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Dopamine is the “feel good” neurotransmitter in your brain.  

The phrase “cheap dopamine” alludes to the things we eat and consume which stimulate dopamine but don’t generate positive trend results.  This includes things like:

Sugary and salty snacks

Alcohol

Porn

Scrolling social media 

Binging videos

Constant task switching

Daydreaming and fantasizing

Leaders have additional forms of cheap dopamine:

Getting to inbox zero every day

Meetings even if you don’t have an agenda

Interrupting people with your stuff because it makes you feel important

Frivilous emails and instant messages

Gossiping about speculations

Set these aside.  Real productivity from your leadership work requires focus on the important things, which generally won’t spike your dopamine in the next 4 minutes.  

(Not your promotion, this is about promoting people in your team.)

You’ve got an opportunity to advocate for promoting a few people in your team.  How do you think about what promotions are appropriate?  How do you persuade approvers to make them happen?  What do you tell your team?

A few principles learned the hard way:

• Promotions only happen when you do your job as a manager.
• A promotion means a person will have a different job, not merely an extension of their current job.  You must be absolutely clear about the expectations for a different job.
  • Decision point:  If it’s a different job, should it be posted as a new position?  Maybe your current team member isn’t the best person available?  If they are an excellent prospect, perhaps the work of posting and interviewing has low ROI.  At a minimum, the exercise helps you define the role and performance expectations!
• Does their previous job need to be done?  If so, who is going to do that work after you’ve promoted someone?
• It’s difficult to promote someone if the approvers don’t know the person or their contribution level or have some sense of their capacity to grow.  Therefore, you need to know these things and consistently communicate this – beginning long before you recommend a promotion.
• All organizations need people performing at different job levels.  No organization is 100% generals or presidents. 
• Think first of promotions as a design element in your organization structuer in an abstract way, independent of the specifics about individuals.
• The primary constraints on how many promotions are available is usually budget.  Therefore, you should forecast how the team salary and benefits costs will change with any promotion.
• Never promise someone a promotion.  There are factors outside your ability to deliver that promise.  You can only commit to advocating for them.

Additional recommendations:

• The opportunity to submit promotion requests often comes up quickly.  A sharp manager sets aside an hour or two each year to pre-plan promotion candidates and think about how to exploit opportunities.
• All promotions are development opportunities. Be slow to promote someone unless you’re confident that they can do at least 50% of the new job now, and will be able to grow into the role in a year.  Sometimes this is called the “150% rule.”
• When someone points out they’re now doing much more than they used to in the same job, remind them (gently) that it’s a normal expectation that job requirements evolve and professionals expand the significance of their roles.  Bonuses, salary increases, and access to extra opportunities are your manager tools in these situations.
• When someone leaves a position, step back and consider whether the position should be refilled at the same level, or higher or lower.  (Frankly – maybe not at all.)
• Resist the impulse to give someone a promotion if they threaten to leave without one.  Promotions must make organizational sense first. 

I’ve made so many mistakes interpreting body language in meetings and discussion.  A sampling: 

A petite colleague sat in all my meetings with her legs and arms crossed.  I assumed she was angry, distrustful, in disagreement.  She was really cold in the air-conditioning. 

An extremely intelligent man was quiet, well off to the side of the main discussion.  I assumed he did not understand our plans.  In reality, he was bored with our pedantic ideas.  

A junior member of my team was fidgeting in our 1:1 while I was delegating a small-to-me-but-big-to-him project.  I assumed he was nervous about failing.  He had learned an hour earlier that his wife had breast cancer, and his mind was racing about how to share this news with their kids.   

We hired a talented young guy for a technical role who had talked incessantly during his interviews.  I counseled him on his first day that he needed to focus more on listening.  The interview day was an outlier for this introverted shy man.  I had to drag words out of him most of the time.   

Be cautious about interpreting behaviors and body language signals.  Our interpretation engine has a high error rate.  

You can’t think your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into.

I’m a big believer in the power of data.  One of my bosses used to say “Data beats no-data every time.”

Fans of Data Science tend to be over-confident that data alone is sufficient and obvious and of course it leads to the right outcome.  Here’s good wisdom in a pithy sentence: “If all we needed was information we’d all be multimillionaires with six-pack abs.” 

It’s about proper data for decisions AND behaviors to follow-through.

Sharp leaders do pay attention to data as a guide to making decisions.  Execution and change are all about behaviors.

Email remains an important tool for many of us. Here are my recommendations to effectively manage your email account.

Search is more powerful than proliferation of folders.  Consistent studies show that we only go back to 4-6% of email messages after 20 days, and less than 1% after 60 days.  It’s a waste of energy to have an elaborate file folder or tagging structure.  A few fat folders are superior to many slim folders.  

You have Inbox, Drafts, Deleted, and Sent as defaults.

Create a folder named @Action to store emails which require some action on your part.  The @ sign keeps that folder up high in your alphabetic list.

Create a folder for your primary role work.  This is where you’ll store most messages which you want to keep for relevance but don’t need to act upon.  I know you have multiple roles, but there is little value in managing multiple folders.  Name this folder something like @MainWork if you can’t be creative.

      Special case:  If you’re moving into a new position, create a new main work folder for that position.  

Optional folders:  

      @WaitingFor  For messages where you are waiting on someone else.  You need a rhythm of checking that folder to follow-through when someone didn’t respond.  I’ve given up on this approach after several tries.  I just cc: myself on messages where I’m waiting for a response, and manage them in my @Action folder.   

      @Collecting   For emails that you probably don’t need but feel like you should wait before deleting them.  

Do NOT leave everything in your Inbox.  Scrolling up and down to decide what to work on is inefficient and depressing.  Your email program will open much faster if you don’t keep 42,000 messages in the Inbox. 

You should process emails in your Inbox several times a day:

      File or delete messages that you don’t need to act upon once you’ve read them

      Use the 2-min rule to quickly respond to messages which take 2 min or less.

      Move messages to your @Action folder if they require more than 2 min

Live out of your @Action folder, not your Inbox.  

Many people are successful at scheduling 3 times a day to process and respond to emails (e.g., morning, mid-day, end of day).  It’s ok if you aren’t that strictly disciplined.  

Delete the messages in your Deleted folder periodically, at least monthly.  Delete old emails in your @Collecting folder periodically, too.  

I heard this many years ago, can’t remember where or from whom, but it continues to ring true:  “Choose your enemies carefully, for they will define you.”

A powerful tool is the ability to choose who/what your team or organization is competing against.

Steve Jobs famously said that Apple needed to compete against IBM and Microsoft.  Sports teams get especially psyched up against their biggest rivals.  We have a long history of painting our political and military enemies with scathing portrayals.

The ‘enemy’ can also be a situation you don’t want to be in – bankruptcy, #3 in the market, reduced optionality, limited freedom to operate because your competitors have strategic patents, too much (or too little) inventory to sell, and so on.  Paint a vivid picture of that situation to energize people into actions to avoid it. 

We like to tell children (and ourselves) that they can be anything they want to be.  Untrue.

You can become good at about anything, if you’re willing to work hard enough for long enough.  But choose a domain where your genetics works in your favor if you want to excel in something.

Your ability to excel in a particular domain probably breaks down something like this:

50% genetics – your biologically innate capabilities.

25% how hard you work, consistently, to achieve levels of mastery.

25% enabling factors such as environment, teachers and mentors, and people giving you opportunities you couldn’t have engineered yourself.

Genetic distribution means that not everyone can excel in a particular sport or role that requires extraordinary coordination, strength, or endurance.  Not everyone has the intellect to be a doctor or experimental physicist.  Not everyone is wired to be an entrepreneur.  Not everyone has a mind designed to find joy in spreadsheets or crafting poetry.  Not everyone has mechanical aptitude.  Not everyone can be an effective leader of complex organizations. We should be thankful for this!

History is replete with innate talent never used or fully developed.  Significant and sustained work is required.

We like to think we did it all ourselves, but none of excel without enabling help from others.  Excellence requires support, in all kinds of ways.  Excellence is an outcome from association. Think carefully about your peers and associates.  These people matter immensely on the journey to becoming a deeper person.

You might have heard the Red Green line, “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.” If you can’t be successful, you can still be a cynical organization.  Cynics are made by leaders who consistently disappoint and frustrate people’s reasonable expectations.  The basic formula is big promises, tiny rewards, and shunning complainers as unworthy of working for you.  

Organization leaders can follow these time-tested proven strategies: 

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Make gigantic promises about the future.  It’s not “Shoot for the moon,” it’s “Shoot for Pluto.”  Never articulate intermediate goals, and certainly never promise any rewards for hitting intermediate goals. Respond with “Soon” or “Next Quarter” if anyone asks “When?”  Delegate any requests for a Gannt chart to a junior person far from headquarters.  

Never acknowledge a mistake.  Blame-shifting, ignoring the topic, introducing a crisis as a distraction, and revisionist history are your friends.  This only applies to you and the people you favor – every other employee gets no mercy.  

Emphasize appearances and posturing over measurable results and deliverables.  Insist that everyone be ‘strategic’ but don’t demand competence.  Favor good talkers over good doers.   Praise people who ask “smart-sounding” questions that don’t lead to decisions or change.

Create change initiatives to address symptoms.  Keep anyone talented away from addressing root causes by putting them on ‘special projects.’  

Reorganize frequently.  Reorganize in lieu of solving real problems.  Describe reorganizations as a “solution” to give problem-solving energy time to evaporate.  

Spend large amounts of money and time on issues which have zero relationship to the products and services provided by your company.  This will make a few employees happy and quadruple the cynicism of the rest, a big win!   

Hire reliable sycophants. Only promote people who will always agree with you and never outshine you. 

Aim to bring up everyone’s performance by no more than 1% and expect all your employees to do this on their time off.  If someone asks for training, adopt a puzzled expression, and ask “Why?” It will probably be necessary to hold back your top performers to keep lousy performers on the payroll, and especially to keep them in positions of authority.  Find plausible reasons to retain everyone in the spirit of “compassion.”   

Never allow one group to celebrate their accomplishments unless every group has delivered remarkable results in the same month.  Repeat this mantra: “We’re one team and unless everyone wins big, nobody gets a win.”   

Pay new hires significantly more than your long-time employees.  Give all the interesting and new projects to new hires. There is plenty of routine and maintenance work for your old employees because they have more experience.   

Distribute 95% of a tiny fraction of your profits for friendly executives and 5% for everyone else.  Pay bonuses many months after a fiscal year closing; you might need that money for something else that could come up in the meantime.  

Choose the best time to change IT, Finance, Regulatory, and HR systems:  Three months before the current system might start delivering its value proposition.   

Consider all status reporting and standing meetings a perpetual requirement.  It was important once so it must still be important.  Insist reports be compiled and sent to you. Delete them without reading them.  

Schedule update meetings, promising new information, then cancel with a cryptic comment like “To be rescheduled another time.”   

Assume that the right answer to any major problem must be found in an external consulting firm or outside supplier.  Heavily discount internal expertise as “outdated” and “not how the best organizations do things these days.”  When your internal people complain that they’re doing most of the heavy lifting for the consulting firm, respond with “Give them whatever they need because they’re the experts.”  

Use inefficient and drawn-out processes for all budget work, especially requests for increases. Give everyone ambiguous hope for big increases and then trim back to nearly nothing at the last hour.  Follow the same practices for promotions and raises.  

Fuel speculation and uncertainty by withholding detailed information.  You’ll find opportunities to do this every week with only a little effort.  Give ambiguous teasers about mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs to people incapable of keeping secrets.  You can be confident that 14 variations of your comments will be spread within two days.  Then follow-through with wordy memos that begin with “You might have heard that… but it isn’t true.  Not now, anyway.” 

Your weakest leaders, with the smallest track-record, need the most development.  Therefore, give them new strategic assignments every two years and position a few competent people to make them look better.   

When a big decision is needed, invite some of your leaders to review the options and make a recommendation based on an elaborate scoring system.  Ignore their recommendation.

Abandon the past convention that we don’t talk about religion, politics, and sex in the workplace.  Foster religious fervor about social issues, political alignment, and sex.  Shame or expel employees who say things like “can’t we just do our work” in the name of diversity and inclusion.  Encourage everyone to be “authentic” even if they’re disrespectful jerks and nincompoops. Bonus points when you celebrate victimhood instead of people overcoming challenges! 

Ask for suggestions and aim to ignore them.  You already know what’s best.  If a suggestion comes up from one of your sycophants, delay acting on it because of “budget concerns.” 

Repeatedly mention your “core values” but ignore violations unless it’s a convenient excuse to get rid of someone.   

Say “Employees are our most important asset” in the weeks leading up to Board of Director meetings, hiring a new HR VP, and deciding on promotions and raises.   

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You might be feeling overwhelmed with such a long list of strategies but take heart!  Nearly all these can be done passively without conscious effort.  Just follow the path of least resistance and what feels less confrontational. Don’t even bother to survey employees to quantify their cynicism.  That’s unnecessary work! 

o-o-o-o-o 

Written in the spirit of The Screwtape Letters and The 13 Step Plan to Run a World-Class Bad Meeting.  

The 13-Step Plan to Run a World-Class Bad Meeting – Glenn Brooke

HT to M.W. for suggesting this.  

Trust has a curious relationship with privacy.  We need circles of trust or we won’t share;  when something we thought was private becomes shared without permission it shatters trust.

I’m a bit double-minded about privacy.

I can see the dangers of governments and corporations exploiting their access to your information for power, control, and profit.  This is an institutional extension of our flawed human nature.  There are good reasons to make voting a private process, for example.

People conflate privacy and anonymity.  Anonymity is hazardous – people say and do more terrible and hurtful things when they think no one knows who they are, or they will not be held accountable.  We’re individually and collectively better when everyone must stand by their word and be accountable for our actions. 

…

Trust is priceless in the moment of testing. A wise man I know says that cynicism is a giant scab that protects you from disappointment. Many among us have been swimming in a sea of distrust so long that dark humor becomes normal.

Many have lost trust in institutions. Banks failed or didn’t keep their promises to customers. Companies prioritized some shareholders and abused their own employees. Public agencies lied to us then doubled down in cover-ups.  Schools mismanaged a crisis or conflict.  Churches tolerated and hid the abuse of the vulnerable.

Cynicism is understandable as a defense mechanism. It’s a powerful shield against almost everything.

But you can’t be cynical and hopeful at the same time. Hope can live beneath cynicism, quietly waiting. Hope is in precious short supply in most hearts.

Good leaders can tap into that hope underneath the scab. Never abuse that hope; always handle hope with gentleness. Anyone who shares their hope is entrusting you, saying “Don’t ruin this.” 

…

Rebuilding trust in institutions begins by acknowledging mistakes, errors, lies, and manipulations. Hold some leaders accountable, and people who were their accessories. I speak of confession, not admission. (Admitting something is enough to get on talk shows; confession is meaningful.) The way up first requires going humbly down.

The next step is forgiveness.  Relationships re-made on the far side of confession and forgiveness can be stronger and better.  There are many examples of companies who disappointed customers, acknowledged this and made it right, creating long and loyal customers for the future.  The same can happen with other institutions. 

Take note of the history of cults, dictatorships, and collectivist ideologies – they have been incapable of openly acknowledging failures or fostering forgiveness. 

…

Trust is an epiphenomenon of relationships. Institutions are a larger fractal state of interpersonal interactions.  

Corporations where invented as a legal construct – a ‘corpus’ (body) without a soul, that could interact much the way individuals do, but shielding individuals in the corpus (especially owners).  Abstraction and anonymity are simultaneously the power and the problem.

Institutions aren’t uniformly “one person” in the same way that individuals have fragmented perspectives and motivations.  There are subsets and sub-tribes holding different narratives.  The lack of clarity about who you are interacting with complicates restoring trust in an institution. 

Rebuilding trust in institutions is complex and requires faith in larger possibilities.  It requires letting go of preferred grudges and hurts. Rebuilding trust in institutions is the work of deep men and women. 

Perhaps this is your calling?

I was part of a small group that in 1994 persuaded our VP of R&D to put every researcher on Window 95 PCs linked by an ethernet network.  Big bucks, global team, many challenges.  I still remember what he said: “I only hope this doesn’t make the scientists spend less time thinking.”

It makes me squirm to think that the GPT text-generators are essentially a sophisticated plagiarism.  Start with a billion text documents, build a statistical probability model, generate derivative (and often remarkably good) text.

One can legitimately ask, “Glenn, if you read a bunch of articles on a subject, then write an essay about it, aren’t you doing much the same thing?”  In part. 

The difference is that I gain more than information by reading articles and writing an essay.  I strengthen my study power and intellect.  I get to make links from what I read and examine to existing knowledge.  I strengthen my self-discipline.  I gain far less when I only use GPT tools to generate an essay. 

My opportunity is to embrace GPT as a complementary tool rather than a substitution for thinking.

…

I’ve shared a few ChatGPT threads with various people and some have commented about my use of the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in my prompts.  “It’s not adding any value to the query,” one person wrote.  

One observation from both history and contemporary life is that when we treat others in a master-slave relationship, we ourselves are damaged and demeaned.  You can say “AI is just a tool,” which is correct — but we should still treat tools with respect, whether animate or inanimate.  We’re made better when we treat others, including tools, with appropriate respect and courtesy.

I suspect this will become even more important as our algorithms and robotics become increasingly sophisticated.  

…

A tip for using ChatGPT – enter your prompt and ask for citations.  It’s an interesting way to find resources to explore further.  Cautionary note: check to verify the citations are genuine.

…

It’s about the clicks and likes. The economic incentive model of keeping you engaged longer on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and many other websites means that algorithms are designed to show you more of what you liked and consumed before. 

Couple this with the reality that we’re more drawn to entertaining “junk food” content than nourishing content, and it’s a downward spiral.

Multiple universities have made their best courses online, for free.  The goofiest squirrel video will be viewed 100,000 times more frequently.

Nothing about GPT will transform these vectors.  That’s up to individual bravery. 

…

“The first rule of economics is there isn’t enough to go around. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.” (Thomas Sowell) 

One of the biggest lessons to absorb into your bones is that there are no solutions, so we must explore tradeoffs.  Tradeoffs are never perfect because they don’t eliminate the tension between options.  This is why I repeatedly ask the question “What problems do I prefer to have?”  

Nothing about GPT and AI as we have it today changes this reality.

…

An acquaintance wrote me, flatly stating “We shouldn’t use AI.  It won’t help us in the end.” He went on to say he admires the concept of the mentats from Dune. (Mentats are highly-trained human computers capable of immense memory and calculations, fueled in part by the Sappho juice drug.)  “This fuses human ethics with rational computing power.”

I reminded him that the novel describes “twisted” mentats like Piter DeVries who use their training for evil outside of any moral framework beyond Nietzsche’s power dynamic.

Our species is not well-equipped to walk away from a technology if it’s potentially useful.  Despite treaties, we still have nerve gas and nuclear weapons in abundance.  AI isn’t going to evaporate because a few people righteously choose to avoid using it. 

The human factor is crucial with any tool.  Nothing about GPT and AI as we have it today changes this reality.

…

AI will produce multiple billion-dollar and a few trillion-dollar companies.  The rewards will be skewed 80/20, or more likely 95/5.  Most of the advantages of AI capabilities will accrue to the top 20%.  Are you in that 20% or 5%? 

Nothing about AI changes the reality that unequal distributions are universal.

…

See if this resonates:  

Imagine 1000 people each routinely using the power of tens of AI tools. They could have 100,000 or a million times the volume output as 1000 people not using AI tools.  AI makes many things scale much faster. (Maybe not quality, certainly not true innovation.)

The net effect is that everyone in a domain that is heavily digitized is now competing with 10x or 100x more people. 

I know a man who writes for multiple sites, each expecting a different style.  (He uses multiple pseudonyms.)  He told recently told me that he writes an article, then requests ChatGPT to rewrite it “in the style of” writers liked by the editors of these sites.  In 15 minutes he can make 10 variants of the original article, and spend another 30 minutes tweaking them.  Bang, done, ready to submit to a multiple editors.  He got the idea from twitter bot farms that tweak the same message and create a hundred tweets.

…

Plenty of people (correctly) believe that AI will transform our culture.  It’s a major new category of tools, even if it can’t fix your plumbing problem.

The etymological root of the word culture is the word ‘cult.’  The singular characteristic of a cult is that someone tells you what to think and how to think, when to think, and when not to think.  (Did your mind just leap to government spokespersons, social media, and TV/radio talking heads? Or some religious leaders?)

One lesson from studying the lives and patterns of highly influential people:  They all inspired a culture around them.  Some were healthy and helpful. Many were unhealthy and evil. 

A cult is an unhealthy culture.  A healthy culture promotes clear thinking, new ideas, and innovations, grounded in a moral framework.

We must have more healthy cultures in a world increasingly occupied by AI tools to offset the power of algorithm-driven cult of controlled thought.  We need fathers and mothers who nurture and launch young adults who have the capacity to mature further. We need teachers who educate their students to go beyond their teachers.  Indoctrination does not tolerate deviations from what it taught.  We need entrepreneurs who create value far above the status quo.  We need leaders who surround themselves with the right peers and mentors to keep them on a positive vector.  We need men and women who model boldness, self-control, humility, strength, humor, wisdom, compassion, fearlessness.