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Radical Candor

I’m reading Radical Candor: Be A Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. In a nutshell, the message of the book is: Be honest. That sounds simple enough, but how often do you avoid being honest because it is difficult or uncomfortable? I know I’m guilty.

So far I have found the book helpful but unsurprising. Being honest makes sense to me. Giving people negative feedback before things spiral out of control makes sense to me. I already knew this.

As I thought about how I can be better in implementing the ideas of the book, I realized radical candor requires clarity of mind. You can’t give honest feedback if you don’t know your honest thoughts. 

Clarity of mind is something I struggle with. I like to plan and execute projects but I’m uncomfortable reflecting. I don’t enjoy introspection.

It can be tempting to not give negative feedback because you are afraid of the discomfort this might cause. I can think of times where I not only held back feedback, but my brain effectively tricked itself into removing my critique from my mind. Sensing there would be no utility in the information, my brain discarded it. I might be crazy, but I think the brain plays tricks like that.

So I’m not only thinking about how to use radical candor, I’m thinking about strategies for keeping my mind clear. As I previously wrote, I meditate regularly (well, I have let myself slip and it’s now semi-regularly). This blog helps too. After trying to write regularly for only a few weeks, I can tell you writing is a challenging but rewarding method for gaining mental clarity.  

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Non-Profit Measurement

For-profit companies have it so easy. Maximize revenue, minimize expenses. Make a profit.

There are important steps to making a profit. Develop a product that provides value. Identify customers. Sell customers on your product. Bring in talent and keep them happy.

But at the end of the day, your balance sheet tells you how you are doing. It is not so clear for a non-profit.

I have worked for a few non-profits now. Here is a sample of their mission statements:

…to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.

…to educate, develop, and empower the next generation of leaders of liberty.

 …to ensure higher education becomes a place where classical liberal ideas are regularly taught, discussed, challenged, and developed, and where free speech, intellectual diversity, and open inquiry flourish.

If you are an organizational leader or a financial supporter, how do you know if a non-profit is successfully advancing such a mission?
This is where non-profit measurement comes in. 
Non-profit measurement is the attempt to measure an organization’s impact. This means attempting to answer questions such as: 
  • What does success look like? 
  • Is our organization moving us closer to success? 
  • How do we know? 
  • If we are working towards long-term results, what short-term indicators can reasonably suggest long-term success?
In my experience, effective measurement provides a common language and clear (if inexact) answers to these questions. These are guidelines to steer team members in making decisions that move the organization in a unified direction. 
If you wonder what I do for a living, I attempt to help the Institute for Humane Studies measure success and make better decisions towards furthering our vision. 
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Minnesota Timberwolves & poor management

The biggest story in the NBA is the broken relationship between Jimmy Butler and the Minnesota Timberwolves. While I don’t have enough information to truly know what is going on, from the outside it seems they are suffering from a failure of management. I see two clear problems:
  1. They gave Tom Thibodeau the foolish Coach & General Manager dual role. Setting aside whether these two workloads are too much for one person to accomplish effectively, they are somewhat at odds. Coaches should focus on making the most of a given season by winning each and every game possible. General managers should focus on maximizing the team in a longer time horizon. General managers can make smart decisions to prioritize the current season if it maximizes their long term overall. We have seen time and time again that combining these two roles ends in failure as franchises fail to manage their assets properly. 
  2. Owner Glen Taylor has been interfering with decisions to be made by the basketball operations team. I don’t know much about Taylor and he is probably smarter than I am. But I doubt he knows more about basketball than Thibodeau. The Timberwolves recently offered Andrew Wiggins, their third-best player, an overpayment of a five-year $150 million contract. While most NBA analysts agree this was a poor decision (Wiggins has had a negative Value Over Replacement Player in each of his four NBA seasons) it was Taylor who pushed this contract after asking Wiggins to promise to get better. Now, despite Thibodeau refusing to trade Butler, Taylor is pushing to make a trade. I suspect Thibodeau understands there is not a trade to be made that makes basketball sense for the Timberwolves while Taylor is reacting emotionally to Butler’s negative attitude. This is understandable but ultimately unwise. And if I were a Timberwolves fan I would be furious because it was the overpayment to Wiggins that likely started this rift, given Butler has said the dispute is over finances.
The Timberwolves will likely trade Butler for a poor return. The only other possibility is to not trade him and he remains on the team, unhappy, adding further friction to the locker room. While Butler is now clearly a problem, their woes stem from a failure of management.
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Tools

Tools are meant to be used.

Let’s say you spend a lot of time setting up a new tool, making it look nice, and laying the groundwork for how you think you will use it. But then you don’t use the tool. You’ve wasted a lot of time.

Even if you use the tool a little but it doesn’t improve what you are doing greater than the time you put into setting up and using the tool then you are not better off.

The obvious case here is that of a flashy tool with exciting features. But if the output isn’t going to make you better, or if the necessary upkeep doesn’t fit with your workflow, you’re not going to benefit from it.

Sometimes people use the busywork of setting up and maintaining a tool as a way to avoid their real work.

Right now I’m feeling the challenge of collaboration tools. These tools are intended to improve work in which multiple team members collaborate. The challenge is that different people have different workstyles. Some prefer digital, some prefer analog. Some prefer pictures, some prefer text.

It is really tempting to set up a collaboration tool that will allow a team, a department, an organization to better work together. If you have the right tool in the right situation it can take you to a whole new level of success.

But if not…

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Feedback

In my short time managing employees, I have learned people want feedback. In fact, I think they crave it.

Delivering feedback is easy. Say “good job, keep it up”. There, you delivered feedback!

Delivering good feedback is not so easy. What characterizes good feedback? In my experience:

  • Accurate (don’t say “good job” if that’s a lie)
  • Actionable (don’t dwell on mistakes; what can be done for the future?)
  • Concrete (back up feedback with specific examples)

The most common reason I don’t deliver important feedback is because I fear how the receiving individual will react. This is a bad habit I should break. Upon reflection, I tend to overestimate emotional blowups to negative feedback and underestimate the power of delivering feedback.

PS: I wonder if this is true of the population at large or if this is only true of the sample I work with (American libertarian millennials). Maybe this is a millennial trend in which we don’t know whether or not we are succeeding without direct feedback from an authority figure…and my reluctance to give feedback is a millennial fear of hurting someone’s feelings…

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Book Review: Getting Things Done

Today I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. Published in 2001, Gettings Things Done (GTD) is a classic among modern business / self-help books. Although I only gave it the speed read I typically give this style of books, I enjoyed GTD and found it worth its widespread acclaim.

GTD is all about organizing your life so that it is less stressful and more productive. GTD details how to organize all your stuff, turning your various inputs (emails, mail, thoughts, conversations) into usable parts that you can organize and structure in order to better attack and carry out your life’s projects. In addition to all the stuff, Allen addresses how to organize one’s projects so that your actions best help you carry out the big-picture goals of the project.

As with most books of this style the first third is good content, the second third helps detail that content, and the final third reinforces the importance of using that content. However basic Allen’s advice may be, it is useful for all persons to revisit. When I had less responsibilities in my prior role with my current employer, I think I was able to get by with bad habits and those bad habits have been reinforced. I’m struggling to succeed by using those bad habits with a larger role. Time to put these new tips into practice!

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Book Review: Good Profit by Charles Koch

I finished reading Good Profit by Charles G. Koch. Last year I read Koch’s The Science of Success  (I believe those are his only two books). Both books are guides to Koch’s management philosophy, Market-Based Management. Market-based management attempts to use economic knowledge to apply the tools which allow free market economies to prosper (property rights, free exchange, profit and loss) within the contexts of a firm.

Koch is Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries. Along with his brother David, Charles is one of the wealthiest people alive. Koch is also a classical liberal who has dedicated a lot of time and money to classical liberal causes such as the Charles Koch Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies.

In the first section of the book, Koch writes of his early years from his childhood to his first days in business. He particularly focuses on the lessons of his father, who left behind the family business to his sons.

The bulk of the book details the five core components of market-based management: Vision, Virtue and Talents, Knowledge Processes, Decision Rights and Incentives. A firm should have a clear vision that expresses how it will use its capabilities to improve people’s lives. Employees should have the right virtue and talents to contribute to the firm (virtue is more important than talent). Firms should be structured such that the right information is available to the right people. Employees should have clearly defined rights over the decisions they can make based on their ability to contribute to the firm’s long-term profit. Policies and compensation should be set so that employees face incentives which encourage them to act in the interests of the long-term profits of the firm.

In the final section, Koch runs through four brief case studies of applied market-based management.

Whereas The Science of Success reads like a how-to manual for implementing market-based management, Good Profit definitely reads like Koch’s manifesto. The book did not address my reasons for skepticism of market-based management. To try and summarize those concerns very briefly, my gut tells me that market-based management is a misapplication of economic concepts to the wrong contexts. Firms exist because of transaction costs, a concept I don’t find addressed by the structure of market-based management.

Koch doesn’t address criticisms of market-based management in the book, but presents the tremendous success of Koch Industries as a testament to the power of his business philosophy. Besides Koch’s two books, I have encouraged market-based management in working with organizations supported by Koch such as the Charles Koch Institute. I find some concepts (decision rights) more compelling than others (incentives). I would be really interested to have the opportunity to experience market-based management working in a firm that fully embraces it, especially in a for-profit context.

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September Reading

This month, I am attempting to blog regularly to get my writing skills back into practice. My original goal was to write a post every day, but I didn’t set aside time over my birthday weekend to write anything. Maybe I will stick to writing every weekday. Regardless, my goal is to write regularly.

Last month, I focused on reading. In the month of September I read:

  1. Hiring The Best by Martin Yate
  2. The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss
  3. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
  4. The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
  5. Countdown City by Ben Winters
  6. World of Trouble by Ben Winters
  7. The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
  8. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman
  9. Anything That’s Peaceful by Leonard Read
  10. Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
  11. Thinking As A Science by Henry Hazlitt
  12. The Science of Success by Charles Koch
  13. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  14. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
  15. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
  16. The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
These books fell into three general categories which dominate my overall reading: economics/philosophy, management, and fiction. In total I read 16 books in 30 days at a pace of roughly two days per book. Sure, the last 4 books from the Narnia series (which I still want to finish) are children’s books. But on the other hand, The Problem of Political Authority was difficult and required a lot of attention! 
There weren’t many within economics/philosophy, but my favorite was The Problem of Political Authority. Huemer did a knockout job in the first half of the book and provides a lot of ammunition for anarcho-capitalists arguing with statists about the necessity and moral authority of governments. In finally getting around to Anything That’s Peaceful, I was struck with the importance of faith to Read’s case for a free society. His central thesis aside (which I found convincing), Alex Epstein reminded me in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels how energizing Objectivists can be because of their love for life. 
While I was not completely sold on the interviewing and hiring system outlined in Hiring The Best, it demonstrated to me the importance of a system. I wasn’t blown away by the findings presented in Willpower but the evidence in favor of willpower’s existence, importance, and potential for cultivation was interesting. Thinking As A Science was underwhelming and felt like more of a pet project than a worthwhile contribution. While I was already familiar with many of the concepts in The Science of Success due to my work in the libertarian movement, I was surprised to see how well it meshed with The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Paul Erdos, the subject of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, was an interesting and funny character but the book didn’t draw me in to the mathematical topics. 
The majority of my reading in September was fiction. The The Last Policeman trilogy was a real pageturner that drew me in to the world so much that I woke up the next morning thinking the world was really going to end in a few months. My favorite book was Countdown City, full of humorous insights for a detective novel. World of Trouble was a well-executed finale. I don’t have much to say about the Narnia series, but may write a separate post about it when I finish the other three books.
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Start of State Policy Network Annual Meeting 2015

I am on my way to the State Policy Network’s (SPN) Annual Meeting today. SPN is the network of state-based free market think tanks in the United States. I have previously attended this event in Amelia Island, FL and Oklahoma City. This year the event is being hosted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Grand Rapids, MI. I spent the summer of 2012 as an intern at the Mackinac Center working on their Michigan Capitol Confidential publication. My work from that time, a series of investigative journalism pieces of government investments in green energy projects, is available online here.

I attended my first SPN Annual Meeting through their Generation Liberty Fellowship for young people interested in free market think tank work. I hosted a session on student outreach for think tanks on behalf of SFL. I think it was a moderately successful session. The next year I attended entirely on behalf of SFL, again running the student outreach session.

This year I have four primary areas of focus. The first is professional development through sessions on management and fundraising. The second is fundraising through meeting with new, potential, and current SFL donors. Third is maintaining SFL’s presence at our exhibitor booth. My final focus is networking with existing and new contacts, updating them on SFL’s work and my current role as well as learning of new projects from other organizations.

I am very excited for this conference and hope to gain a lot from my participation. This is my first non-SFL libertarian event in months. Following the conference, Kelly and I will meet up and head to Michigan State to attend the football game against Purdue with my old roommates and their significant others: Nick, Jay, Kara, Kyle, and Kate. On Sunday, we will celebrate my 24th birthday with my family. This should be a great week!