Leadership is not science but art which is highly situational. This book discusses a few contrarian principles to help leader break free of the wisdom of the herd. Theses principles are not dogma but can be useful reference to guide us. Overall the book is a little bit hard to read compared to other books, simple words are not always used and the content in each chapter is not that well structured for easy understanding. Nevertheless it won’t affect the true value of these principles if we put into practice.

Think Gray and Think Free: Think gray is to avoid forming firm opinions about ideas or people unless and until you have to. Think free is to think several steps beyond to contemplate really outrageous ideas and only subsequently apply the constraints of practicality. This will help leader to avoid his established prejudices and be creative and open.

Artful Listening: One important skill for leader is to understand other’s thinking. So listen first, talk later and when you listen, do it artfully. Think gray will help you to listen different inputs openly and also know when to stop listening.

Experts: Experts can be helpful but they’re no substitute for your own critical thinking.

You Are What You Read: Again the importance of reading books and particularly for the supertexts including The Princes, Republic, Hamlet, Antigone and etc. to learn about some timeless truths about human nature. Only read things that matter.

Decisions, Decisions: Again the decision making. The suggestion is to never make a decision yourself that can reasonable be delegated to a lieutenant and never make a decision today that can reasonable be put off to tomorrow. Delegating authority while retaining ultimate responsibility, artful procrastination, ignoring sunk costs and taking luck into account are finest traits during decision making.

Give the Devil His Due: The contrarian leader won’t be naive about the people and circumstances he’s dealing with. Many decisions will be very complex and the leader must discern the pitfalls of various options and choose the best on offer, knowing that there is no perfect solution. Don’t unnecessarily humiliate a defeated opponent.

Know Which Hill You’re Willing to Die On: Moral and ethical concerns insinuate themselves into almost every aspect of leadership. Know what matters most to your beliefs and your choice may at some point require you to retreat from all the surrounding hills.

Work for Those Who Work for You: This is the one I firmly believe in. For majority of time the lead should do everything you can to help your direct reports succeed. Choosing the right people, motivating them, supporting them, helping them grow, inspiring them, evaluating them and firing them are among the most important things a leader does.

Follow the leader: Leaders don’t really run organizations, rather leaders lead individual followers who collectively give motion and substance to the organization.

Being President vs Doing President: Don’t delude yourself into thinking that people are intrinsically better or worse than they really are. Working to bring the best of your followers while minimizing the worst.

With practice and flexibility, principles will help you become a more effective leader. 

In today’s world we’re facing too many choices every day, with the social pressure and the ideas that you can have it all makes lots of us overwhelmed while not results in the maximum results. It’s true for person and also true for companies like Meta today. This book shares the mindset and framework for us to focus on the less but real critical things by explore, eliminate and execute.

First part the book introduces the core logic of an essentialist including the power of choice that we have control to ourselves, the unimportance of practically everything, the reality of trade-off. There are only a small percent of efforts yield the higher rewards than others while meaning most things are non-essential. The time and energy is limited so what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.

With the right mindset, the first step is explore to discern the trivial many from the vital few. Essentialists spend as much time as possible to explore, listen, debate, question and think. To do this you need space to escape and explore life including concentrating and reading. Lots of successful people like Bill Gates keeps time to read and think. Then it’s to look to see what really matters. Keep eye on the big picture, pay attention to the signal in the noise, filter for the essence of information. Keeping a journey, getting out into the filed, keeps eyes peeled for usual details and clarifying the question will all help you to tap into your inner journalist. While explore and look, it’s important to remember to play to embrace the wisdom of your inner child. Play is essential to a happy life and sparks exploration. Also another critical things in life is sleep to protect our ability to promise. Sleep is priority and breeds creativity. Then it’s to select with the extreme criteria. “If the answer isn’t a definite yes then it should be a no” and you should focus on only the top 10% of the opportunities. They should align with your passion, talent and value.

The second step is to eliminate to cut out the trivial many. To clarify the essential intent that’s concrete and inspirational and how it means be done. Living with intent. Dare to say no gracefully. The main thing is to keep main thing the main thing. There are different ways to say no and it’s much more graceful than a vague or noncommittal yes. Say no with options is a common strategy to reject gracefully. We need learn for quick no and slow yes. Another hard part to make the tradeoff is the sunk-cost bias. To make the right choice we need be comfortable to cut loss. Admit past failure is important for future success. Also be caution to make commitment to others too quick, a 5 seconds pause could help. Eventually we need edit to keep reducing distracting details just like movies. Last but not least it’s critical to set boundaries. To know that you have limits you will be limitless, with the rule in advance will eliminate the need for the direct “no”. It’s a source of liberation and with practice it’ll become easier and easier.

The third step is to execute on the few vital things effortless. First is the importance of buffer, as we know the only thing we can expect is the unexpected so we need practice extreme and early preparation. This is true to lots of time when we estimate the effort and the book suggested to add at least 50% to the estimated time. Then it’s find the obstacles and remove them instead of doing more. After that it’s important to keep the progress with small wins. Start small and gets big results and celebrate small acts of progress. Then it’s about the importance of routine to design it that makes achieving what you have identified an essential to the default position. Do the hard thing first and do one thing at one time to makes things look easy. Keep asking what’s important now to focus on the present and enjoy the moment. Eventually it’s BE the essentialist and make it habits of every day in the little moments in life. With more clarify in the purpose, more control to your power, more joy in the journey and eventually live a life that really matters.

This book actually reminds me lots of principles I read from books in the past. Think big, start small and move fast. Focus on what really matters, Realize the importance of routine and saying no. The 20/80 rules and decision framework. It’s good to keep repeating the good principles and practicing to really internalize them.

The appendix discussed about leadership essentials which worth writing down here. The less but better mindset, the ridiculously selective on talent, define the essential intent by ask what the one thing we could do, focus on each team members’ highest role and goal and attribution, listen to get what is essential, check with people on how to remove obstacles to enable small wins and eventually build a unified team that breaks through to the next level of contribution.

Good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. The book “Measure What Matters” introduces what is OKRs , why it works and how to integrate it with the process and culture.

OKRs, short for Objectives and Key Results, which is a collaborative goal-settings protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. It has been widely adopted in industry including Intel, Sun, Google and etc. Obviously it’s not a silver bullet, as we know what happened to Sun and what is happening to Intel now, but nevertheless it’s a great framework to map the ideas into concrete objectives and measurable outcomes.

What is OKR?

Objectives are WHAT is to be achieved and they should be significant, concrete, action oriented and ideally inspirational. Key results benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Most importantly they are measurable and verifiable. Either we meet the key results or not and there shouldn’t be gray areas.

Why does it work?

The book introduces four superpowers from the OKR framework. The first is Focus and Commit to priorities. OKRs forced leaders to make the hard choices to focus on the most important things needed to win. The second is Align and Connect for Teamwork. OKRs make everyone’s goals very transparent and individuals can link their objectives to the company/org’s priorities, identify the dependencies and collaborate with other teams. Top-down alignment brings meaning and motivation to work while owning their OKRs depending on people’s sense of ownership from bottom-up to boot engagement and innovations. The third is Track for Accountability.  OKSs are measurement and driven by data. The periodic check-ins, objective grading and continuous reassessment trigger actions to make sure things are on track and update timely as needed. The last is Stretch for Amazing. OKRs motivates the team to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible, the challenge helps release the creative and ambitious selves.

How to integrate it with process and culture?

CFRs (Conversation, Feedback, Recognition), a framework for continuous performance management can team up together with OKRs to lift people to a whole new level. Conversation is an authentic ,richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance. Feedback is bidirectional communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement. Recognition expresses appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of all sizes. CRFs and OKRs, champion for transparency, accountability and empowerment to encourage people to drive the excellence outcome measurement OKRs toward the objective. This will help organizations to establish a common framework for decision making and talking about the same thing with meaning, which is an important part of culture.

After reading this one, I found this framework contains principles that’s very similar with another book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution ” including Focus on the Wildly Important, Act on the Lead Measures, Keep a Compelling Scoreboard, and Create a Cadence of Accountability. They’re all about focus, measurable, tracking and accountability leading to great execution.  

In our daily and professional life, there are lots of times we need persuade others and this book provides six good principles that we can use to influence other’s decision. As what mentioned in the book, nothing will grantee the success but combining of them together will greatly improve the chance of success.

Weapons of Influence: The first chapter introduced that some small tactics has huge impact to influence others. For example with a simple reason attached with your request, even the reason doesn’t quite makes sense, it will greatly increase the chance that others will accept your request like to cut the line. Also the comparison like show most expensive things first then less one will make people feel the price is more acceptable, similar trick might be used by real estate agent to show a pretty old low quality house first then the normal one.

Reciprocity: This principle says that when we receive something, we feel obliged to give something back. This is something embed into our genes as in history we as human need to group together to survive. It’s common to see free sample in supermarket like the Costco, which is proven a very success strategy to get more people to by the product as after people eat the free sample they feel obliged to give something back leading to more purchase. Also in negotiation the reject-then-retreat is a common trick to ask for something big (still reasonable) then fall back to the next option when got reject, as the fallback option gives the other party the impression that you’re making compromise already so they need do something. At the same time to avoid been manipulated by this, it’s useful to think about other’s true intention.

Consistency: This principle shows that we feel compelled to be consistent with what we have said/done in the past. A common tactic is to get someone to say YES to some small thing first to make commitment, then ask something more bigger. Interesting that the author used example from prisoner-of-war camps by China after the Korean war to successfully get corporations from the captives.

Social Proof:” When we’re uncertain how to behavior or react, we look to others for answers. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it. This is why we’re seeing so many “best-selling products” in Ads, and also “national bestseller” on lots of books’ cover including this book. Also it can be used to explain why the suicide contagion and jonestown massacre.

Liking: This tells us that we’re more likely to agree to someone’s request if we know and like him/her. Friendships and personal relationships can have strong influence in our choice. There are a few things including physical attractiveness, similarity, compliments, contact and cooperation will create the liking effect that more easily to get other’s buy-in. This is actually also very helpful during recruiting to convince others to join team, by sharing the common things for similarity, find PoC with similar background with candidate and etc. 

Authority: We tend to obey figures of authority (people with titles or expertise), this is what most of people taught since kids. That’s why in so many Ads we are seeing something pretend to be doctor/teacher will have bigger influence to people’s purchase decision. Also celebrity endorsements in advertising is useful overall.

Scarcity: We perceive something to be more valuable when it’s less available. Hunger marketing is a typical example here, usually offering products with barging pricing while stock is limited with limited time offer, deadline and etc. The trigger is that the fear of loss is always greater than the desire for gain, we weigh more on worry that we lost the scared items.

All these actually remind another book thinking fast and slow. It’s in our genes that we need make fast decisions with mental shortcuts, which likely to very critical as our ancestor had to make quick decisions in dangerous situations to survive. These short cuts works well in most cases but become possible vulnerabilities in our decision making which comes out the six principles of influences here.