire many other companies. And his book about these principles – encapsulated in No Rules Rules – is the one I am looking forward to reading.
Talking of books, yet another business book that is getting rave reviews is one by David Cote, Honeywell’s outgoing chief. It’s called Winning Now, Winning Later. While most memoirs of outgoing CEOs tend to be, let’s face it, boring, Cote’s book promises to be different. According to this review in the Fortune, Cote’s book is different for it tries to address the fundamental challenge of how to set a strategy for long term growth, while showing results in the short term. The Fortune article nicely captures the working principles that Cote deployed to turn Honeywell around. For instance, reserving as many as 20 days in the year just for thinking about the strategy and setting long term vision for the company, keeping a blue book to jot down the ideas, and making unannounced visits to sites to study the as-is situation. 95% of success is about getting the strategy right, according to Cote. “If you get the strategy and direction right, you can spend 95% of the time in improving execution, which in turn lowers cost and frees up even more cash both for quarterly profits and new investments,” he writes in the book. That one thought alone made me add the book to my reading list.
And finally, stumbled across this super interesting infographic on ’20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions’. While I have most likely experienced all of them at some point, the ones that I need to watch out for constantly are: blind-spot bias, choice-supportive bias, and recency bias.
A quote that I came across last week:
“At some point, the only time you’ll have to worry about is the time you’ve wasted”
