And Vijay Says…

Late on Wednesday night, I got an email that essentially said we moved from #5 to #1 on a certain important metric . This was a big goal for our team, and we were all working hard for it. So I shared the news with my leadership team right away . Thursday morning, one of them (who is new to the team) asked how we managed to pull it off . And my reply was that our secret ingredient was LOVE, and cued in the Barny song . Of course it sounded terribly cheesy 🙂

In any case, here is what I meant by LOVE in this context

LOVE = Level Set + Operational Efficiency + Valor + Execution Excellence

It’s a simple formula that has served me well throughout my career

Level set

There are three parts to doing a good level set – starting point , destination, and the first couple of milestones.

You need to know where you are starting from – what works , what doesn’t work , strengths and weaknesses of the team, existing relationships and all that. More important – a good honest hypothesis on WHY we are where we are, and WHY we need to change. The trick here is not to get bogged down in details . Get a good enough starting point and have the confidence that you can tweak along the way as you progress and learn more .

You need to make sure everyone else knows the starting point too , and that they are bought into the first upcoming milestone – and the long term vision . Strength of leadership is in making sure you have both an actual vision and at least a few initial milestones in place before you start . One without the other does not go anywhere far.

Operational Efficiency 

I grew up in a culture of being metrics driven. It has its definite advantages – but also some problems that need to be addressed. I like to be a metrics minimalist. Any measurement that does not give me a chance to change the outcome is a metric I can live without.

I am a big fan of keeping things simple so that everyone gets what they need to do. Complexity does not scale – and your job as a leader is to encourage your team to simplify everything that can be simplified. You need a simple way to track progress – and the process needs to be tweaked as you learn more along the way.

You need to be pragmatic about metrics. Metrics is not the end – it is just a means to an end. If you don’t realize that – you and/or your team will just find ways to game the metrics. Fascination for metics at its extreme is also the primary cause for premature optimization.

Valor

The very fact that you are in a turnaround should indicate that some things were messed up in the past. The starting point to a turn around is that you need a lot of courage to take it on – simply because you don’t really know if you have actually hit the bottom, and it might sink further on your watch. But your own courage is just a starting point. Your team needs to find the courage to face the hard problems , and look at them differently in a positive frame of mind. And they won’t do it until they see their leaders have their backs – which goes back to the point of the leader having the courage to begin with.

This is also why it is important to celebrate successes – however small, and even if the net result is still in negative territory. Positivity breeds more positivity and eventually gets you the collective momentum you need . A lot of turn arounds fail because people feel their efforts went thankless for a long time. That is squarely on leaders – if you truly care, you need to express your sincere gratitude to the people who trusted you and put in the effort. In the same breath I will add that if you don’t mean it – don’t put on a show, as your team will see through it quickly and it only does harm .

The true tests of courage is the trust and transparency of the leader. Most people can see through the BS if you try to spin the message. Also, it is a lot less stressful for leaders to be transparent and admit that you don’t have all the answers and that you need their help to find solutions, than to pretend that things are rosy and make up some convenient answer.

Execution excellence 

This is where everything comes together. Planning and preparing only takes you so far – the real test is what you do every hour of every day. You have to clearly say what you are going to do to your stakeholders, and then go do exactly what you said you will do. And when things don’t work the way you thought – you need to tell them what did not work, and what you are going to do about it, and then go do that. Success of a turn around is due 99% to perspiration , and just 1% to inspiration .

True excellence means that you don’t need to drive this top down any more, and that the team does it as their routine work and grow into leaders themselves.

Post script

Looking back over a long period of time, we all realize that turning around a problem is perhaps the relatively easy part in hindsight. Things can go south at any point – either because you slacked, or because there were others who put in more effort and thought into it than you did, or because the environment changed externally and internally and you did not see it coming, or maybe just plain bad luck. That is why its important to iterate- and why you have to celebrate success, say thank you to people who made it happen, level set to a new baseline and start all over again.

 

Promotions are hard for the employee and the employer. Unless its the first couple of levels in the organizational ladder, there is always a lot of subjectivity that goes into the process from both sides. Even when a company says it is all data driven – it is often the case that subjective decisions ( my favorite one – a score for communication skills) that contribute to the final “score” .

I have had my fair share of happiness and frustration when it comes to promotions – both as an employee and as a manager. So I thought I will offer a few thoughts on this topic for what its worth. I am skipping over some obvious stuff like networking, having mentors and coaches and sponsors, gaining the right skills, being a good communicator and so on.

Careful what you wish for !

While the title looks cooler, the office larger, and the pay check looks bigger – promotions come with things you don’t always realize prior to the big event. To maintain the level of high performance you are used to – You may need to travel more, you may not get as much time with family or to exercise , you may be risking your job itself a whole lot more with the kind of decisions you make , you may get a new boss who is not as good to you as the last one, and at some senior levels – you may not have any air cover any more !. Before you set down the road to promotion – you need to understand what it means to your life uniquely . And since circumstances changes, you need to evaluate along the way if you still want it.

When Performance and Potential meets Feasibility

If you are awesome at your current job – there is a high chance that you will get good raises and bonuses. If you don’t and you leave – you probably can get a job elsewhere at the same level that pays you better. That does not get you promoted most of the time. Similarly if your leaders feel you have the potential to be good at your next job – they will put you on the slate to be promoted. But then you need to perform at a level consistent with the job you are going to be promoted to. If you don’t – you will stay in your current level. Even if performance and potential are great – you may miss out on promotions because the business makes an evaluation that there is no capacity to promote you. If you miss out on a promotion – you need to know which of these scenarios played out, and then make a decision to fight it, improve on it, give up or leave . Don’t just do the same things all over again and expect a different result .

Don’t be petty – be Great !

While the prevailing wisdom is “results should speak for you” – that is not how it works in real life for the most part. So you need to market your success so that people know what you did . This needs some nuance too which is where this usually goes wrong terribly. If you steal credit – you will get exposed at some point and take a fall for it. So do yourself a favor – and don’t EVER do it ! Also – as you grow as a leader, you need to demonstrate that you are grooming a top performing team, and not just growing yourself. I need more than fingers and toes to count how many people have not made it through promotion processes just for being petty .  It’s the kind of reputation that is really hard to shake off.

Grow some thick skin ….really thick skin 

No one likes to be criticized – even when it is “constructive”. In the ideal world – leaders praise in public and criticize in private. As your responsibilities grow – the risk of taking heat in larger forums also generally increases. If you melt down frequently when your leaders turn on the pressure, take some time to figure out how to grow your resilience. Remember that they are evaluating you against the job you want – not the one you have now. That means they also expect you to push back when you have conviction in your actions. You need to get comfortable with testing boundaries – and you need to be resilient if you want to be good at it.

Trust and transparency are never out of fashion

I remember the coaching a senior partner gave me the evening I was promoted to senior manager – “Vijay, it is quite simple to progress in this firm. You tell people what you will do, and then you go do it. You ask for specific help and act on it. You let everyone who needs to know if there is a meaningful deviation from what you set out to do and what is your new plan. You keep doing it to higher degrees every year and you will progress rapidly. That is all there is to it”.

That advice has stayed true to this day and I gratefully pass it on to others.

From “Climbing a ladder” to “Surfing waves”

The first few promotions are absolutely like climbing a ladder – each rung looks to be the same distance above the last one. You can plan the process fairly well. This analogy stops being relevant by the time you make first line manager. From that point it is more like surfing waves. A surfer cannot will a wave to show up. He can only be as prepared as he can when a wave shows up. Waves many not show up for a while – but you could also have back to back big waves that you can ride high. If you don’t see waves at all for a while – you may want to find another beach to try your luck, and it is totally ok to be happy paddling around in the sun and enjoy the peaceful scenery for a while. Its your life after all 🙂

Have a plan for dealing with rejection

Promotions obviously get progressively harder to get given there is lesser room as you move up a pyramid. The criteria gets not only harder – it gets fuzzier as well. You have a decision to make when you are passed over for promotion.  The best time to decide what to do with rejection is before you go through the process when your judgement in less clouded with emotional distress. You need to make peace with the fact that the world is not fair. Someone else may have powerful connections, may have more skills , or just have the knack of being in the right place at the right time.

If performance was the reason, and you agree with it – obviously the solution is to get the right skills, try harder etc. If potential was the reason – its time to have an honest conversation with your leader and decide if there is something you can do about it. If it was because the business could not afford to promote you – understand what else can happen instead . Can you get a raise and a promise to get promoted when some agreed up on event happens? Is this a make or break milestone for you that you would rather leave than try again ? And if it is – does your leadership know it so that they can factor it into their process ? Should you check the open market to see what else is available so that you don’t need to settle for less in the last minute if things don’t work for you in the promotion process ?

The only thing harder than getting a promotion 

is to sustain the performance at the new role ! Its one thing that you and your leaders both thought you are awesome. It’s quite another to make it work every day . Again, I think the best time to plan for that is before you get promoted . Learn as much as you can about what success looks like at the new level and what is the big difference from success in current job. Then fix those gaps as much as you can. That will improve your chances of success in getting promoted, will give you the confidence to make a strong start and worst case – it will help you interview better and find a new gig if you choose to leave.

 Good luck !

Almost 7 decades have passed since Alan Turing asked “Can Machines Think?” . It’s hard to define what thinking means – and it continues to be hard today as it was in 1950. So Turing took a pragmatic approach and redefined the problem as “Can a computer behave like a human being?”.

It was absolutely a fine question to ask in 1950 because it was about the theoretical future and it provided a Northstar for AI researchers to guide their efforts . Now AI has reached a level where it is practical and the answer to the question has real consequences.

First – I don’t think machines think at all like we do . Most AI today is machine learning . What it does is do pattern detection at scale. And it takes a lot of information for the machine to “learn”. That in itself is an indication that machines are dumber than even little children today .

A toddler who has seen a picture or two of a dog on her story book can usually understand that the first real dog she sees is similar to a dog she saw in the book . And the odds of her mistaking a dog for a cat are minimal . That’s not true for machine learning at all – it needs a lot of labeled data to get to a comparable level if at all .

Second – we don’t just make decisions based on patterns alone . We use other information we know from the past and combine that with the newly detected pattern to make a decision . That’s not how AI works in mainstream today .

But Machine learning is amazingly powerful at a lot of things. It does not need to be like human thinking for it to be powerful and give us a lot of value . And like all of computing – it can also cause a great deal of harm. The time is ripe for us to get the debate on ethics of computing in general and AI in particular to actual actions with some urgency .

What is the purpose of AI ? Is it to replace humans at scale ? Or is it to augment humans ?

If it’s purpose is to augment humans – then isn’t it pure deception to make it pass Turing test ? Why should it solve problems in a way that makes an observer believe it’s a human ?

For example – if I ask a computer to add two five digit numbers , it can find me an answer in sub-second time . But to make me believe it’s a human that is answering – it needs to wait for few seconds or a minute to give me the answer . What is the real value delivered here ? And why should the virtual assistants have a human name and persona at all if the aim is to augment humans ?

Humans are imperfect and we are not always logical, nor consistent . That is our default mainstream behavior . Computers on the other hand have logical and consistent behavior as their default . It’s a waste of effort to make them behave like humans just to pass the Turing test . And obviously how ethical would such a system be that is fundamentally built to deceive ?

Computers can and should be used extensively to solve complex problems . They can do that without having to mimic humans just to trick us .

AI can do the world a lot of good – and that won’t happen if we don’t trust it . For example – there are well known ethical problems to solve for self driving cars . If we stop thinking about AI as human like – we probably will set a realistic bar for it to meet for us to be comfortable letting it drive our cars . AI enabled cars will also have many accidents – but we can have a logical discussion on “is it good enough that we can save a lot of lives lost through DIU and texting while driving by having more cars depend on AI ?”. If on a global aggregate – if AI can reduce the total loss of life every year , will we accept it ?

There will be many such difficult questions to answer now and in future . Can’t we give ourselves more room to solve them by taking away the need for AI to be human like ?

So should we free the world of AI to move past the Turing test so that they can focus on solving real problems without the burden of also deceiving us in the process ?