Who Not How
A business guide emphasizing the importance of identifying and focusing on the right people rather than processes to achieve goals.
NBA star Kobe Bryant once told his teammate Shaquille O’Neal, “These young guys are playing checkers. I’m out there playing chess.”
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.” —Lucius Annaeus Seneca
When you believe something must be done, you somehow find the ability to get it done. This is why deadlines are so powerful.
Interestingly, though, research has found that teams who have high levels of autonomy but low goal clarity, as well as little performance feedback, actually perform worse than teams with low autonomy. However, when a team has 1) high autonomy, 2) high goal clarity, and also 3) gets regular feedback on their results, then their performance shoots through the roof.
Although having a great work ethic is something to strive for, you’ve got to be careful. You’re either in the “Time and Effort Economy” or the “Results Economy.” Far too often, people wear their hard work as a badge of honor. But in reality, they are engaging in Hows that could easily be handled by a Who to more effectively produce the desired result.
“You can survive without a community, but you can’t thrive without one.”
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” —Reid Hoffman
A keystone concept in psychology is known as the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or over-attribution effect), which is the tendency for people to overemphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for how a person acts while underemphasizing situational explanations.
While Lewis was encouraging Tolkien to continue mapping out his universe, he himself was undergoing a crisis of faith. On a fall evening in 1931, Lewis took a walk with Tolkien and another fellow Inkling, Hugo Dyson, and they prodded Lewis back to his faith. By dawn Lewis had decided to return to Christianity, his rededication to which completely revolutionized Lewis’s imagination and creativity, fueling his most important work and legacy.