Aneesh Sathe

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Summary #

Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.

Good leaders are courageous thinkers #

Leadership is a frame of mind. You don’t need to have a title to be a leader, but if you do have a title you better have the right frame of mind.

As a leader, you need to be able to think for yourself. Take in, organise, and make sense of data coming to you and then take a call. You also need to have a strong moral sense. This takes courage. It is trivial to let things proceed as they are or to con your superiors into generating a list of tasks for you to do. But to point and say that we need to do this and not that, takes courage and mental faculties to argue for your point in the face of opposition.

In books on leadership, one often reads saying “no” and creating time for yourself in your schedule, the main purpose of this is to give yourself time to think, to marinate in the data and ferment out decisions. Leaders (in my startup experience) are pelted with requests and activities that would easily fill up 48 hours every day if they let them. For people like me, who come from research, the importance of creating time to think and plot ahead is implicit and we naturally make that space.

Good leaders make that space, put in thought and make the tough calls.

Good leadership teams are capable, great leadership teams are capable friends #

There is a central problem here. No leader can be an expert in everything. Even if data is staring you in the face, you may not (and often don’t) have the experience to correctly surmise what the next step should be. This is what the leadership team (or just your team) is for.

There is an excellent article by William Deresiewicz on Solitude and Leadership (here), where he talks about how being a leader is essentially an activity done in solitude. However there is also an important point he makes about the need for friendship as a means of self-discovery and solitude:

“So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.[…] what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”

Leaders should go out of their way to be friends with their leadership teams. In my experience of running projects, large and small, without a tight-knit leadership team the projects are hopeless and fail miserably. The main reason for this is not the capabilities of the individuals but their ability to openly discuss and question assumptions. To an external observer this make look like the leader is generating a coterie or a clique around them, but that’s exactly what one needs. A good leader is nothing without a leadership team that is textbook definition of coterie: “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with a unifying common interest or purpose”.

A good leadership team enables the leader to take tough decisions and make what seem like courageous calls from the safety of having thought things through.

Most people know my love for  Norah Jones (I bought the cassette for Come Away with Me before all the awards), most people don’t know that I’m a long time fan of Anoushka Shankar also. To hear the sisters talk and play together is something else!   If for some crazy reason you don’t want to listen to the podcast, here are some of their songs from albums:   https://youtu.be/kEJSWIftX98   https://youtu.be/Wi7F-MlKLG4 https://youtu.be/wnkopIHRH3Q https://youtu.be/jguri1qOCY0 Here’s one of Anoushka with Sting: https://youtu.be/TmnDLMzpXLE   And the best tribute I saw to Chris Cornell: https://youtu.be/XbQ08Ixczvo Now go listen to the podcast 😉 https://youtu.be/VNz7kzO9vS4

As I start to build up my web presence during, what seems to be the fall of twitter, coming across article like these is heartening. Glen says:

The hardest thing we can do, but the most vital, is to start building amateur websites again! […] Building amateur web pages increases the quality of content on the web as well. A status update or a tweet on a huge social network is a lot like fast food; it’s immediately satisfying, but it’s not good for you, and ultimately leaves you feeling empty. But writing content for your own site - something that you feel so passionate about that you needed to build your own site to get it out into the world - is like cooking your own meal from scratch. It’s immediately filling, and satisfying in the long run the way fast food could never be. But it’s not enough to build our own site. We need to connect to others. Geocities was one of the pioneers of early web hosting, and even though it’s gone, there are still lessons we can learn from it. When you built a site on Geocities your site was sorted into a neighborhood, along with other sites that shared a common theme. This is a concept that we can borrow and build upon. We need to get to know our virtual neighbors and build a community around common interests, linking each other’s websites to form our own microweb of related content. So seek out new and interesting sites, and link to them on your site. Reach out to them, and see if they’ll link to you. Start a dialog. The way to build a better web is to build a better web of people.

After an unusually wet season the wildflowers have gone into a superbloom. I can’t seem to get enough of them.

Little feet waddle over the bookshelf. Little hands grab books made for little hands. It’s his favourite, a cardboard box of four books: numbers, animal sounds, alphabet, and objects. Illustrated by Eric Carle, each page has one a lovely illustration accompanied by one or two words. We pick a book, as we do several times a day and what feels like several hundred times on the weekends. Usually the routine goes we open a book, I point at the picture and say the word often with some sound effects. Usually Aarin makes encouraging noises, stays till page four then goes and does the next thing but not today. Today is different.

Feet waddle, hands grab, a book is selected. It’s animal sounds. I flip to the first page, it’s a picture of a sheep with the word ‘sheep’ under it. This is no surprise of course, being that’s it’s a book for infants the mystery is kept to a minimum. Like so many times before I point to the sheep and say “this is a sheep, and sheep goes Baa!”. Then I repeat this time with a questioning tone “Sheep goes….”. Pause for effect and I normally answer myself “Baa!” Not today. Today Aarin has a big smile and a giant loud exuberant “BAAA!” thunders forth from his little mouth. He’s done it! He’s learnt something and I’m proud, over the moon even!

Convinced my child is a genius I point to the next page. Spotting a cow, are also known for a lunar missions, I ask “Cow goes…?” And of course he confidently opens his mouth, as I knew he would and proclaims: “BAAA!”

Yup, cow goes baa!

That was several weeks ago, for a while everything went Baa! Now Aarin knows several words, cats go miaou, cows go moo, and bellybuttons are found under people’s shirts. While I’m happy with his progress, I’m also a little sad because the cow going baa moment all too short.

All the animals in Aarin’s world make the proper sounds now. In my heart though, there will always be a little pasture saved just for the cow that goes baa!