The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com

Text LEARNERS to 44222 to receive the first chapter of my new book, WELCOME TO MANAGEMENT for free.

Episode #340: Liz Bohannon - co-founder and co-CEO of Sseko Designs and the author of Beginner's Pluck: Build your life of purpose, passion and impact now. Liz and the Sseko story has been featured in dozens of publications including: Vogue Magazine, Redbook Magazine, O Magazine, Inc, Fortune and others. Sseko has appeared on national broadcasts including ABC's Shark Tank and Good Morning America. 

• Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence:
  • They do work that taps into their intrinsic motivation and they know WHY they do what they do.
    • You must drill down far to know this
  • Vulnerable -- Look at Brene Brown.  A "truth teller."
  • Shoshin - An openness with eagerness.  Have to have both.
• Why is the "Beginner's Pluck" message resonating with so many people?
  • "I believe it, but not sure if I really do..." People (women especially) tend to doubt themselves too much.
• "You don't need to be extraordinary to build a life making a difference."
• "Passion is something you build... I learned it through telling an untrue story."
• Be driven by interest, and curiosity...
• "I'm the CEO of a for-profit fashion company."
• "My ego wasn't super involved.  It gave me the freedom to just do it."
  • "I got so obsessed with the problem and finding a solution to it."
• "The work of an artist is to know what's inside of you.  Be solutions agnostic."
  • "The artist creates without thinking of the audience."
  • "The entrepreneur has to think of the audience." -->  What's the actual problem this fixes?
  • Sit in the complexity of what it means to be a world changer.
  • "We live in a world that is so quick to critique... Show up, do the work."
• How did Liz learn to run a business?
  • She took a six week crash course on basic accounting and followed her curiosity to learn each skill as she went.
    • Don't be caught in analysis paralysis
    • "The thing I had connected to me was my WHY."
    • "You don't get to know Step 7 when you're in stage 1.  That's not how it works."  Must take it a step at a time.
    • "What do I absolutely need to figure out?
      • The MVP - Minimum Viable Product -- Know that it's only Version 1.  Can iterate as you go.
• The 4 stages of Learning:
  • Unconscious incompetent
  • Conscious incompetent
  • Conscious competent
  • Unconscious competent
• How often am I feeling out of my league? -- You should feel this often in order to grow.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com

Ep: #339: Robert Greifeld - Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Change As CEO Of NASDAQ

Robert Greifeld served as the CEO of Nasdaq from 2003 to 2016. During his tenure, Bob led Nasdaq through a series of complex, innovative acquisitions that extended the company’s footprint from a single U.S. equity exchange to a global exchange and technology solutions provider, nearly quadrupling revenue, growing annual operating profits by more than 24 times and achieving a market value of over $11 billion. He is the author of a new book called: Market Mover: Lessons from a Decade of Change at Nasdaq. 

Notes:

• Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence:
  • "Once you achieve competency, they're on a daily battle with complacency."
  • Always looking forward - never resting on laurels
  • A mindset that: "Success in the past is no guarantee that success will happen in the future."
• Self reflection is important for self awareness: "Being focused on the present doesn't preclude self reflection."
• Has being rich made you happy?  "Wealth makes you more secure?"
• How to balance family time and work time?
  • "Balance is a dangerous word.  I prefer having an integrated life instead."  "I made a rule that I did no business dinners unless I was doing the selling."
  • Make multiple short trips instead of longer ones... Only miss seeing your family for a day or two at a time
• Bob describes the story of how he was recruited to NASDAQ and why he took the job...
  • During the interview process, he shared the five things he would do within the first 100 days:
    • Get right people on board
    • Reduce bureaucracy
    • Embrace fiscal discipline
    • Overhaul technology
    • Stop being satisfied with number 2
  • Have to have the right people on the bus
    • Bob met with many people prior to starting as the CEO of NASDAQ:  "I fired a lot of people before 8:00am on the first day I started.  I did a lot of work prior to starting to learn who was going to buy in."
    • "Good morale in a bad organization is not a good thing."
• With promotions, live by the 80/20 rule: "We tried to promote 80% from within our organization."
  • "When interviewing people from the outside, the odds of being wrong are higher."
  • Qualities to look for in people to promote:
    • Positive attitude/energy -- "Happy campers"
    • Pure skills
    • How well do they play with others?
    • Won't tolerate prima donnas
• How to be a great leader?
  • Must be in front of your customers
  • Stand in the shoes of your people
  • Do a lot of individual contributor work
  • "Don't be a conference room pilot" -- Don't spend all your time in meetings
• Learned knowledge vs. Lived knowledge
  • Learned: "Don't know what's coming, you just learned it."
  • Lived: "You've sat in the seat, you can see around corners."
• Acquisitions:
  • Geography - If location is near us, that helps
  • Industry - If it's the same industry, just smaller, that helps
• Overall advice:
  • Never had a career path or end goal
  • Wanted to do something that energized me
    • "I'll do that job well."
  • "Don't focus on climbing the mythical career ladder."
  • "Don't take a job to just get another job."
• Why leave NASDAQ?
  • "I like controlling my schedule."
• The benefits of growing up with blue collar parents.  His dad worked for the Post Office, he was always upbeat and believe that life can be better.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Episode #338: Jason Fried

Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com

Text LEARNERS to 44222 to learn more

Jason Fried is the founder & CEO at Basecamp. He's the co-author of Getting Real, Remote, REWORK, and It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work.  Basecamp is a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary.
Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is read by over 100,000 people every day. Jason believes there's real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people's desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of Basecamp products.

Notes:

• Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence:
  • Willingness/ability to know what's the work worth doing
    • The skill to discern what's important
  • How to develop that skill?
    • Must become a good auditor of your time.  Practice.  Look back on what you've done.  Analyze what you do? Discern what's worth it.
• Remote work:
  • Basecamp has 56 employees in 30 cities around the world... Why remote?
    • "You don't want the best people, you want the right people."  The odds of all the right people living near your headquarters is small.
  • The business started in Chicago with three people.
    • They hired DHH to be their first programmer.  He lived in Denmark.  Then they hired someone in Utah.  "It just worked.  We didn't worry about where, just wanted to find the right people."
• Jason never writes a business plan -- No 1, 3, or 5 year plan.  They work in six week project increments.
  • Why? "Planning is simply guessing.  Setting your course over a guess doesn't seem like a good idea.  We have an idea of where we're headed, but we work in six week chunks."
• What Jason learned from Jeff Bezos:  "People who were right often changed their minds." --> Be willing to change your mind when better evidence presents itself.
• The "anti-goal" mindset:
  • "(Financial) Goals are made up. There's nothing about them that's true.  They are guesses... Made up numbers."
    • "Asking if I hit the goal is the wrong question.  Asking if I enjoyed the run is the better question."
    • "One of the problems with setting goals is you are a different person when you set them than when they need to be met."  You grow, evolve, and change.
    • "Too many companies focus on numbers instead of their customers." --> That is because they have number based goals to hit.  It can ruin the customer experience (Jason had a terrible experience trying to cancel his satellite radio service)
• Qualities Jason looks for when making hiring decisions:
  • Communicate clearly - "You must be a great writer."  Much of their communication is done in writing.  "We look at the cover letter first.  That must be good.  If that's not well written, then we do not look at the resume."
  • Quality of character - "You must be a good person.  We hire people that we want to be with.  No ego.  We like to hire people that use "we" and "us" instead of "I"
  • Must be able to give and take feedback - Need to be coachable.  "For designers, we give them a project to do in the interview process and then we provide them feedback.  If they can't handle it, we will not hire them."
• Transition from individual contributor to leader... How to do it well?
  • "It is REALLY hard. Very few people are born being good managers."
  • "Come to terms that you can no longer do everything."
  • Advice Jason got from Tobi (CEO of Shopify) - "As the CEO, you are working on longer term strategic initiatives.  You don't get to feel the day-to-day progress that people lower in the organization feel."  Need to get comfortable with that.
• Some of the benefits at Basecamp: Fully paid vacation every year for all employees ($5K), 3 day weekends all summer, $1K/year in continuing education outside of your job, $100/month for a massage, $100/month gym membership, $2K/year charity match, paid in the top 10% of your salary range as if you lived in San Francisco (even though no employees live in San Francisco)
  • Why do it? "It's the right thing to do.  I wanted to start a business that I wanted to work at.  We're a company that cares about service."
  • "People are not the place to save money.  They are the place to spend money."
• "Give people their time.  A contiguous block of time every day to do their work."  Don't muddle it up with meetings in the middle of that time.
• "I'll work hard now so I can relax later" is not the optimal way to live.  Create the habits now to enjoy it as you go.  "Later" is where intentions go to die.  "When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit."

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Text LEARNERS to 44222

For full show notes, go to www.LearningLeader.com

Episode #337: Scott H. Young - How To Become An Ultra Learner

Scott Young is a writer who undertakes interesting self-education projects, such as attempting to learn MIT's four-year computer science curriculum in twelve months and learning four languages in one year. Scott incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Ben Franklin, Judit Polgár, and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Nigel Richards who won the World Championship of French Scrabble—without knowing French.  He is the author of the best-selling book, UltraLearning.

Notes:

• Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence:
  • Understand how excellence works
  • Learning, constantly thinking about the process of improving
• Being interested in learning new things... Scott finds the mind fascinating
  • Encountering things that people have done that are jaw dropping
• Projects:
  • Why he failed to learn French as an exchange student
    • "Simple decisions you make early on can have big consequences."
    • Because he didn't go all in and immerse himself in the language, he always reverted back to his native tongue
• Go for inversion from the beginning.  This is why he did the "year without English."
• "Doing the hard thing makes it easier in the long run, it accelerates skills more quickly"
• UltraLearning - A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense
• As a manager, recognize that there are many different skills you can possess to be successful...
  • Know what you need to be good at.  Break it down to the component skills... Have a process
  • Get better at each important skill
  • Think: "What would it be like to be amazing at this?"
• Tristan de Montebello:  He wanted to learn a new skill that was completely outside of his current skill set (he's a musician)
  • Instead of learning another instrument, he chose to become a world class public speaker
  • He started as an amateur and ended as a finalist for a public speaking championship.
    • How?  He got on stage twice a day, took improv class, and compressed the process.
    • "He made the conscious decision to become excellent."  And then executed...
• Process for a person who has a full time job/family/mortgage:
  • This doesn't need to be a full time endeavor
  • "How are you using every minute of every day?"
  • Take on intensive bursts
  • Follow your curiosity and obsessions
  • Ramit Sethi -- "See the game being played around you"
• Principles:
  • Spend time figuring out the best way to learn what you want to learn.  What tools and resources are available?
  • Drill, attack your weakest point.  Sometimes you shouldn't learn a skill (ex: fixing your car... Hire a mechanic instead)
  • Every complicated skill has components
  • Test to learn
    • Repeated review - read over and over
    • Free recall - read the text once, then close the book.  Try to recall what you learned.  In an experiment, free recall learners retained more.  PRACTICE remembering something.  It impacts how you process information.
• Anders Ericsson - Deliberate practice:
  • In 40% of the cases, feedback hurt.  Task oriented feedback works best.
  • How we process feedback is most important
    • "If you're doggedly trying to be an ultra learner and sustain excellence, emotional consequences are important..."
• Born with it vs. Ability to learn:
  • Anyone has the ability to learn anything
  • Everyone has their own abilities, their own pace.
  • Recognize your capacity to improve but don't compare to others
• Life advice:
  • Read more books - It expands your mind
  • Meet more interesting people - Subtlety informs choices, expands group you meet
  • Go do ambitious things - bold projects
• Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea