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IN THIS ISSUE
The tyranny of WhatsApp groups The perfect toy The opposite of self-pity |
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Good morning,
In CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets
that Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest, McKinsey consultants
Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra say that the best CEOs are
very structured about how they use their time.
They quote Ajay Banga, CEO of
Mastercard.
“Time is your single most valuable
resource, and it’s finite. The first two years were really hard. I’ve stumbled
my way through time management, to be completely honest. I started badly,
because I was trying to do everything—communicating, getting to know people,
leading change, finding the people I could build new relationships with, and
getting them to carry my message.” He continues, explaining what life is like
when things aren’t well in control: “I was travelling as well. It was hard to
sleep. I’d come back to my hotel room in Asia at 11:00 at night and I’d have
one hundred emails from the US waiting to be answered. And I’d promised my team
that I’d respond to every email and every phone call within 24 hours.”
Banga needed to get control of his
calendar to strike the right balance of focus on different business priority
areas, and to carve out some thinking time between meetings, especially when
travelling. To do so, he adopted a colour-coding system in his calendar. The
time he spent travelling, with clients, regulators, internal, and so on were
each assigned a different colour. “If I wasn’t spending time in the right
places in any of these areas, a quick look at the calendar would make that
abundantly clear,” he shares. “One of my chief of staff’s primary jobs was to
make sure that the balance of meetings was correct.”
But, one doesn’t need to jump into an
elaborate system of colour coding. The authors write:
“To keep on top of a busy schedule and
the demands of the job, some CEOs turn to an old-fashioned technique: making a
list. ‘Even now I handwrite quarterly objectives for myself,’ says Ecolab’s
Doug Baker. ‘What do I need to get done? It could be as simple as starting the
search for a leader. My objectives come out of the annual company objectives.
It’s basically what needs to get done to make the strategy happen. That’s how I
hold myself accountable.’ Baker codes his list of objectives. One star means
he’s working on it. A circle means it’s getting there. And a cross-out means
it’s done. ‘No doubt it’s rudimentary, but when a lot of objectives aren’t
started, I tell myself that I’ve got to get three things done before I head out
the door.’”
Have a great day!
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The tyranny of WhatsApp groups
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Even as we started to read Sirin Kale’s
first-person account in The Guardian on her experience with WhatsApp
groups, we nodded in silent acknowledgement. “If I were a woman of courage, I
would simply exit these chats as soon as I am added to them; but I feel the
weight of social obligation, and so I remain.”
Kale reports many people she spoke to
felt the same way. “I am not the only person to feel this way. Last month,
WhatsApp bowed to
public pressure, and announced that users will be able to exit groups invisibly, without
notifying other members of their decision. (The new policy has yet to be
implemented, however.) The conflict-avoidant among us rejoiced: now, finally,
we can slink out of groups without being perceived as rude. But 11 years after
the instant messaging app introduced a group chat feature, will we ever
truly escape the tyranny of the WhatsApp group?”
Her conversation with Danny Groner, a
marketing professional based in New York, is interesting. Each time he
attempted to exit a cousin’s group, someone added him back to it. So, “Groner
has hit on a workable compromise, at least for him: his wife monitors the group
on his behalf. ‘She is willing to sacrifice herself to be a part of it,’ he
says, ‘because it doesn’t bother her in the way it does me.’”
There are many like him and
the question is how is anyone to deal with it all? Richard Seymour, author of The
Twittering Machine has some perspective to offer here. “The basic thing it
does is colonise and eat away at bits of your attention here and there, until
gradually it starts to occupy a bigger and bigger part of it. Think about what
you can be doing in that time. There is something to be said for the idea that
not everything needs to be responded to, or deserves a response.”
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There are toys for every season. And
then there are some toys that appear to have stayed with us for a long time.
Just how do you build toys that pass on from one generation to another? This is
a question that hadn’t occurred to us until we read a deeply researched essay
on the theme by Matthew Braga in The Walrus.
“In the toy business, these products
are considered ‘classics.’ It’s an amorphous category filled with all sorts of
games and toys that have just a few things in common: namely, they are
survivors in an industry where trends rule all. The Rubik’s Cube is, in many
ways, the perfect example of a classic toy. More than 450 million are estimated
to have been sold since 1978, with up to tens of millions of units still moving
in a year… Often, classic toys encourage what academics say is high-quality
play, like problem solving or imaginative thinking. And, as some experts have
found, such toys are highly nostalgic—conjuring warm, fuzzy memories in the
parents who do the buying. This is how toys turn into tradition.
“It’s the reason parents buy Lego (to
encourage creativity and cognitive thinking) or dolls (to simulate caregiving).
It’s why most daycares and kindergarten classes have colourful blocks with the
alphabet printed on the sides: to teach, to set kids up for future success.”
Then there is nostalgia that plays a
role in keeping toys alive. But Jane Eva Baxter, who has researched the theme,
thinks that, “after a few generations, even something as timeless as a Rubik’s
Cube may struggle to stay relevant without the stories we tell to keep it
alive—stories that will inevitably be replaced by memories of newer, more
potent toys. ‘Eventually, that’s going to break down,’ she says. ‘Even the
object isn’t going to be able to hold that intangible chain together.’
“So what does stand the test of
time?”
Chris Byrne is an analyst who watches
the toy business closely. His answer? “Something timeless, Byrne says,
like . . . He-Man.
“He-Man?
“Yes, the blonde, buff hero—an icon of
’80s machismo—has been updated and reimagined for a new generation. He-Man and
his friends, the Masters of the Universe, still have adventures and wage war
against the evil Skeletor, who is intent on conquering Castle Grayskull, the
source of He-Man’s power. But, unlike in the original series, the spotlight now
equally shines on the powerful women who fight by He-Man’s side, and Black
heroes are also finally front and centre.”
Intriguing, isn’t it?
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The opposite of self-pity
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Team Founding Fuel
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