ทวีตที่ปักหมุด
𝐀𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞!
It was @nntaleb that drove home to me that aging should not be seen using the distance from birth, rather through the estimated distance from death.
I like to visit and walk the cemeteries whenever I’m in a new city to remind myself of the eventuality and give me the courage to speak truth to power.
I recently went back to Japan after 20 years. Here is me walking the cemetery in Kyoto.
Well, why am I talking about this now?
I wrote a book! A book that I wrote knowing that I’m going to be dead one day and that I must come clean about the mistakes I made as a Tech. leader.
Failed executives don’t write books about their failures. They just go on to make millions and fail elsewhere.
They may appear to be a success if you just look at quantifiable metrics like their net worth or the share price of their company.
But they are miserable failures if you look closely at what they did to the lives of their employees - bureaucracy, burn out, forced relocations, layoffs, etc.
So I decided to write a book that catalogs and details many of my mistakes. On thinking deeper, they are not just my mistakes, but the mistakes of
mainstream management in general - I simply took them for granted without questioning their validity and effectiveness.
As much as I have become skeptical of anything prescriptive (what to do) that ignores the unique context in front of us, I think it is important to talk about what NOT to do.
So, I made sure this book is full of negative advice (what NOT to do) - traps and pitfalls you must avoid.
Why negative advice?
I go back to Nassim Taleb, who explains the why elegantly:
“I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.
Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for - - ” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid.”
Grab a copy here: cyb3rsyn.com/products/mmm-b…
#leadership #systemsthinking #complexity #cybernetics #philosophy
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