Three types of Empathy (#92)
Cooperation requires connection, and connection requires empathy. We must meet our employees where they are — as people with outside interests, pressures, fears, and ambitions.
Storytelling & Papañca (#91)
There comes a point when emotional empathy no longer serves us if it prevents us from having the necessary conversation.
When to Break the Rules (#90)
We should break our own rules when following them will violate our first principles. The rule is a proxy to the value we defined, and a rule is only as good as our ability to adhere to our values when we execute it.
Jackie Robinson Day: Larry Doby Edition
Sports is meant to be entertainment, an escape from daily toils, our common love of the game binding us. Yet how can we be entertained when we look on the playing field and are so easily reminded about the lack of opportunity, the systems that create racial and gender bias?
Revisiting Imposter Phenomenon (#89)
We aren't imposters. Feeling like an imposter is an experience we suffer due to the environment and culture we operate in and not a flaw of self. We are enough.
Vision & Recovery (#88)
If star athletes have a common weakness it is when something breaks down mentally rather than physically. It's in those moments that they are no longer able to allow their mind to run on a kind of high-performance autopilot.
Humility & Ambition (#87)
The best candidate for any job needs only three prevailing qualities: aptitude, attitude, and willingness.
Agency & Resiliency (#86)
Reporting shallow statistics about the number of under represented employees tells us nothing. Diversity initiatives fail if they do not fundamentally alter the institutions power relationships.
Adversarial Collaboration (#85)
Break the endless cycle of critique → reply → rejoinder by embracing adversarial collaboration, a method to solve problems more quickly and transparently.
Principles & Analogies (#84)
Following an established recipe does not make us a chef, it makes us the cook. First principle thinking is the path to expertise — to becoming a chef.
Goals & Kill Criteria (Paradox #83)
Completing a goal that is no longer useful is a failure. Use kill criteria to trigger reevaluation of a goal because, once set, goals ignore changes in the landscape and don't always age well.
Sun & Clouds (Paradox Pair #82)
If everyday was a perfect day we'd start to become desensitized, eventually once glorious days would no longer inspire us at all.