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The Crucible Of Leadership

Yesterday evening, the Gotham Gal and I went to see Jerry Colonna do a reading from his recent book, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.

As we were standing around chatting waiting for Jerry to go on and start reading, Jerry mentioned that he once wrote a guest post for AVC. So I went back and read it this morning.

It is great and I am reposting it for all of you to read this morning.

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The Crucible of Leadership

Work is difficulty and drama, a high-stakes game in which our identity, our self-esteem, and our ability to provide are mixed inside us in volatile, sometimes explosive ways…Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves. David WhyteCrossing The Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

Fred started this series inspired by Bijan who urged folks to “invest in your team, help them become better managers.” The topic, said Fred with his flair for understatement, “is very important.” Over the weeks, different people looked at the process of building the capacity to actually lead—putting the team in place, scaling people, everyone argued may be the hardest part of building the company.

To me, the hardest part of scaling people is learning to lead your self.

The Crucible

They often come to me, their coach, because they don’t have any place else to put the feelings. They’ll sit on my couch, or pace while they talk on the phone, pausing as we grapple with issue after issue after issue. The common denominator is always people. When I first take on a client I warn that I don’t have a magic wand. Nevertheless their wish for some elixir to mend their relationships is heart-breakingly visceral.

When they start, they often think the hardest part is figuring out what to do but they’re inevitably knocked on their ass by the task of leading.  And when they make mistakes–when they fail to lead–their identity, self-esteem, and ability to provide—as David Whyte notes–sometimes explode.

We all too often break ourselves in the work of becoming a CEO, a manager, a leader.

The only answer, the only balm against the inevitable existential pain of becoming the leader we were born to be is to see the lessons implicit in the practice of becoming.

“In the course of studying how geeks and geezers became leaders,” writes Warren Bennis in the introduction to his classic, On Becoming a Leader, “…I discovered that their leadership always emerged after some rite of passage, often a stressful one. We call the experience that produces leaders a crucible…the crucible is an essential element of the process of becoming a leader…Some magic takes place in the crucible of leadership…The individual brings certain attributes into the crucible and emerges with new, improved leadership skills. Whatever is thrown at them, leaders emerge from their crucibles stronger and unbroken.”

The magic, the alchemy, occurs when what we do mixes with who we are and is cooked by the heat of what we believe.

Take as an example a client I worked with intensely over the last few weeks. She and a co-founder have been killing each other (okay, I have a flair for the overstatement…still, they have both been getting sick with a host of ailments—migraines and stomach problems). The arguments had gotten so bad that neither could stand to be in the same room with the other. Even I was exasperated. During one late night call, I asked my client to forget, for a moment, whether her co-founder was right or wrong. “I don’t care who’s right,” I said with my voice rising. “The only thing we have to focus on is what are you supposed to be learning from this.”

There was a long silence. I thought, “Okay. You’ve really pushed her too far. You and your woo-woo ‘lessons in the pain’ crap.” But then: alchemy. She opened up. “This is really shameful to admit,” she began, “but I know I’m a pain in the ass because I have to be right, all the time. I know it’s wrong but I can’t stop myself.”

And with that we had something to work with. I pressed her: Given this tendency, what do you really believe? What values do you hold? What kind of company do you want to build? And what kind of adult do you want to be?

Over the next few weeks, on guard for her need to be right, we carefully went to work changing her approach to the co-founder. For her, the crucible moment came in facing her shame, acknowledging who she really has been and as a result she got to choose how she wanted to manage and who she wanted to be.

We forge our truest identity by facing our fears, our prejudices, our passions, and the source of our aggression.

The Buddhists teach that for the steadfast warrior to emerge, we’ve got to break open our hearts to what is.

Eat Me If You Wish

“One day,” begins a story re-told by Aura Glaser in the latest issue of Tricycle Magazine, “[the Buddhist saint] Milarepa left his cave to gather firewood, and when he returned he found that his cave had been taken over by demons. There were demons everywhere! His first thought upon seeing them was, ‘I have got to get rid of them!’ He lunges toward them, chasing after them, trying forcefully to get them out of his cave. But the demons are completely unfazed. In fact, the more he chases them, the more comfortable and settled-in they seem to be. Realizing that his efforts to run them out have failed miserably, Milarepa opts for a new approach and decides to teach them the dharma.

“If chasing them out won’t work, then maybe hearing the teachings will change their minds and get them to go. So he takes his seat and begins… After a while he looks around and realizes all the demons are still there…At this point Milarepa lets out a deep breath of surrender, knowing now that these demons will not be manipulated into leaving and that maybe he has something to learn from them. He looks deeply into the eyes of each demon and bows, saying, ‘It looks like we’re going to be here together. I open myself to whatever you have to teach me.’

“In that moment all the demons but one disappear. One huge and especially fierce demon, with flaring nostrils and dripping fangs, is still there. So Milarepa lets go even further. Stepping over to the largest demon, he offers himself completely, holding nothing back. ‘Eat me if you wish.’ He places his head in the demon’s mouth, and at that moment the largest demon bows low and dissolves into space.”

Surrendering to the demons that torment your organization does not mean abdicating your responsibilities to manage. You are still responsible for dealing with the reality of what is. In some cases, the demon is the wrong vision for the company. In others, it might be that you’ve hired the wrong people. In still others, it might be your own failings—like an inability to admit that you’re wrong.

But in all cases, allowing your self to be eaten by the demon that remains—acknowledging the ways you contribute to the problem without descending into pointless self-flagellation–adds to the heat beneath the crucible. Without heat, there is no alchemy.

On Becoming Your Self

When I was a young Padawan, I remember lamenting to my therapist about my own fears as a manager. After a series of infuriating questions, she got me to admit that I was trapped by my own beliefs about success. I finally admitted I would never be satisfied until I was as successful as Bill Gates.

Being myself was never good enough and, as a result, being comfortable in my own leadership was impossible.

“If you bring forth what is in you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  Jesus, Gospel of Thomas

It was only later, after allowing myself to bring forth what is in me, that I emerged not only as a leader but a Jedi master.

Joel Spolsky, in his guest post for this series, tackled what I hear all too often in my workshops. He takes the Steve Jobs Question head on.

He writes:

“And yes, you’re right, Steve Jobs…was a dictatorial, autocratic asshole who ruled by fiat and fear.” But, importantly, he points out “you are not Steve Jobs.” Just like I am not Bill Gates.

Indeed, I think what Jesus taught was a simple truth: the only choice that doesn’t destroy you is to be the leader you were born to be. The alchemy of becoming your self is the ultimate act of leadership.

Listen close enough and you’ll hear echoes of this from every conceivable source.

Phil Sugar, tells us who he is and what he believes in the simple statement that, “My biggest legacy is the network of people I’ve hired and what they’ve gone on to do.”

Matt Blumberg, having gone through his own crucible challenged conventional wisdom (and the advice of Fred), choosing instead to invest in his team. “We consistently work at improving our management skills,” he notes adding that, “We learn from the successes and failures of others whenever possible.”

JLM writes:

“Develop a philosophy of management. Write it down. Try it out on some folks whose wisdom you admire. Put it to work…” and, my favorite, “Live it.”

I read in all these thoughts a steady, consistent wisdom: the wisdom of knowing yourself, your own beliefs, and living them.

Enduring the alchemical crucible requires developing the capacity to reflect, to turn the pain of the everyday life as a leader into lessons. Every wisdom tradition I’ve ever encountered—from Fred’s blog to the words of sages—ultimately demands the same thing: we must go inward.

That’s often the biggest obstacle to becoming your self. The frenzied, frenetic, do-it-now, answer-the-email-now-or-the-company-will-die-even-though-it’s-3 a.m. attitude is precisely the wrong process of becoming your self.

Joseph Campbell, writing in The Power of Myth, says,  “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning…a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”

Call that room, at that hour, the crucible of leadership.

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CS Education Week

This week is CS Education Week. There are CS Education week events all around the world, mostly in schools where students will do an hour of coding.

In NYC, where I do most of my CS Education work, there are CS Education week events in many/most of the public school buildings this week.

As I could not be in NYC this week, I went onto Twitter this morning to see what is going on and saw this:

I love Hopscotch Coding. Young students deconstruct the game of Hopscotch into the various moves and then lay out the code next to the Hopscotch game to show how they played it. This teaches students so many important skills at a very young age and doesn’t even require a computer.

Spencer Dinwiddie, the point guard from the Brooklyn Nets, went to PS 196 in Williamsburg and did an Hour Of Code with the students.

Students at this school in Little Neck Queens did coding exercises in English, Math, and Science. One of the great things about CS is that it integrates so well into many different disciplines.

Celebrating CS Education Week in your school or your child’s school is a great thing to do and I encourage everyone to celebrate CS Education week by doing that this week.

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Bigger Isn't Necessarily Better

Crunchbase has a story up today explaining that Series A and Series B rounds make up between 25% and 35% of all $100mm+ “supergiant” rounds every year.

That’s interesting but what would be more interesting is to compare the cohort of companies raising Series A and Series B supergiant rounds to the rest of the companies in a given year that raised Series A and Series B rounds.

What would interest me are success rates between the two cohorts. One could measure how many of each cohort are alive five years later. Or one could compare the stock price appreciation over the five year period between the two cohorts.

I have found, and written here, that performance of VC backed companies is inversely correlated to how much money they raise.

There are all sorts of reasons for that, but mostly it is that money is a burden, and anchor, it weighs you down and slows you down.

So I’d like to see the data on these supergiant A and B rounds. I suspect it will be pretty poor.

#entrepreneurship#Uncategorized

Shadowstalker

Often art can expose issues more clearly than other mediums.

A show opened at The Shed this week called Manual Override. It is about the increasing power of technology in our lives and our inability to control it.

There is a piece in the show by the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson (whose Electronic Diaries form the spine of the show) called Shadowstalker.

In Shadowstalker, you enter your email address

And the work showcases your “digital shadow”:

Here is what my digital shadow contains:

Of course, none of this will surprise most people. We all know the Internet knows an awful lot about us.

But Lynn has managed to express it vividly in art and that has a powerful effect.

If you are in NYC, stop by The Shed and see Manual Override. The entire show is great. And try to see the Agnes Denes show too. It is also terrific.

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The Access Act

Yesterday three Senators, Democrats Mark Warner (VA) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (MO), put forward new legislation aimed at opening up the markets in web services. Their proposed legislation is called The Access Act and you can read it in its entirety here.

First let me say that this is exactly the kind of regulation we need to deal with the growing monopoly powers of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, etc.

When Liz Warren came out with her idea to breakup these large monopolies, I wrote here that I thought that would turn out to be bad policy and ineffective. I came back to this issue when Liz starting breaking out of the pack and leading the race to run against the President next year.

As I said in both of those blog posts, it is my view that the monopoly powers that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc have do not stem from their size and market reach, they stem from the data monopolies they own about us and our online activities. Breaking these companies up into smaller parts does not solve that problem. As my partner Albert observed in a blog post last week, spinning Instagram out of Facebook will do nothing to reduce Instagram’s market power, which is massive in its own right.

What we need to do is to allow any company, large or small, to compete on a level playing field with these large monopolies and they way to do that is to force them to open up their platforms and data so that competitors can provide similar services.

Senator Mark Warner put out a long tweetstorm yesterday laying out the ideas behind this bill and I would like to highlight a few of them here.

And

I am excited about all three of these ideas and they work together. You can’t do just one of them. But I am most excited about the third, delegation. My partner Albert calls this “the right to be represented by a bot” and it is critical to making all of this work.

Just when you thought government was lost and useless, someone inside the walls of power in Washington steps up and puts forward a set of ideas like this and you think “well someone actually gets it.” I am deeply grateful to Senators Warner, Blumenthal, and Hawley (and their staffs where so much of this work gets done) for their leadership here.

Finally, one complaint. The bill defines a term “large communications platform” and that is the entity it seeks to regulate. As currently defined in the bill, a service would have to have 100mm monthly active users to be considered a large communications platform. That number is way to high in my view. We ought to regulate companies in this way at much smaller sizes. 10mm MAUs is where I would start requiring this sort of thing and maybe ratchet up the requirements as they scale to 50mm, 100mm, and beyond.

But all of that can get sorted out as this bill is discussed, debated, and hopefully eventually made into law.

I hope Liz and the other candidates out there who want to use old techniques on new markets will read their colleagues’ bill, understand its importance, and start changing their tune on this issue. It is too important to get wrong.

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Franz Liszt

We went to a piano recital last night in Budapest.

Gabor Farkas played a number of compositions by Chopin and Liszt.

I was particularly taken with the Liszt compositions. The one called “Les Jeux d’eaux de la Villa d’Este” was particularly lovely.

I shared another pianist’s rendition of it with some friends on Twitter this morning.

After the recital, we went to dinner and we spent much of dinner talking about Liszt and reading about his life and work. It’s nice when a phone connected to the Internet can be a catalyst for a conversation at dinner instead of a hindrance.

As many of you likely know, Liszt was a “rock star” in the world of classical music in the mid 19th Century.

He fell in and out of love with Countesses and Princesses and held court in some of the most important cities of the era, including Vienna and Weimar.

But possibly most interesting was the level of hysteria that he generated in his fans with his piano playing, a phenomena known as Lisztomania.

The kind of hysteria that the Beatles and other rock bands produced in their fan bases was not a new thing.

It had gone on a century before in the concert halls of Europe at the height of the Classical Music era.

Which leads me to speculate that Lisztomania itself was not a new phenomena and that great performers at the height of their powers have had the capacity to cause people to lose their composure for as long as humans have had the power to perform.

In any case, Franz Liszt is an interesting case in the study of celebrity. And his music is also wonderful. He has found two new fans, a century and a half after his departure from Planet Earth.

Which is the amazing thing about arts and culture. It survives and can be appreciated by generations to come leading us to become fanatical about someone who has not been alive for a very long time.

And yes, if you were wondering, I have Ken Russell’s Lisztomania downloaded into my Google Pixel Slate to watch on our flight back to the US later this week.

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The Self Driving Bus

If you are in or around the Brooklyn Navy Yard and want to get to the East River Ferry, you can have a self driving car take you there.

I did that yesterday:

It’s sort of like a van. There are six passenger seats in the vehicle rand I saw four of them lined up waiting for passengers next to the main gate off Flushing and Cumberland.

There is a driver in the front seat but the van drives itself. That takes some of the excitement factor down a notch. But it increases the comfort factor. I assume the driver can take control of the vehicle and drive it manually if necessary.

It makes a ton of sense that autonomous vehicles would start out in places like the Navy Yard where there is not a lot of vehicle traffic and the map is fairly simple.

If you want a taste of the future go over to the Navy Yard and get a ride. It’s free.

And while you are there check out the amazing new Dock 72 building next to the East River Ferry stop. They are leasing it up now and there are some great office spaces still available there. They have smaller offices for startups. Link here.

#machine learning#NYC#robots and drones#Uncategorized