Energy is the central principle of Johnson’s career. “Intelligence is all about energy,” he once told an interviewer. “You can have the brightest people in the world who simply can’t be arsed. No good to man or beast.”


The most misleading idea I picked up at school was that success is the result of intelligence. It's not: it's the result of doing things. This seems so obvious now, I can't believe nobody drummed it into me at school. So I never did an internship or tried to get myself elected to a prestigious student body. I assumed my good grades would transform themselves into a job. I spent three years working in a bookshop. When we think we see intellect what we're really looking at is energy. The really energetic write pushy e-mails demanding work. They apply for grants, they go to parties, they network. All this stuff is exhausting and a lot of people who do it are ghastly, but it should be more widely taught that life requires this sort of effort.

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense

How do you prioritise your work.

In any case, the best targeting is often psychological, not technological. "I never read The Economist. Management trainee. Aged 42" is a magnificent example of microtargeting, even though it appeared on a poster. Why try to identify your target audience in advance when the right creative gets them to identify themselves? In mass media, the targeting takes place in the mind. And to suggest that the ad is wasteful because lots of people see it is dumb. Efficient advertising identifies potential customers; effective advertising can create them.

Back in the day, we direct marketers thought above-the-line advertising people were weird for paying so little attention to defining audiences. But we always saw "who to talk to" and "what to say" as interdependent. To suggest that you should decide one in isolation from the other was like suggesting that when you complete a crossword, you should always solve all the "across" clues first. We never thought it was all about the creative. But we never thought it was all about data analytics either.

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

A few years ago, the uncle of a friend of mine gave his (now former) wife a huge bunch of roses on 13 February. "But Valentine’s Day is tomorrow," she remarked. "I know," he explained. "That’s why I got them today – they’re much cheaper." She threw them in the bin. Economic rationality simply isn’t very attractive in evolutionary terms; this is why male strippers are more likely to dress up as firemen than accountants. 

Managing self-doubt -

Pay attention to the evidence that you're getting from the world. Are you getting clear repeated information from the stakeholders that matter to you that you need more  preparation?

Listen to actual feedback rather than you're inner critic.

Most people never get the that stage of even asking their intended audience for feedback - they make up a story in their head and it's usually a convenient story that allows them to hide a little bit - that they need to do more preparatory work.

Self-doubt : Is it coming to you in real information and evidence from the outside world.

Creating a story that is more about fear than the external thing itself.

DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT

Unskilled > ILLUSIVE SUPERIORITY

Skilled > ILLUSIVE INFERIORITY

Negotiating Style:

Diplomat:

The diplomat will be an attentive listener, brings a softer approach to a negotiation, is tolerant of different opinions but may fail to focus on own interests/priorities. Diplomats are known to lose battles so they can win wars.

Warrior:

Knows needs, focuses on task at hand, won't be distracted. Works well in negotiation situations where the relationship stakes are low.

Co-operator:

Finds maximum value in every negotiation and makes sure that he and his counterpart each gets their fair share - will find value for both parties.

Being your shoes-off self should come naturally.

When someone shares an idea don't shut them down, cut them off or belittle them. 

It may not even register to you but to the other person it can feel depressing and alienating, it's often better to stay silent.

Good way to draw someone out is to comment on something they're wearing.

Make sure it's something they've chosen -

If you say to a tall person 'wow you're tall' you will not only sound stupid and un-creative because they've heard it a million times but they don't have anything profound to say about it because they didn't choose that.

But if you say wow, what a great jacket etc then they can feel proud because you've complemented their taste.

Conversational Pitfalls :

Catering strategy

Over-sharing


Small Talk :

Everyones desperate to get their coffee fix today.

Gearing up for the week?

That is one suitcase you won't miss on the conveyor belt

"Maybe we should start a fan club"

Ethical Dilemmas-

Grey areas

What are your options?

Which will compromise your VALUES ?

What advise have I received ?

>>> SUNSHINE TEST

In an ethical situation the best choice is often the one you can talk about openly and not be embarrassed/ashamed of. 

Introvert - tend to Think first, Talk later.

Dig down in to issues before moving on to new ones - deeper conversations

Great listeners

Calm and peace, low-key in times of crisis.

In the face of normal ambiguity, let alone unexpected crises they help others stay calm and focused

Organizational Politics -


Get the pulse - for any major issue at work stay in the loop understand where people stand.

Pick you battles - You can't win every argument, you have a finite amount of reputational capital you can spend on any given issue.

Find ways to help others achieve the wins their chasing -


Embrace the Devil's Advocate as the ultimate hedge against poor decision-making. Make it a concrete role in meetings etc. 

Micro-managing will rapidly hurt rapport and team culture.

Managing your manager:

Learn communication preferences

Be clear about their expectations for your performance - on-going to stay in synch

Understand boss's goals

Perform above average - establish good track record

White Privilege -

The author refuses to classify who and what is white, how do we establish who has privilege in that context?

so , she espouses privilege as a genetic phenomenon. this is the logical implication.

Its amusing people like this claim to be tackling racism whilst creating their own racist mythology.

Work Culture -

The Culture of an organisation can either make or break your career.

Work culture has the power to shape your work enjoyment, connections with colleagues and the processes that allow you to thrive.

Often in these situations it's not dramatic career change that's needed but just an organisational change.

1. Interaction with people
2. Autonomy
3. Identity
4. Organisational Structure

As Catherine Price, author of How to break up with your phone told us:




“When you try to multitask or hold information in your working memory it’s extremely exhausting to our brains. That alone makes us less efficient. Let alone the fact that we’re making ourselves switch so often that it’s slowing us down in general.”

ICE BREAKER - If I was an Animal? >> Kangaroo >> Pouch

Vegetable >> Carrot >> Healthy but in a cake.

Eliminate Hand-offs

Move away from clear lines of responsibility - Agile team mixes up these lines.

Cross-functional

AVOID GROUPTHINK -

Typically there'll be an expert who's opinion holds more weight than others.

A group decides to agree with the opinion of the few experts in the group.

In an Agile team should avoid groupthink because everyone should be able to ask challenging questions about the product / project

If you can't simply explain your thinking to someone else then it's probably not a well designed solution.

PENNY GAME PRODUCTIVITY -

>>> While individual productivity decreases the overall productivity of the whole team increases - project delivered faster

The most productive way to work in an agile team is by moving around small batches of work and eliminating hand-offs - even if your own productivity decreases. 

AGILE :

Can't impose a traditional hierarchy on Agile teams - shouldn't have one manager directing the team to deliver the product - collective decision-making.

You can't direct a team of people who collectively know more about the product than anyone else in management - so you have managers become less directive and more supportive.

DRIVEN BY SENSE OF SHARED MISSION

OPEN TO DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT

COMFORTABLE WITH AMBIGUITY

SELF AWARE / SITUATION AWARE

FOGGING: THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT.... PARTIALLY CONCEDE A POINT

https://wvde.state.wv.us/counselors/links/students/documents/Lesson9.36Handout1AssertiveVs.AgressiveBehavior.pdf

I NOTICE

I INTERPRET

AM I RIGHT?

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted.

This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castration at the hands of an overenthusiastic choirmaster. Yet he remained an optimist — by all accounts, a man of deep generosity and warmth, who infused his most human qualities into his music. Mozart converses with angels. Beethoven storms the heavens. But Haydn pours out a big glass of Tokaj and invites you in for a really good chat. Describing his recovery from depression in 2004, The Spectator’s pop critic Charles Spencer wrote that Haydn’s ‘geniality and sanity’ reached him when no other music could.
Since lockdown, I’ve had Haydn’s string quartets on continuous play; a relatively new experience because these pieces — some 70 in total — have been my greatest delight as an amateur cellist, and once you’ve played a Haydn quartet, mere listening rarely comes close. Imagine taking part in a four-way conversation in which you’ve miraculously acquired the eloquence of Johnson and the wit of Wilde; in which everyone is their best self, and that zinger of a one-liner that you’d normally remember half an hour too late is there on your lips at precisely the moment you need it.Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castrationI’ve been trying to find recordings that convey that same immediacy and zest. So far, it’s an incomplete and subjective list, with only one real guiding principle: is this performance good company? Starting with the six quartets Opus 9 of 1769 (like many 18th-century composers, Haydn issued his compositions in six-packs), it’s useful to know that the bargain stuff is often as good as the pricier vintages. In Op.9, Haydn hasn’t quite outgrown the mannerisms of his baroque predecessors. But the Kodaly Quartet, on Naxos, plays with red-blooded verve: one sip, and you can feel the colour returning to your cheeks.
For Op.20 (1772) I cheated a bit — the Dudok Quartet of Amsterdam recorded three of the six in 2019 (the remainder are due out this May). Their Haydn is elegant and effervescent, the temperamental opposite of the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals, whose Op.33 quartets (1781) combine needlepoint brilliance with a flashing, theatrical sense of fantasy — exactly as they should, because Op.33 is where Haydn achieves escape velocity. Four instruments become four personalities; commenting, conversing, laughing. It’s the birth of comedy in instrumental music, and Mozart (who studied these works intensely) could never have written Figaro without it. The Cuarteto Casals makes this revolution sound like a glorious improvisation.
For much the same reason, in Op.50 (1787) I’m completely smitten with a young French ensemble, Quatuor Zaïde. Don’t miss the finale of Op.50 No.6 where Haydn creates a melody with a single note as the player rocks crazily between two strings. Schoenberg, 124 years later, would call this Klangfarbenmelodie; Haydn just smiles. With Op.54 (1788), seasoned quartetters home straight in on the extraordinary Adagio of the second quartet, a wild, impassioned gypsy fiddle solo more than a century ahead of Bartok. The Quatuor Ysaÿe pretty much nails it.
The Op.64 quartets of 1790 might be the most loveable of the lot. You can’t really go wrong, but the Medici Quartet gets my vote for sheer high spirits and charm. By Op.76 (1797) Haydn has returned from his two trips to London, intensely aware that he’s no longer writing merely for four friends in a drawing room, but for the world. These are quartets on a symphonic scale, anticipating Beethoven, Brahms and even (in the rapt, spiritually charged Largo of No.5) Bruckner, and the Takacs Quartet accords them the seriousness, as well as the imagination, that they demand.
By now, Haydn was in his late sixties: his creativity was ablaze, but his body was failing. He abandoned Op.77 (1799) after completing two quartets, and, in his unfinished Op.103 (1803–5), signed off for ever with a desolate little postscript: ‘Gone is all my strength, old and weak am I.’ You wouldn’t guess it from these two masterpieces — simultaneously playful and visionary — and no group performs them with more insight and wonder than the Viennese period-instrument pioneers Quatuor Mosaïques.
But that’s just one approach. In his last years, Haydn expressed the hope that his music might ‘some day, become a spring from which the careworn may draw a few moments’ rest and refreshment’. In truth, there’s refreshment here to last a lifetime.

Human societies develop pecking orders - the process of sorting out who will dominate or influence whom and in what way can be messy and unpredictable. Most organisations start with founders leaders who have preconceptions about how things should be run and therefore impose rules that initially determine how authority should be obtained and how aggressive behaviour is to be managed.

Sociologists have shown that manners and tact are not mere niceties of social life but essential rules for how to keep us from destroying each other socially. 

The most fundamental rule in all societies is that we must uphold each other's claims because our self-esteem is based on it. Human society of any sort hinges on the cultural agreements to try to uphold each other's identities and illusions, even if it means lying.

One reason why performance appraisal in organisations is emotionally resisted so strongly is that mangers know full well they are violating the larger cultural rules and norms when they sit a subordinate down to give him or her feedback. To put it bluntly, when we tell people what we really think of them in an aggressive way this can be functionally equivalent to social murder. Someone who goes around doing this is viewed as unsafe to have around, and if he behavior persists, we often declare such a person mentally ill and lock them up. IN his analysis of mental hospitals, Goffman showed brilliantly how "therapy" was in many cases teaching the patients the rules of polite society so that they could be let free to function in that society without making others too anxious. IN more traditional societies, the jester or the fool played the role of telling the truth about what was going on, and this worked only because the role could be publicly discounted and ignored.

When you use technology in the presence of others you're communicating to them that they are second place to whatever you're doing in the moment.

No-tech time , sanctuary

The book truly meets the author’s “definition” of a predominantly bullshit work. But perhaps not! The “definition” rests on the subjective discretion of the task-doer so meeting the criteria would require a level of intellectual integrity and self -awareness largely absent from the text. In the eyes of this objective, even well-disposed, reader (at least initially) the book is based on a good idea/polemic ruined by lazy argument, and poor editing. The material relevant to the topic could be condensed to about ten percent (under thirty pages) the rest is irritating over-embellishment, repetition and saccharine virtue-signalling on gender and class issues.
Dreadful waste of ink and time.