Books

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father

June 24, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Almost all leaders take office with an ambitious vision for their country or their organization, but only a few ever succeed in transforming that vision into reality. Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015,) the architect of modern Singapore, was one of them.

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's Founding Father

Lee was one of the most competent leaders the world has ever seen. An incorruptible Cambridge-educated lawyer, he was an autocratic pragmatist—a strong-willed, visionary leader who “got it done.” Under his leadership, Singapore metamorphosed itself from a tropical backwater with few natural resources to a first-world metropolis in just one generation. Today, Singapore’s per-capita GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity is the third highest in the world.

There is also a darker side to the Singapore story, however. The island-nation’s prosperity came at the cost of a rather authoritarian style of government that sometimes infringed on civil liberties. In a 1986 National Day Rally, Lee defended,

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

Singapore is not quite a dictatorship, but neither is it a full democracy. Its political system is skewed to let Lee’s party dominate the country’s polity. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Lee asserted, “It is not the business of the government to enable the opposition party to overturn us.”

A vast majority of Singaporeans today will overlook these civil-liberty concerns in the context of the country’s socio-political stability, public security, world-leading and affordable healthcare, free education, good housing for all, and high employment.

Singapore’s spectacular success is accepted as evidence, sometimes lamentably as justification, as with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, that a vibrant economy and sustained prosperity could blossom only under a totalitarian government. Singapore’s achievement is not likely replicable in its entirety elsewhere.

Over the last several months, I’ve read a few biographies and evaluations of Lee and his political leadership, including the memoirs The Singapore Story: From Third World to First (1998) and One Man’s View of the World (2013.) Here are a few key leadership lessons that Lee had to teach.

Vision, structure, and determination are paramount to efficacious leadership. Lee was a brilliant, clear-eyed, far-sighted statesman. Singapore’s political stability, rapid economic growth, and its raising affluence between 1959 and 1990 were not accidental, but the result of his dynamic leadership and disciplined social engineering. In The Singapore Story (1998,) he writes, “The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.”

Leadership entails tough, unpopular decisions. Lee was not afraid of being out of favor. “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind … you will go where the wind is blowing. And that’s not what I am in this for.” He famously forbade the sale of chewing gum to keep Singapore’s streets clean. He maintained capital punishment and caning. Singapore’s vandalism rules drew worldwide attention in 1994 when American teenager Michael Fay was caned for damaging cars and public property, in spite of appeals for clemency from the US media and government, including then-President Bill Clinton.

The litmus test of great leadership is results that matter. Many take issue with Lee’s methods, but few dispute the results he achieved. He was a pragmatist with devotion to no particular ideology. He once contemplated, “I was never a prisoner of any [socio-political] theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was: Would it work?” and “The acid test is in performance, not promises.”

Nurture a meritocracy. Lee’s commitment to meritocracy is a hallmark of Singapore’s national identity—social mobility is rooted in hard work and contribution regardless of ethnic differences. He devoted resources to cultivate an excellent education and health system, and developed a high-quality teacher workforce—all to maximize people’s potential. According to Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) he wrote, “It is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.” In recent years, though, the debate over rising social inequality has led to some reproach of Singapore’s meritocracy.

Attract and retain superior talent; pay them well. A key contributor to the wealth, stability, efficiency, and cleanliness of Singapore is its civil service—it’s one of the most proficient and least corrupt bureaucracies in the world. The government’s transparent policies have been a powerful enticement for people, businesses, and investments. Singapore has some of the highest paid civil servants in the world. The country is not content to let its top graduates all go straight to the private sector, so it pays what it takes to get them. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Lee’s immediate successor, told Singapore’s parliament on 3-Dec-1993, “If we do not pay ministers adequately, we will get inadequate ministers. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys for your ministers. The people will suffer, not the monkeys.”

One’s accomplishments become one’s legacy. Having a broad picture of the effect you want to have on the world will help you pinpoint the actions necessary to achieve it. Explaining his legacy, Lee wrote in Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011,) “I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

To judge leaders by their methods alone is to underrate their successes. While considering Lee’s legacy, one needs to acknowledge his achievements while refusing to close one’s eyes to certain lapses. Lee’s many critics considered him authoritarian—he imposed media restrictions and used detention without trial and defamation suits to quash critics of his government. Discussing a political opponent in Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) Lee justified, “If you are a troublemaker, it’s our job to politically destroy you. … Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That’s the way I had to survive in the past.” Lee was unapologetic about his heavy-handed style of governing, seeing it as necessitous to get Singapore to where it got.

Books I Read in 2018 & Recommend

December 31, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Self-Help: David Gelles’s Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out (2015) provides a remarkable account of the ever-increasing adoption of meditation-based mindfulness. It can promote stress-reduction and produce improvements in one’s overall emotional state and outlook on life. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018) explores chronobiology—how the quality of the decisions we make are correlated with their timing. Our biological clocks influence our cognitive abilities, moods, and attentiveness. [Read my summary.]
Business & Finance: Based on a popular Harvard Business School class on “acquisition entrepreneurship,” Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business (2017) is excellent manual for prospective entrepreneurs, employees of small businesses, financiers, and value-seeking investors. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Economics: Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (1999) argues that the extravagant consumption of the most affluent in our society has a ripple effect on everyone’s spending. The desire for many to indulge in luxury “possessions” is motivated less by the gratification they may bring than by what others are buying or want to buy. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Richard Carlson’s bestselling Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff (1997) reminds that there’s always a vantage point from which even the biggest stressor can be effectively dealt with. To deal with angst or anger, what we need is not some upbeat self-help prescriptions for changing ourselves, but simply a measure of perspective. [Read my summary.]
Leadership: John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018) is a remarkable expose on Theranos, the former high-flying Silicon Valley tech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes. How could the many smart people who funded, endorsed, defended, and wrote about this company never set aside their confidence in Holmes’s persuasions and looked beyond her claim of “30 tests from one drop of blood.” [Read my summary.]
Books & Reading: If you’re interested in sharpening up your ability to read, comprehend, and debate, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s bestselling How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (1972) is a goldmine of invaluable insights into the art of reading and debate. [Read my summary.]

See my book recommendations from 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

The four books I re-read every year are Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Phil Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

You may be interested in my article on how to process that pile of books you can’t seem to finish and my article on why we read self-help books.

Wish you all very enlightening reads in 2019! Recall the words of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

A Guide to Intelligent Reading: Summary of Mortimer Adler’s ‘How to Read a Book’

October 29, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re interested in sharpening up your ability to read, comprehend, and debate, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren‘s bestselling How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (1972; first published in 1940 under only Adler’s name) is the definitive guidebook.

The book stemmed from Adler’s belief that students of liberal education needed to be grounded in the “great ideas” of humankind, as represented in the canon of Western classic literature. To Adler, the art of reading well is deeply correlated to the art of thinking clearly, critically, and freely.

After the publication of How to Read a Book (1940,) Adler advanced his ideas on educational theory further by starting the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation. His later successes as a University of Chicago philosopher and an educator had an colossal influence on American education in the twentieth century.

Take-away Lesson #1: Active Reading is the Effort to Understand

How to Read a Book is divided into four parts:

Part one discusses the first two levels of reading: elementary reading (the level of reading taught in elementary schools and high schools) and inspectional reading (methodical skimming and cursory reading.)
Part two contains the third level of reading, analytical reading: classifying the author’s arguments and information, coming to terms with the book’s line of reasoning, establishing the author’s implications, criticizing the book, and critiquing the author.
Part three covers the particular nuances of reading various types of literature: practical books, creative literature, stories, plays, poems, history, philosophy, science, mathematics, and social science.
Part four of the book is earmarked to the ultimate goals of reading—viz., expanding one’s mind for further understanding—a goal facilitated by “synoptical reading.” Since, per Carl Jung, “one book opens another,” a determined reader should peruse several works on the same subject with the intention of establishing a broader outlook of the subject matter. According to Adler, syntopical reading is the hallmark of scholarship: “Knowing that more than one book is relevant to a particular question is the first requirement in any project of syntopical reading. Knowing which books should be read, in a general way, is the second requirement.”

The essence of reading’s comprehension and appreciation lies in how best the reader can answer four questions during the course of reading a book:

During elementary reading: “What does the book say?”
During inspectional reading: “What is the book about?” How the author is trying to say it? What methodologies, narratives, substantiations, and examples does he use?
During analytical reading: “What does the book mean?” And, “Are the author’s arguments and claims valid—in whole or part? What is the significance of the author’s theses?”
During syntopical reading: “How does this book compare with other books?” And, “What other sources of knowledge could be pursued?”

How to Read a Book concludes with two appendices: (1) a list of titles in the “Great Books of the Western World” program, and (2) a number of exercises and tests on all four levels of reading.

Take-away Lesson #2: A Reader Must Suspend Judgment Until He Can Express the Author’s Positions

“You must be able to say, with reasonable certainty, ‘I understand,’ before you can say any one of the following things: ‘I agree,’ or ‘I disagree,’ or ‘I suspend judgment.'”
“Students who plainly do not know what the author is saying seem to have no hesitation in setting themselves up as his judges. They not only disagree with something they do not understand but, what is equally bad, they also often agree to a position they cannot express intelligibly in their own words.” As I’ve elaborated on this blog before (here, here, here, here, and here,) you must be able to accurately state—in your own words—the position of those you’re debating, before you can challenge them.
“When you disagree, do so reasonably, and not disputatiously or contentiously.” And, “Most people think that winning the argument is what matters, not learning the truth. He who regards conversation as a battle can win only by being an antagonist, only by disagreeing successfully, whether he is right or wrong.”

Take-away Lesson #3: Reading Well is Better Than Reading Widely

The objective of reading a book is to evolve to the level of the author: “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” Additionally, “Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.”
Read a “difficult” book multiple times. Each time you read a specific book, you’ll discover more—new ideas, new concepts, and deeper truths.

“In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.”
“It is generally desirable to skim even a book that you intend to read carefully, to get some idea of its form and structure.”
“Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.”

Regarding the “ignorance of those who have misread many books”, Adler asserts that such people, “are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well.”

Recommendation: Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading is a smart reading that should be on everybody’s library. It is a goldmine of invaluable insights into the art of reading, debate, and persuasion.

Summary of Richard Carlson’s “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff”

September 4, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stress follows a peculiar principle: when life hits us with big crises—the death of a loved one or a job loss—we somehow find the inner strength to endure these upheavals in due course. It’s the little things that drive us insane day after day—traffic congestion, awful service at a restaurant, an overbearing coworker taking credit for your work, meddling in-laws, for example.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the many irritations of life. We overdramatize and overreact to life’s myriad tribulations. Under the direct influence of anguish, our minds are bewildered and we feel disoriented. This creates stress, which makes the problems more difficult to deal with.

The central thesis of psychotherapist Richard Carlson’s bestselling Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff… And It’s All Small Stuff (1997) is this: to deal with angst or anger, what we need is not some upbeat self-help prescriptions for changing ourselves, but simply a measure of perspective.

Perspective helps us understand that there’s an art to understand what we should let go and what we should concern ourselves with. As I mentioned in my article on the concept of opportunity cost, it is important to focus our efforts on the important stuff, and not waste time on the insignificant and incidental things.

I’ve previously written about my favorite 5-5-5 technique for gaining perspective and guarding myself against anger erupting: I remove myself from the offending environment and contemplate if whatever I’m getting worked up over is of importance. I ask myself, “Will this matter in 5 days? Will this matter in 5 months? Will this matter in 5 years?”

Carlson stresses that there’s always a vantage point from which even the biggest stressor can be effectively dealt with. The challenge is to keep making that shift in perspective. When we achieve that “wise-person-in-me” perspective, our problems seem more controllable and our lives more peaceful.

Carlson’s prescriptions aren’t uncommon—we can learn to be more patient, compassionate, generous, grateful, and kind, all of which will improve the way we feel about ourselves and the way that other people feel when they are around us.

Some of Carlson’s 100 recommendations are trite and banal—for example, “make peace with imperfection,” “think of your problems as potential teachers,” “remember that when you die, your ‘in-basket’ won’t be empty,” and “do one thing at a time.” Others are more edifying:

Let others have the glory
Let others be “right” most of the time
Become aware of your moods and don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the low ones
Look beyond behavior
Every day, tell at least one person something you like, admire, or appreciate about them
Argue for your limitations, and they’re yours
Resist the urge to criticize
Read articles and books with entirely different points of view from your own and try to learn something

Carlson’s succinct insights have hit home with legions of the hurried and the harried. He became a bestselling author and a sought-after motivational speaker. Before his tragic death in 2006 at age 45, Carson followed up “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff…” with some 20 tacky spinoffs intended particularly for spouses, parents, teenagers, new-weds, employees, and lovers.

How to Value, Price, and Buy a Small Business [Book Summary]

June 26, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Beyond the capital markets and startups, I’ve been exploring buying a suitable small business to invest in and operate. To inform myself with the process of searching and valuing privately-held establishments, I recently perused Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff‘s resourceful HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company (2017.)

The authors of this HBR Guide teach a popular Harvard Business School class on “acquisition entrepreneurship.” Their curriculum trains self-employment-inclined MBA students to search, negotiate, and buy an established business and become an entrepreneur-CEO within a year or two.

According to the authors, MBA students are drawn to their class by the prospect of a meaningful leadership responsibility earlier in their careers, as opposed to slowly climbing the corporate ladder or taking on the great risk of starting a company from scratch and establishing a viable business model.

The first section of the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business can help you decide if entrepreneurship is a good match to your temperament, lifestyle, work-experience, and career ambitions. The largest part of the book provides a comprehensive roadmap for all aspects of acquiring a business—bankrolling the search process, deal-sourcing, managing risk, organizing equity- and debt-financing, running due diligence processes, structuring the purchase, and closing the deal. The final section of the book discusses changing the leadership over and transitioning into operating management.

Reflection: Is Acquisition Entrepreneurship Right for You?

Self-employment is not for everyone. Entrepreneurs need to be smart, driven, business-savvy, self-motivated, strategic, resilient, persuasive, and be able to deal with uncertainty.
On top of the challenges of self-employment, acquiring and operating a small-business will require reaching out, projecting self-confidence, and persuading people you don’t know—business brokers, financiers, investors, regulators, sellers, employees, and customers.
During your exploration of what business to buy, you’ll have to quickly learn about unfamiliar industries, markets, and companies. As a leader, you must be able to develop cross-functional expertise quickly.

Searching: A Full-time Job in Itself

Plan to commit full-time for six months to two years to raise funds from financiers, identify and vet potential acquisition targets, and negotiate with sellers on a realistic purchase price. Afterward, plan for no less than three more months to perform due diligence and complete the transaction.
“When you are seeking out a business to buy, you might face months when you work 12 hours a day and simply not find a desirable prospect. It’s a frustrating experience with lots of effort and no reward.”
Arrange for debt and equity financing from potential backers and risk-sharing partners. Contact affluent folks in your network and investors who specialize in small-businesses. The networks of people you bring together to help your mission can also lend a hand during the deal making and the due diligence processes.
To find potential businesses to buy, try reaching out directly to businesses whose owners may be inclined to sell. Engage small business brokers (there’re some 3,000 small business brokers and intermediaries in North America,) or comb through databases of small businesses for sale.
For potential sellers, look for business owners who, after building their firms over the decades, are approaching retirement and don’t have an inheritor interested in running the business. Many aging business owners are determined to ensure that their businesses live on.

Seek Enduringly Profitable Businesses: Recurring Customers and Predictable Revenue

Look for “enduringly profitable businesses”—stable, slow-growth companies in dull-and-boring industries (such as sandblasting, equipment maintenance, industrial repair and overhaul, window-cleaning, service-providers) in small, defensible niche markets.
Seek businesses whose business-to-business customers are unlikely to switch vendors because the product or service their customers buy isn’t a big part of the costs of their business. Consequently, they’re not motivated to shop around for lower-cost vendors and squeeze margins.
Focus on businesses with yearly revenues of $5 million to $15 million and cash flows of $750,000 to $3 million.
Avoid promising start-ups and risky turnaround opportunities; “it is tempting to imagine buying a troubled business or one with uneven performance, because the purchase price would be very low. But we strongly advise against it, because you’ll have to reinvent the business model and doing so is a very difficult and risky endeavor. Instead, buy a profitable business with an established model for success—one that is profitable year after year.”
Avoid high-growth businesses because “high growth means that your new customers will quickly outnumber your existing ones. Because new customers bring new demands, there are many ways to get in trouble. New customers are, well, new; they have no loyalty to the company and no history. High growth requires great management effort. It also absorbs money rapidly, and raising that money puts a strain on the business and its owner. A rapidly growing firm also attracts competitors, which see the expanding market and the opportunity to attract new customers. So, in a high-growth business, you could work hard and still fail if you cannot keep pace with your competitors. And even if your business survives, you might find that competition has forced you to sell at low prices, so you enjoy little financial reward after all. Making this all the harder, the seller will demand a much higher price for a business that has the potential to grow quickly.”
Avoid technology-driven companies (they face shifting customer needs and therefore demand constant reinvention,) cyclical business, and businesses with well-established competitors.
Small business-owners usually don’t hire large consulting firms or investment banks to sell their businesses. Their businesses are too small to appeal to private equity firms. “We think it makes sense to buy a business with between $750,000 and $2.0 million in annual pretax profits. … At the upper end of our size range—$2 million or more in profitability—we find that institutional investors, like smaller private-equity firms, start to become interested and that competition raises the purchase price, reducing the financial benefits of owning the business.”
“EBITDA margin (EBITDA/revenue) ≥ 20% for services and manufacturing or 15% for distribution and wholesale”

A Checklist for Enduringly Profitable Businesses

Initial Filters:

Is the prospect consistently profitable?

Is it an established business instead of a startup or turnaround?

Is it in the right size range?

Is it located in a place you are willing to live?

Do you have the skills to manage it?

Does it fit your lifestyle?

Deeper Filters:

Is the prospect enduringly profitable?

Is the owner serious about selling the business?

Seek Enduringly Profitable Businesses: Recurring Customers and Predictable Revenue

Valuing the Company and Negotiating a Deal

Use the company’s past financial information to project future earnings and your return on investment. Then decide on how much you should pay for a small business: “You’ll need to base the offer price on the general range of 3x–5x EBITDA.” Adjust the multiple for profit margins and growth prospects.
Run a primary due diligence—“a focused period of rapid learning in preparation for making an offer. This is when you’ll test the seller’s initial claims and verify the information that has made the business appealing to you. … You’re looking for any reason that you might not want to acquire this business.”
Finance using equity and debt. “Visit banks and approach your investor network to raise money for the acquisition. You should be prepared to provide information about the business and its industry, details on the due diligence that you’ve done, your financial projections, and the deal terms that you are proposing.”
Once your offer has been accepted after negotiations, run a confirmatory due diligence “in which the company’s records will be fully open to you. You will typically have around 90 days to work with your accountant and attorney to check for any inconsistencies and red flags. … This can be an extremely nerve-racking time for both the buyer and the seller, so it’s important to be patient and calm.”

Transitioning into Leadership and Emphasizing Business-as-Usual

As part of the negotiated deal, try to get the seller to stick around for 3 to 6 months to help you in the transition.
“After closing the sale, you should focus on four tasks: introducing yourself to all your managers and employees, meeting with external stakeholders, communicating the transition plan to everyone, and taking control of your cash flow.”
“The most common trouble for small firms under new owners is running out of cash. … So set up a process whereby you approve all payments before they go out, and review your accounts-receivable balances at least weekly. You should also implement a 90-day rolling cash-flow forecast.”
Meet with all the constituencies and reassure them that they won’t see any immediate changes. Lay emphasis on “your overarching goals for the company—for example, excellent customer service, commitment to quality, a satisfying work environment—and encourage people to stay focused on their work.”
Visit every major customer as soon as you can. Keep your ears open for ideas to improve your product- and service-offerings.
Don’t make any big changes early on, get to know the business, and be very respectful of all the constituents—they know more about the business than you do.

Recommendation: Read ‘HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business’ for a Very Good Introduction on How to Buy and Organize Finance for a Business

Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business is excellent manual for prospective entrepreneurs, employees of small businesses, financiers, and value-seeking investors. You will also become acquainted about interactions with bankers, brokers, sellers, accountants, and attorneys you meet while searching for a business to buy.

How to Elevate Timing from Art to Science: Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’

May 29, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018) explores how the quality of the decisions we make are correlated with their timing.

Pink is an expert on motivation and management, and an author of such best-selling books as Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) and To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012.) He describes When as not so much a “how-to” guide for making the most of our lives, but as a “when-to” manual for individual and group work.

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

Pink’s principal theme is chronobiology—the science of how the body’s biological clocks can influence our cognitive abilities, moods, and attentiveness.

Drawing on scientific research on the science of timing, Pink concludes that the mental acuity, creativity, productivity, temper, and frames of mind for most folks follow an identifiable “peak-trough-rebound” template. Most people get their best work done in the mornings, suffer a trough of mental weariness in the afternoon, and experience a late-evening burst:

Our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. … [R]esearch has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Needless to say, this “peak-trough-rebound” phenomenon is fairly universal but differs among individuals. There are “larks” who do remarkably well in the mornings and “owls” who tend to embrace their late night productivity habits.

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

According to Pink, “peak-trough-rebound” is attributable to the body’s relatively low temperature when we wake up. The increasing body temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness, which consequently “enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction.” As the morning evolves, we become more focused and alert until we hit a peak. Then our energy level wanes and our alertness declines, only to be restored in early evening.

Pink concludes that mornings are good for decision-making and that errors increase in the afternoons. Studies recommend that we schedule surgery in the mornings when surgeons tend to make fewer mistakes and avoid petitioning a traffic ticket in the afternoons because judges tend to be less considerate than in the mornings.

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

Pink emphasizes the risks of clouded judgment that characterizes the afternoon “trough.” As an example, Pink speculates that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 was about the time of day—it’s captain’s ill-fated decisions were made in the afternoon following a night of no sleep.

With case studies of error-reduction in hospital operating rooms, Pink suggests “vigilance breaks” (quick team huddles for reviewing checklists and verifying courses of action) and restorative breaks (naps, short physical activities, or mental diversions) during troughs to “recharge and replenish, whether we’re performing surgery or proofreading advertising copy.”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Based on the mentioned studies’ correlations and causations, Pink offers advice further than daily scheduling—from marriage to switching careers and sports:

The best time to perform a specific task depends on the nature of that task. Identify your chronotype (Pink offers an online survey,) understand your task, and decide on the most suitable time. Do not let mundane tasks sneak into your peak period. Additionally, if you’re a boss, understand your employees’ work patterns and “allow people to protect their peak.”
Tasks that need creativity and a flash of insight (rather than analytical perspicacity) are best done during the late-evening recovery period when the mind tends to be less inhibited and more open to inventive associations.
Harness the psychological power of beginnings—New Year’s Days, birthdays, and anniversaries are all natural times to make resolutions and start working on goals. Other opportunities for fresh starts include the first of the month, the beginning of the week, and the first day of spring.
“Lunch breaks offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—especially for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”
Afternoon coffee followed by 10- to 20-minute naps and leisurely daily walks are “not niceties, but necessities.” Drink a cup of coffee just before a nap—the 25 minutes it takes for the caffeine to kick in is the optimal length of a restorative siesta.
Morning workouts are best for people aiming to burn fat, lose weight, or build sustainable exercise habits. Folks trying to reach personal bests should seek out the afternoons, when physical performance tends to reach its zenith.
Studies suggest that people are most likely to run their first marathons at ages ending in 9—but those ages are also when people are most prone to cheating on their spouses.
According to one survey, switching jobs every three to five years in your early career can lead to the biggest pay increases.

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing offers little fresh substance. Many of the cited studies’ implications, causations, and correlations are open to debate.

A speed-read of When, especially of the takeaway points at the end of each chapter, can offer some practical tips about when you are likely to be creative, focused, and least error-prone.

Parenthetically, the third and the final section on “Synching and Thinking” is out-of-place to Pink’s principal theme of timing, even if the case study of the synchronized effort that constitutes the Mumbai Dabbawala lunchbox delivery system is interesting. Pink explains that the importance of “syncing up” with people around you through a collective sense of identity and a shared purpose is “a powerful way to lift your physical and psychological well-being.”

Complement skimming Daniel Pink’s When with Michael Breus’s The Power of When (2016; Talk at Google.)

How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job—Book Summary of “Mindful Work” by David Gelles

April 4, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mindfulness Simply Means Being Aware and Being Present

Most religions and spiritual practices encourage some sort of meditation and mindfulness. However, the specific practice of bringing your attention and your focus to the present moment, and observing and accepting the experience as is, is most commonly associated with the Eastern meditative traditions.

Mindfulness is an element of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path to nirvana (enlightenment.) The Buddha taught that a mistaken perception of reality inevitably leads to suffering. Mindfulness is the primary means of bridging that gap between how things seem to be and how they really are.

Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

In its secular form, mindfulness is but a practice of consciousness. It is heedfulness or awareness of your subjective thoughts, behaviors, and experiences—without evaluating or judging them.

Mindfulness can help you, through direct experience, become more comfortable with your life and to be better able to cope with the problems and issues in your daily life.

The heightened mental receptivity, together with an increased sensitivity to the environment, better openness to new information, and a sharper decision-making are understood to produce a great number of physiological and psychological benefits.

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

In a world that barrages us with information and demands us to be incessantly active and reactive, mindlessness is being embraced increasingly in the mainstream culture. As a supplement to yoga, and without any specific religious association, mindfulness is today practiced as a way to prevent being swept away in an avalanche of thought, activity, and emotion.

David Gelles’s Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out provides a remarkable account of the ever-increasing adoption of meditation-based mindfulness. Prominent American corporations such as Google, General Mills, Aetna, and Ford have built mindfulness-themed employee wellness initiatives to foster a happier, more productive workplace.

Gelles brings a business journalist’s objectivity to draw together his experience of practicing meditation for 15 years. He also reviews scientific research that has evidenced how people who have a mindfulness routine are less distractible and better at concentrating, even when multi-tasking.

Scientific research is making the benefits clear. Studies show that mindfulness strengthens our immune systems, bolsters our concentrative powers, and rewires our brains. Just as lifting weights at the gym makes our muscles stronger, so too does practicing mindfulness make our minds stronger. And the most tried-and-true method of cultivating mindfulness is through meditation.

Gelles discusses the teachings of many key influencers in the development of the mindfulness movement. The rising popularity of meditative mindfulness in the West has its genesis in a retreat organized in the ’70s by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk and teacher. One of his attendees, the University of Massachusetts psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, integrated Hanh’s teachings with yoga and medical science, and created the popular eight-week “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” course. Over the decades, other psychologists developed mindfulness-based interventions that allow patients to observe their cognitive and behavioral processes.

Gelles summarizes much of the recent research that has confirmed the centuries-old Eastern wisdom about mindfulness practices. Developments in contemplative neuroscience have corroborated the effects that meditative mindfulness has on supporting the body’s immune system and counteracting the symptoms of burnout.

Indeed, mindfulness seems to change the brain in some specific ways. Broadly speaking, mindfulness increases activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, an evolutionarily recent region of the brain that is important for many of the things that make us human. This region is the seat of much of our higher-order thinking-our judgment, decision making, planning, and discernment. The prefrontal cortex is also an area that seems to be more active when we are engaged in pro-social behavior—things like compassion, empathy, and kindness.

Some studies have shown that folks who practice meditation have a less perturbed amygdala. That means that the brain is less vulnerable to interpreting many flight-or-fight stimuli as threats and triggering anger, stress, or a defense reaction.

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

Meditative Mindfulness in the Emerging Context of Consumer Culture

Gelles warns that capitalism and commercialization could, due to many increasingly-visible entrepreneurial teachers, complicate something as seemingly simple as observing one’s breath and paying attention.

I’m sympathetic to the skeptics, who worry that a noble practice is being quickly corrupted by modern marketing. But having witnessed mindfulness in action for fifteen years, it is clear to me that rarely, if ever, does exposure to meditation make someone a worse person. On balance, the folks who become more mindful tend to be happier, healthier, and kinder. Nevertheless, it is worth addressing the various critiques of mainstream mindfulness, if only to put them to rest.

…

Even today, some of the most popular gurus in America have demonstrated a penchant for bling that strikes many as being out of touch with their mantra of inner peace. Bikram Choudhury, the litigious yoga teacher, cuts the figure of an oligarch, driving around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce and sporting a gold-encrusted Rolex. A Thai monk with a taste for Louis Vuitton luggage and private jets had his assets frozen by authorities in 2013.

A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

Recommendation: Read David Gelles’s Mindful Work. This helpful tome offers a succinct rundown of the benefits of mindfulness. In an era where our culture is increasingly questioning the frenzy of activity and reactivity that has entrenched the current way of life, mindfulness will continue to draw many mainstream practitioners for its ability to promote stress-reduction and produce improvements in one’s overall emotional state and outlook on life.

Indeed, mindfulness is about much more than simply observing sensations as they occur. It is about what happens to our minds, hearts, and actions when we deliberately continue these practices for weeks, months, and years. Mindfulness is a practice that allows us to achieve more sustainable happiness and to grow more compassionate. And over time, mindfulness requires one to confront thorny concepts like impermanence and compassion.

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

March 13, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

Appearances are Important

Your office and desk must seem organized. A messy office or a cluttered desk can not only impede your space and cramp your style, but also affect how your peers and superiors perceive you.

Clutter can drag you down, sap your energy, and reduce your efficiency. However, if clutter is your style, you should have every right to work the way you like to work.

A messy desk isn’t a professional flaw, but clutter may reflect of your competence. Untidiness can give an impression that your job may be too much for you to handle, or that you can’t get your thoughts and information organized.

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

As opposed to sorting through everything in your drawers, desktop, and filing systems, consider removing the whole lot somewhere else and only allowing the important things back.

Stephanie Winston, author of The Organized Executive, famously wrote that each clutter represents a decision not made. In this bestselling book, she recommends the “TRAF” system, a precursor to the “Inbox Zero” discipline that I’ve previously discussed on this blog. TRAF is an acronym for the four decisions you must make on each piece of paper that arrives at your desk. You can Toss it away, Refer or delegate it to someone else, Act on it, or File it if it absolutely deserves to be achieved. Don’t keep anything merely for reasons of habit or for sentimental reasons.
Don’t start tomorrow with today’s mess. Spending ten minutes at the end of your workday gearing your desk up for the next day can help you stay organized.

After you’ve taken steps to reorganize your office, sustain your system. Look for ways to further streamline and fine-tune your organization framework.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

Taking too much time to organize can be just as ineffective—don’t end up spending so much time organizing that you don’t have the time to do anything else. (This is one of the shortcomings of David Allen’s Getting This Done system.) Learn to put things away as soon as you’re done working on them.

Being organized not only means less time wasted looking for things, but also rewards you with a greater sense of control and a favorable professional image.

Writing Clearly and Concisely

February 13, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In my judgment, most books should be booklets, most booklets essays, most essays articles, most articles paragraphs, and most paragraphs should be statements.

It is far more important to write well than most folks realize. Writing not only communicates ideas, it also generates them—in the minds of both the author and the reader.

Effective Writing is a Lifelong Pursuit

One of my 2018 goals is to peruse two classic texts on writing clearly and concisely: William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (1918) and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (1980.)

Strunk and White affirm that brevity is the essence of good writing in these three sentences:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Succinctness, simplicity, and humanity are also dominant objectives in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.

On Writing Well is a celebrated guide to concise, unmistakable, and well-crafted writing. The book has sold several million copies worldwide, and is a required reading at many a university course.

Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though most people seem to think it does … Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

Zinsser’s central premise is that good writing is the result of hard work, not inborn talent. The book’s particular strength is in Zinsser’s selection of paragraphs by great writers, and his instruction on how to learn from those writers: “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”

On Writing Well is a must-read for anyone who writes and desires to his or her prose. Read Derek Sivers’ helpful synopsis of the book.

Books I Read in 2017 & Recommend

January 5, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Management & Leadership: Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management. Drucker’s conception for the organization as an integral part of society, his elucidation of the nature of managerial and leadership tasks, his emphasis on good governance, and his prescription for effective leadership have served managers well over the decades. The Practice of Management is one of those books that Drucker’s admirers tend to appreciate more with every successive reading. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours. A learning addict’s approach to learning new things to a good-enough level—but not to perfection. “In my experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice … to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well. … It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn a language write a novel, paint a portrait, start a business, or fly an airplane. If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.” [Read my summary.]
Management: Leigh Branham’s The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. Discusses many ideas for employee “engagement practices” in great specificity to help managers and leaders keep their antennae up for signs of employees’ bitterness and discontent, and correct before they lose their best and brightest people. This practical volume can also help employees discuss and resolve their workplace needs and aspirations. [Read my summary.]
Influence & Leadership: Jeswald Salacuse’s Leading Leaders. “You need to take account of the interests of the persons you would lead. Leaders will follow you not because of your position or charisma, but because they consider it in their interest. Your job as a leader is to convince them that their interest lies with you.” [Read my summary.]
Education & Teaching: Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind. To enable the highest degrees of understanding, any skills instruction must be systematically reinforced by instruction in which the deployment of the skills makes holistic sense. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Habitually, your narratives and emotions dictating your actions. Frankl’s key message is that amid the various stimuli and responses, you have the freedom to choose your responses to any given set of circumstances. Frankl also introduces “logotherapy,” the psychotherapy system he conceived to help you uncover a sense of purpose in life and survive nearly anything. [Read my summary and my notes on Frankl’s exposition of the meaning of suffering.)
Biography & Entrepreneurship: Howard Schultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It. According to the ‘founder’ of Starbucks, Starbucks succeeded because the company offers more than just good coffee. The extraordinary growth of Starbucks derives from the corporate values he endorsed, viewing people as being more important than profits. The Starbucks marvel is not only about economic growth and brand success, but also about its socially conscious corporate ethos. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Beyond the tome’s gossipy narrative of Mayer’s management style, readers of this page-turner will be interested in Yahoo leadership’s strategic and tactical missteps. Particularly fascinating are how Yahoo missed opportunities to buy Google and Facebook when they were mere startups, the rebuffing of an acquisition bid from Microsoft, a lack of strategic focus, the leadership skirmishes with activist investors, the revolving door at the CEO’s office, and an Asian-asset drama. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Donald Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure. Celebrated Coca-Cola executive Donald Keough offers a predictable, yet insightful—even if circuitous—exploration of ten (and a bonus) leadership mistakes. A worthwhile read for its many nuggets of business history, including his take on the infamous New Coke debacle. [Read my summary.]
Management & Leadership: Jeffrey K. Liker’s The Toyota Way. Toyota’s long-term standing as the epitome of quality production is undeniable. According to Liker, the genius of Toyota lies in how it has steadily institutionalized common-sense principles for waste reduction and continuous improvement. “Toyota is process oriented and consciously and deliberately invests long term in systems of people, technology and processes that work together to achieve high customer value.” [Read my summary.]

Also, my book recommendations from 2016, 2015, and 2014.

You may be interested in my article on how to process that pile of books you can’t seem to finish and my article on why we read self-help books.

Wish you all very enlightening reads in 2018! Recall the words of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

Books

Wondering what to read next?

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Take-away Lesson #1: Active Reading is the Effort to Understand

Take-away Lesson #2: A Reader Must Suspend Judgment Until He Can Express the Author’s Positions

Take-away Lesson #3: Reading Well is Better Than Reading Widely

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Wondering what to read next?

Reflection: Is Acquisition Entrepreneurship Right for You?

Searching: A Full-time Job in Itself

Seek Enduringly Profitable Businesses: Recurring Customers and Predictable Revenue

A Checklist for Enduringly Profitable Businesses

Valuing the Company and Negotiating a Deal

Transitioning into Leadership and Emphasizing Business-as-Usual

Recommendation: Read ‘HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business’ for a Very Good Introduction on How to Buy and Organize Finance for a Business

Wondering what to read next?

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Wondering what to read next?

Mindfulness Simply Means Being Aware and Being Present

Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

Meditative Mindfulness in the Emerging Context of Consumer Culture

A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

Wondering what to read next?

Appearances are Important

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

Wondering what to read next?

Effective Writing is a Lifelong Pursuit

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?