Day #15 Grayleap Reading Challenge #Streaks #OneThing #Leadership #Business
SUMMARY
Book #1: Shed everything. Pick a small thing that can have maximum effect. Focus on that One Thing for dramatic results.?
Book #2: Real-life relationships are more important than the number of followers that you have online. You might get a boost of serotonin from seeing the likes and comments on your posts, but it does not replace the human factor.
Book #3: Founders of Remind App (used in more than 50% American schools), initially "failed because they were arrogant" and "weren't yet focused on what counted." Eventually, OKRs would lead them to $40 million in funding.
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1) The One Thing - Review of Chapter 1 by Daizy Patel
Chapter 1 - The One Thing
The chapter begins with an incident where he goes to see the comedy movie "City Slickers" on June 7, 1991. He narrates an incident from the movie where Curly, the gritty cowboy reveals the secret of life, and that is ONE THING, which is, just one thing.?
The author finds that out of the mouth of a fictional character comes the secret of success. Furthermore, he says that he was not able to understand this until he faced some turmoil around him. Then he began to realize that whenever he had huge success, he had narrowed his concentration to one thing, and where his success varied he had focused on too many things.
The author shares a story of his personal business challenge when he had to reach out to a coach who helped him arrive at the "ONE THING" that his business needed at that time. He stepped out of his CEO role to focus on that ONE THING of recruiting 14 key people. Once they were in, the company saw a dramatic turnaround.
The author highlights the importance of giving attention to small things. By "small things," he means that, out of all the things we have to do daily, we can narrow our focus to one thing. That, he said, was the best way to connect what we wanted to what we do; to narrow down the focus to bring extraordinary results. The author explains why TO DO LISTS fail. He helps us understand the importance of doing "fewer things with more effect". In the end, he summarizes by saying that GOING SMALL is a simple approach to extraordinary results, and it definitely works.
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2) Leaders Eat Last - Review of Chapter 15 by Rajesh Madan
Chapter 15: Managing the Abstraction
We get to know the five rules of making a connection with people at a human level.
Sinek starts with thought-provoking comparative case studies. One in which the Syrian dictator kills over one lakh of his own people. The second is the story of a young girl who meets with a road accident and an army recruit tries his best to save her life. She's taken to the hospital. And a few days later, he learns from the newspaper that she's dead. The second story has more human pull for us than the first one because, as humans, we don't get emotionally triggered by abstract numbers.
Sinek then goes on to lay down the five rules:
1. Keep it real - Bring people together: Real-life relationships are more important than the number of followers that you have online. You might get a boost of serotonin from seeing the likes and comments on your posts, but it does not replace the human factor. That's why even bloggers have their annual event at a physical location, not online.
2. Keep it manageable - Obey Dunbar's number: 150 is the golden number of people one can really get to know well. Beyond that, it becomes unmanageable. Sinek expounds on the anthropological and other reasons why that is true.
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3. Meet the people you help: Sinek quotes Adam Grant's book Give and Take. Fundraisers for a university had a high turnover rate. Wanting to correct this, they were made to meet the beneficiary students of the funds. The average weekly revenue increased by 400% the following month.
4. Give them time, not just money: Money is abstract. Whereas if you spend time with someone, they're much more likely to remember and even be grateful to you.
5. Be patient: Getting to know someone takes time. Don't rely on the initial serotonin rush of meeting the person.
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3) Measure What Matters - Review of Chapter 5 by? Amarendra S.
Chapter 5 - Focus: The Remind Story
This chapter tells the tale of Remind, a mobile messaging app utilized in more than 50% of American public schools. While still a student, Brett Kopf, founder of Remind, received diagnoses for both dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. David, his brother, put up a system so that teachers could notify him of future tests. The two made the decision to turn the successful experiment into a business.
In the first phase of business, Kopf says they "failed because they were arrogant" and "weren't yet focused on what counted." They survived death by joining a start-up accelerator. They began operating on three deceptively simple yet powerful principles:
1) Solve a problem?
2) Build a simple product
3) Talk to your users
He shares:
"I focused on a single 10-week goal: to interview 200 teachers across the USA and Canada." Within a couple of weeks, when teachers started getting excited about the solution they were offering (a crude beta version of the product), they "knew they were on the right track." Soon they got the next round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins. With that, the author, John Doerr, walked in with his proposition of OKRs. Within six months or so, the Remind App exploded, with "more than 300,000 downloads per day."?
His view on OKRs:
1) "You can only do one big thing at a time really well, and so you better know what that one thing is."?
2) "At a fast-growing startup, effective leaders keep firing themselves from the jobs they did at the beginning."
He used OKRs for his personal focus too, limiting himself to 3-4 activities. He also shared his progress with colleagues and openly sought feedback. He says, "people need to see the CEO's priorities" and it is even OK to see the CEO failing at something. In a culture where mistakes are admitted openly, people would know that "it is ok to make a mistake, correct it, and move on."
Within a year of beginning with OKRs-based management, Remind secured $40 million in funding.?