If you find you can’t reconcile major differences – especially in values – consider whether the relationship is worth preserving.
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.
Recognize that you don’t need to make judgments about everything.
People who are one way on the inside and another way on the outside become conflicted and often lose touch with their own values. It’s difficult for them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be their best.
It is a common mistake to move in a nanosecond from identifying a tough problem to proposing a solution.
Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them. When determining an acceptable rate of improvement for something, it is its level in relation to the rate of change that matters.
Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.
Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design.
Be imprecise. Understand the concept of “by-and-large” and use approximations. Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.
I believe that everything that happens comes about because of cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time.
From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation.
By recognizing the higher-level consequences nature optimizes for, I’ve come to see that people who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision making.
Go back before you go forward.
Avoid staying too distant. You need to know your people extremely well, provide and receive regular feedback, and have quality discussions.
Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. I ask each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief description of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections.
I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them.
Play jazz with people with whom you are compatible but who will also challenge you.
Have the clearest possible reporting lines and delineations of responsibilities.
You should be able to delegate the details.