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The annoying habits of highly effective people
- siruncledrew 8y agoI think another thing that influences annoying habits of "effective" people is that no executive/manager is going to hold a CEO accountable for being late/strolling into work, whereas if a CEO didn't like it that person would be be immediately told to stop and change their behavior.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> no executive/manager is going to hold a CEO accountable for being late/strolling into work I did this. I had just been promoted to the lowest manager position at a global bank. Our global head had a habit of starting meetings late. After one, I asked to speak privately. I said I had been working hard with my team on improving their timeliness. They responded, and our mornings became more productive as a result. But once a quarter they came to these meetings and saw the top guys in our division stroll in late. It undid work I fought hard for, and which I continued to believe in. He thanked me for my perspective and was never late again. (Another example: CEO assigned our intern class a book assignment. I proceeded to reject the author’s thesis.) Organisations that don’t permit upwards feedback are, in my opinion, unhealthy. (In the interest of balance, I have also given upward feedback that was rejected. The reasons for their rejection changed how I worked going forward, every time productively.)
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWere you ever terminated or had your contract not renewed for providing upwards feedback that was rejected?
- maerF0x0 8y agoon this thread. There is defensible feedback and there is just being contrarian. If you have a reasonable position, you may just be missing the CEO's context and they should be smart enough to see the gap and fill it in for you. Without requiring a pink slip.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoDefensible feedback can still get you fired.
- maerF0x0 8y agoIn the world of at will employment, everything, anything and even "nothing" can get you fired.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> Were you ever terminated or had your contract not renewed for providing upwards feedback that was rejected? Not to my knowledge. More memorable was the positive response I received to both of the aforementioned pipe-ups. Granted, I'm pretty up front about wanting open communication in any corporate culture I join, so I'm heavily selecting–during interviews and random conversations–for teams who value that.
- cube00 8y agoJust on "late shaming" in general, sometimes people have legitimate reasons for starting later. They might have been up until early morning in conference with another time zone, they might have family responsibilities, etc. If they're late to scheduled meetings by all means hold them to standard, but if they're just arriving in the office later then everyone else I'm not so sure that's cause to be held "accountable" no matter your level.
- justtopost 8y agoMost see those who can't reliably reconsile family responsibilities and the responsibility of having a job to provide for said family, as bad employees. Maybe only bad because of lifestyle fit, but bad for your org. Being unreliable is worse than not being there at all for most jobs.
- phakding 8y agoNever understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that's my experience.
- jjoonathan 8y agoSame appeal as any other type of cargo-culting: it's a lot easier to get up at 5am, shake hands firmly, and dress for success than it is to spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> spot an extreme growth opportunity, bet everything on it, and be correct. Or be born into money. No amount of self-help is going to tilt the scale towards that.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoBo Burnham on getting into showbiz: "Don't take advice from guys like me who've gotten very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying 'Liquidize your assets! Buy Powerball tickets! It works!'" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U)
- UpshotKnothole 8y agoAh Taylor Swift, she didn’t really win the lottery though, or if she did, she was able to start off buying a loooooot of tickets. Her father worked for Merril Lynch, from three generations of bank presidents. Her mother worked in finance. When she was 14 her father moved the family to Nashville and worked for Merril Lynch there, and invested in a record label called Big Machine to the tune of $120,000. This was the company that first signed her. She grew up rich, with the freedom to pursue her passion from the age of 10, when her mother would take her to karaoke contests. The ability to up stakes and move to Nashville, to have your father buy your way into a record label... well... it doesn’t overshadow her natural ability, but it helps to explain how she was able to leverage it so effectively.
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- scottmcleod 8y agoUhh this article is useless click bait.
- mamon 8y agoI always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.
- bcheung 8y agoEarly rising isn't so much what time you wake up as it is waking up early enough so you have time to yourself before you have to go into the office or start your day job. The important thing is your first few hours after waking go to your most important goals.
- giobox 8y agoIs the idea that working on your “important goals” in the first few hours after waking is more effective an evidence based opinion? I can’t imagine myself performing my best at any task I do the first two hours after waking, and that certainly seems to be the case for almost all of my colleagues too, if early AM meetings are any indicator.
- bcheung 8y agoNot sure about references but the general consensus I have seen and heard, and is congruently in my own life as well, is that willpower is at its strongest in the morning and as the day goes on we experience "decision fatigue" that drains us mentally. Additionally, there seems to be some kind of slowdown that necessitates sleep. There have been studies (sorry don't have references handy) that show people who are sleep deprived are less likely to exercise self-constraint. I would recommend the book "Miracle Morning" if you are interested in more. As to not being productive in the morning, there is a consistency of waking up at the same time that needs to happen. In my experience, it takes 10-20 days before you can function well at the earlier time period. Also, there are things you can do to increase alertness. Sunlight, drinking water (dehydration makes you tired and mentally sluggish), electrolytes, exercise (just a minute or 2 to get heart rate up), cold shower. All of these wake the body up and increase mental alertness. I frequently use them before I start my day and it makes a big difference. You can't just wake up and start working, you have to have a consistent routine that is aligned with human physiology. It takes about 30 minutes after getting out of bed before I reach peak alertness.
- weberc2 8y agoWhat a strange, disappointing article. I was expecting trends in annoying behavior, but this was just some low-grade complaining about rich people. And I'm not complaining about people complaining about rich people, I'm complaining about the poor quality of the complaints: - Richard Branson once said that he didn't like when people were late, but Virgin's trains aren't very timely - Tim Cook would probably be just as successful if he got up three hours later (opines the writer) - General fear mongering about the dangers of executives like Jobs and Zuckerberg wearing the same attire every day
- FabHK 8y agoIt's the Bartebly column, an entertaining look at work, not a scientific paper or even news.
- shay_ker 8y agoCEO biographies are interesting just like any other biography, I suppose. But never once have I heard/read, "I read this other CEO's biography and decided to copy their habits, and that was my secret."
- dkarl 8y agoYou do read, "My success happened because of an inspirational encounter with this other revered CEO (whose own book was a best-seller, hint hint)" but that's such compelling marketing that I wouldn't bet on there being any reality behind it.
- pg_bot 8y agoMay I suggest "My Years with General Motors" by Alfred Sloan
- wffurr 8y agohttp://archive.is/TtLIn http://archive.is/TtLIn non-paywall link
- keyle 8y agoAre articles like these even worth writing still? We're many years out of this type of self/help gluttony now, aren't we?
- toofy 8y agoI thought we were as well, but here we are :/
- harry8 8y agoIt's not an exact analogy but if you start with the idea of "Characteristics of lottery winners." As the base and make it entirely up to the author to show with evidence that their content is actually better than that when they discuss CEOs, you'll avoid a bunch of total BS.
- dkarl 8y agoAt one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born into it, it's all he saw growing up, every element was demonstrated for him and instilled in him as normal his whole life. Another guy is successful because he was born with nothing and had to fight for every little thing, and he kept fighting for the next thing until he had a whole company. These are both coherent stories, but they don't explain the difference between those two and all the other people who were born to success but reverted to the mean or who were born into poverty and stayed there. I've seen people succeed with vastly different, contradictory strategies. I've seen engineers promoted to management earn respect by getting in the weeds and doing unwanted grunt work, and I've seen engineers promoted to management stay so hands-off from technical stuff that new employees assumed they were MBAs who didn't understand the work they were managing. I've seen people with humble origins flaunt them at every opportunity and others all but deny them. I've seen people who immersed themselves in detail to see the whole picture and people who carefully rationed the information they consumed to avoid being overwhelmed, systematically delegating the responsibility for details. Conclusion: that's the wrong way to try to understand the difference between luck and skill. Suppose you ran a huge experiment where you had 1000 chess grandmasters, 1000 masters, 1000 good amateurs, and so on down to 1000 chronic duffers, and they each inherited a thousand games starting at move eight (crediting the first seven moves to luck, circumstances, and childhood.) You wouldn't learn much by asking whether the winners attacked or defended, opened the middle or jammed it up, preferred their knights or their bishops. Those aren't the right questions. A grandmaster doesn't move a knight just because she likes knights, or because moving knights is the baller thing that all the grandmasters do. It's because it accomplishes something in their situation. If life was a game you could play over and over again, with executive control gradually fading in starting in the teenage years, a brilliant player might play each lifetime very differently. It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what skills you would develop as you "played" dozens or hundreds of lifetimes! Certainly not rigid rules like "wake up at 5am" or "wear the same thing every day."
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- exabrial 8y agoI wouldn't call Tim Cook an effective manager though. He centralizes decisions on himself and had been turning Apple's reputation and Halo-effect into cash rather than innovation.
- pandapower2 8y ago>and had been turning Apple's reputation and Halo-effect into cash rather than innovation. Sounds pretty much like his job. Apple doesn't exist to innovate. It innovates to produce cash.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- briandear 8y agoHave you ever worked for Apple? What you see and reality aren’t always the same. As far as innovation, have you used Apple Watch? Have you used CoreML? ARkit? Has any other company shipped a 7nm chip? Do you know the products in the pipeline? It’s pretty easy to snipe when news reports are your only source. It isn’t like Tim Cook publishes meeting minutes or Craig F or Eddy Cue are sitting around discussing Tim’s management style. iPhone or iPad wouldn’t have been possible without Tim because he created systems to actually produce and ship the thing. Look at the efficiency of Apple’s supply chain — nobody else can come close. That success is the very definition of “effective manager.” If we want to talk of inept managers, we would have plenty from which to choose, but Cook isn’t one of them.
- waivek 8y agoAre there any resources that speak about Apple's supply chain? I'd love to learn more.
- rconti 8y agoSo the article starts out by saying that you won't be successful just by emulating Tim Cook (rises early) or Jeff Bezos (putters in the morning). Shouldn't the author have just ended it there by concluding that neither one of these habits is necessary in order to be successful, rather than going on complaining?
- skrebbel 8y agoYes, but the Economist probably pays them for a certain minimum length.
- randomsearch 8y agoAnyone who thinks cutting down on sleep is a good idea should read “why we sleep”. Don’t do it. You’ll be less effective at work and you’ll seriously damage your health. Fact.
- lihaciudaniel 8y agoI think your argument does not stand valid, telling someone to read a book is a road end. I believe you shouldn't see it as cutting sleep but rather waking up early. I am not saying per se that from now on you'll wake up at 4. But rather cut 10 minutes every month until you reach that goal. For example I have school and some of it is really unnecessary. I'll rather study the first thing. Its called prioritizing and you can repeat it every time. The only down side to this is that you sleep earlier and miss out on things.
- amai 8y agoRelated to the topic I can recommend the book Hansen: Great at Work (https://www.amazon.com/Great-Work-Performers-Less-Achieve/dp/1501179519 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Work-Performers-Less-Achieve/dp...). It is probably the first statistical analysis on what makes people really successful at work.
- FabHK 8y agoI'd recommend Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. (2016) by economist Robert H. Frank. He details how much of success is luck. Pertinent xkcd, Survivorship Bias: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- lbriner 8y agoRsing at 4:00am is more likely to either be the symptom of someone addicted to their work above all else but it also probably shows the fragility of life at the top! If you were Tim Cook, what would you do next in a company with billions of spare cash to keep the investors away from your door and without losing focus? I don't think I would sleep if that was me!
- sgillen 8y agoCould also just be a circadian rythm thing. I’m sure there are many otherwise normal people who’s biological clock would prefer to sleep early and wake up at 4.
- choicenotchance 8y agoWebsite says I've reached my limit for the week. Even though it's my first time there for months. Jesus these article websites are becoming such greedy beggars
- DecayingOrganic 8y ago"The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes." I would highly recommend people here to take a look at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
- data_spy 8y agoI understand what you are saying to a degree, however I've had more success than many colleagues due to me spending time every day to improve myself (usually technically). What you are saying is like saying some people are thin due to genetics, which can be true, but also many people are thin because they workout.
- motohagiography 8y agoGiven this issue a lot of thought, mostly after reading Jeffery Pfeffer's views about how most CEO biographies are designed to kick the ladder away behind them. Given the exponential / power law distribution of returns, if you are anywhere on the left hand side of that curve, you are doing phenomenally well, even if your actual place on it is random. This curve is the mechanism behind the Matthew Effect as well. To get there, you just need to survive long enough to end up on it somewhat randomly. The competitive environments in offices are really about getting exposure to opportunity - not reaping the rewards of work. This is why some seemingly dumb people do well. They have the relationships that get them exposure to the opportunities to end up somewhere randomly on that exponential curve. You'll notice that people who fail or stagnate in offices are the ones who have been isolated from peers, customers, sales people, and other sources of exposure to randomness, and that is not an accident. Highly successful people ensure they are at the front of the queue for those random opportunities, and whether they do that through merit or mendacity is ultimately immaterial. Being smart is not about problem solving or abstraction, it's an instinct for always getting the option on opportunity. Absolutely recommend Pfeffer on this.