The Weekly Distillation No.50
Leading in this moment; Covid; DeFi; Work From Office; French Whisky
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
Welcome to The Weekly Distillation. This is a newsletter that seeks to distill the noise and help you be informed, provoked to think, and inspired to create as you lead in life and in your organisation.
People once said……..
“The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.” - Jim Mattis
“Where there is no work, there is no dignity.” - Pope Francis
"It's not a case any more of it might happen, it will happen," - Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA on the promise of new music from the quartet ahead of a hologram tour
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity." - — John F. Kennedy
"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." - George Orwell
Skim it in a minute
The above chart is the current reality of two of the most vaccinated countries in the world. Watch carefully what happens in Israel.
Trying to get my head around incentivised liquidity pools and APRs of 1825% (or even 3%). One to read more than once if you have any interest in decentralised finance (or DeFi).
People are returning to offices or getting back out and meeting people. And they’re hating the commute and travel times. They’re having to communicate they are not as immediately available as they were for the last 18 months. It’s great to see people face to face - but it’s kind of inefficient too. Here’s one VC’s interesting reflections on what they are seeing amongst their portfolio companies and their staff.
French whisky anyone? Or English single malt (that wouldn’t be a single malt if it was in Scotland)? Good examples of innovation in the market.
And just for fun - how good is this goal from last weekend?
Deep Dive into Leading in this Moment
I wrestle with writing on topics like this as 1) I hate the word leader (it has become meaningless) 2) I’m a terrible leader and 3) who on earth am I to give anyone any advice on this! These are a few reflections based on what I am seeing and hearing and what seems to make sense to me.
A massive amount of challenges daily for leaders
The challenges currently are ever-changing, highly varied, structural as well as contextual and often material. These leave boards and leadership teams asking questions such as:
How do I think about diversity and how can I lead here in a healthy way?
Is climate change an existential threat? Does the threat to my organisation justify a meaningful response?
How can I address supply chain shortages?
Where will I find future talent from?
What is the working pattern of the future? Can my employees work from anywhere?
Where are my sales coming from in 12 months time? How do I budget?
How much is AI going to destroy my organisation and how can I react?
Should I make vaccines mandatory for all employees?
Is there a financial crash coming and if so, should I take the fantastic debt offer right now?
I feel swamped - as do my team - where do I need to focus? And how do I find a rhythm of rest in this always-on world?
How do I look after my team’s and my own mental health?
What is the political context we are likely to be living in? War? Terrorism? Independence? Seccession?
What products and services do we need to create, launch, prove and scale for our customers?
Where do I invest the limited resources I have, to maximise the impact?
How to process these
The first thing I would do with this list is segment it and look for the shared themes:
1) People and culture - mental health; diversity; future talent; working pattern of the future; vaccines; prioritisation & off-time
2) Operating context - political context; economy; climate change; AI; financial markets
3) Core product/service - investing; new products & services; supply chain shortages; sales & budgeting
Stating the obvious but bringing your vision and values to this will help answer the questions.
I spent time in a strategy day session on Wednesday. Our first session was recognising our reality, using a “what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s confused and what’s missing” matrix - it was really helpful to bring out the team’s reflections on where we were at. We then identified the key themes from everything that had been written down - we came up with 8.
Our 2nd session has us focus on imagining and visualising where we wanted to see things in 3-5 years and then to share those as a team. We captured the key themes and made sure they mapped back against the 8 themes we identified in our current reality.
Finally we identified 5 priorities to focus on for the next 6 months, as our first step towards that 3-5 year growth plan. 3 months would have been too short for us. Again - we mapped it back against the 8 themes we identified at the start of the day to see if we were addressing them all. There were one or two immediate holes but nothing significant.
This approach was for a strategy day but I think it also works for almost every one of these questions and can be a 15 min exercise, or a 3 day exercise.
Ask what’s right, wrong, confused and missing on this question
Ask where you want to be by xx period
Make a plan for immediate action
However, the framing of all of that through your vision and values is key - otherwise you can’t prioritise, you don’t know where to allocate scarce resources and you will likely be fragmented rather than focused.
Does it even matter?
Every one of the questions at the top of this section screams for attention. What’s more important in this moment? Recruitment? Sales? Finance? Diversity? Responding to the threat from AI?
Ask yourself something I heard recently - if I don’t address this will it be the issue that sinks the company? Now, I aspire to more than avoiding sinking the company - but grabbing a sense of perspective is helpful.
I try the following with my children when they can’t decide which sweet from the box they want - I ask them if they had to remove one, which one would they put back in the box. Very quickly we get down to a choice of 2. I think that approach works with these questions - if you had to remove 1 that is not an immediate issue, which one would it be? Keep doing that until there are hardly any left and then analyse the issue, visualise the goal and make a short term action plan.
Momentum over almost everything.
Leading right now is tiring, it’s confusing and it’s pressured. With clarity of vision and values and using some simple diagnostic and process tools, a lot of the stressful questions can turn into a plan of attack very quickly.
What’s working for you in leading in this moment?
I mentioned last week that I’d been working on a spreadsheet of distilleries and looking at the new whisky distilleries in the works to be built (or at least in the mind) in Scotland (c.34 I think, albeit one or two are a bit dubious or I am projecting - and one or two I can’t share). I got a few responses from whisky companies asking for the list. It’s very much an early work in progress but I’ve created it as a Google sheet and will keep updating it over time - feel free to contribute.