Living Without Television (on Television)

Since moving to New York, I have been living a grand experiment - I decided not buy a television. My co-workers thought I was nuts of course, but my roommate and I believed we could get all of our shows and news through the Internet. If we succeeded, we would save $60/month on basic cable and $400 on a nice TV.

The grand experiment turned out to be fairly easy because I wasn't a sports fan. I got my news through CNN.com and Google News, and I watched just about everything else on Hulu - even the ball dropping at New Years. The most difficult part is being a day behind on series like 24 when my friends want to talk about it the next day. But overall, I've become so used to it, I actually prefer TV on the Internet to TV on the TV. I will be watching the Presidential Inauguration on Hulu as well.

I realized that as TV on the Internet expands, the idea of "net neutrality" may be challenged. As it stands now, anything said on television is censored by the FCC. Anything said on the Internet is only self-censored. YouTube makes you confirm your birthdate before anything that the community deems inappropriate for young people. Hulu put a notice on the SNL short Jizz My Pants that it originally aired at 12:40 AM. But other than that, these shows are allowed to say anything and do anything online. I wonder whether this different in censorship between TV and Internet will ever come to a head, or whether Internet will just be treated like HBO or Cinemax where producers can also say or do anything. I suppose we'll see.

Ironing

My favorite part of being too lazy to iron is that I start convincing myself that wrinkles are stylish.

A Business Workout

Riding back to the hotel from the client site, I got to have a one-on-one conversation with the partner on my project. He asked how I felt about the project, and I told him that the most fascinating day on the project so far was listening our private equity client talk about their strategy. They just seemed so brilliant because of how easily they articulated a viable action plan moving forward that could revolutionize the business. As a new associate consultant, I just listened in awe.

At the same time, I knew that their seeming brilliance was actually pattern recognition. These guys had so many more years of experience than I had, which meant that they had seen many of these situations before. They could identify patterns emerging because they had experienced them before, and therefore they knew what to do.

The partner agreed. He said that when he first started out, he thought the managers at Marakon were so smart. But once he got to manager level, he realized that these guys weren't necessarily more intelligent than he was - they had just seen more. Once he got the experience, he was operating at the same level.

He said that this pattern recognition was like doing reps at the gym - a business workout. The more business reps you do, the stronger insights you get. He said that what you want to do is reinforce experience with book learning. In addition to doing the job, get a subscription to Harvard Business Review (academia) and BusinessWeek (pop business) - the combination will supercharge your insights. These reps are also what make business school so valuable. Business school is about looking at dozens of cases and debating them with intelligent peers. The patterns become more clear and when the situations arise, you already know what to do.

I think he's right about the combination of experience and book knowledge. The best doctors go home every day and crack open medical journals to keep up on the latest. I think the best businessmen do the same.

New Leaders That Succeed Do This

Two researchers studied the performance of 5,000 people who took new positions of leadership:

Among the high-performing new leaders, one attribute stood out: a strong focus on results. In fact, most of them had managed to secure a “quick win”—a new and visible contribution to the success of the business made early in their tenure. Those who had achieved a quick win scored on average nearly 20% higher than those who hadn’t. This was a forceful but unsurprising finding; management experts often advise newly promoted executives to put points on the board fast. A quick win is a crucial form of reassurance to the leaders’ bosses, who hope they have made the right promotion decision; to team members deciding whether to place confidence in their new manager; and to peers trying to determine whether an equal has joined their ranks.

Our findings became more interesting when we examined the struggling leaders. In that group, we saw a high incidence of five problematic behaviors: focusing too much on details, reacting negatively to criticism, intimidating others, jumping to conclusions, and micromanaging the people reporting to them...

Our analysis demonstrates that leaders who make the most successful transitions do, in fact, focus relentlessly on quick wins. But they focus on a different kind of achievement. Rather than riding roughshod over others to prove themselves, they pursue what we’ve termed “collective quick wins,” accomplishments that make their entire teams look good.

Collective quick wins are achieved with teams, not in spite of them, but they aren’t just team-building exercises. Like other quick wins, they add measurably and meaningfully to the success of the business. If the win does not translate into cost reduction, revenue growth, or some other tangible business outcome, it doesn’t qualify. Nor is a quick win collective unless it features substantive contributions from members of the transitioning leader’s team. Symbolic acts on behalf of the team don’t count, no matter how high-profile they might be. The team must make real, direct contributions. Two simple litmus tests prove useful here: Can key players on the team see their fingerprints on the outcome? Would they cite their contributions with pride? If the answer to either question is no, the win is not collective.

-- Harvard Business Review, "The Quick Wins Paradox"