Category Archives: Clarity of Thought

Have Specific Conversations, not General Conversations

August 9, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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If you are discussing a topic with colleagues, it’s almost always better to have a specific conversation instead of a general conversation. General Conversation Specific Conversation “We need to figure out how to scrub all open bugs.” Followed by a lot of non-specific debate… “There are 42 open bugs. 42 bugs fit on one screen in Excel. Lets look at them all right now and see if there’s a pattern.” “Customers are angry. We need …Continue reading →

Taxonomy and Lexicon

July 3, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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How many times have you been in a heated discussion only to find out that the two sides were talking past each other because they were reading from two different dictionaries? I bet you can also remember situations where just a little more structure got everyone aligned quicker. Creating, explaining, and re-enforcing a strong Taxonomy and Lexicon is a critical skill for all leaders (reminder: everyone in our business is a leader, not just managers). Taxonomy …Continue reading →

One-Way and Two-Way Doors

June 27, 2019
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Technology & Execution
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Effective decision-making starts with understanding; in the long-term, very, very few things actually matter. The vast majority of the decisions made day-to-day are either minutia or easily reversible and can be made quickly. However, a small number of things (about 1 in 10) matter a lot (in the long term) and are worthy of serious pondering, discussion, investigation, investment, and decision making. A mentor (Chris Jones) introduced me to the pithy phrase 90% of the decisions you make don’t …Continue reading →

Mental Models

June 22, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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A secret to clear thinking and decision-making is to learn, invent, and adopt mental models. You’ve probably noticed effective leaders can frame complex ideas simply. They’ll lead conversations like this: “Well, I think there are three things we should focus on and they are…” “Folks, I think there’s another way of looking at this problem. What if we viewed the problem through these four lenses…” The key to simplifying the complex is to be intentional …Continue reading →

Good Intentions are Never Enough

May 9, 2019
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Technology & Execution
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Everyone has good intentions… Everyone WANTS to do the right thing. But good intentions are never enough. Stuff doesn’t get done based solely on people’s good intentions. Change can’t happen based only on good intentions. What is needed is a way to mechanize people’s good intentions. “Mechanisms” are the way. A Mechanism is a complete process that ensures things get done. A complete process is a ‘virtuous cycle’ that reinforces and improves itself as it operates like a snowball rolling downhill. …Continue reading →

Have a Plan (With Dates)

April 18, 2019
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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I’ve written a lot on the importance of having a plan. This week’s Leadership Principle tip doubles-down on that. Consider a status update: Bad: “The team will investigate the issue.” Good: “The team will complete the investigation of the issue by Tuesday afternoon and will share a plan for how to fix it by Thursday.” The Good version of this does a few things: It enables accountability on the next steps. It conveys the appropriate …Continue reading →

Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought

July 8, 2018
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Writing
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This post is an inventory of tools I use to drive clear thinking. I update it regularly as I learn new tools, or gain new insights about existing tools as I use them. I am available to do 1:1 or group coaching on all of these topics. See Advising, Coaching, and Consulting | Kindel Tig’s Clarity of Thought Toolbox Embrace Mental Models. A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a …Continue reading →

Clear Narratives Show Instead of Tell

April 29, 2018
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Writing
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This is yet-another-post on the topic of Amazon-style “six-page memos,” aka Narratives. This post focuses on the mantra: “Great narratives show, they don’t tell.” When writing things you believe to be facts, ask yourself: How do I know? How can I qualify it? Then, qualify it in your words. Tell (Bad): The BMW E28 M5 is a rare car. Show (Good): Of the 722,328 E28 5-series sedans BMW built between 1981 and 1987, only 2,191 …Continue reading →

Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)

April 21, 2018
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue reading →

Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success

April 1, 2018
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts. The idea is that a scout can only earn a particular merit badge (actually a patch that gets sewn onto a vest) by demonstrating mastery of the skill or ability defined by the badge. For example, a scout would only receive the “Firemanship” badge by clearly demonstrating, repeatedly, the ability to start fires without matches. Merit Badges can come in all sizes. A small …Continue reading →

Attention is the Currency of Leadership

January 24, 2015
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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Great leaders optimize how they spend their attention. They are skilled at turning up the heat to get others to focus their attention on the right things at the right times. Attention is the currency of leadership, and each person has a fixed amount of attention to spend. “Leaders have a fixed amount of attention units they can spend in a day, week, or year. Are you spending yours on the right things?” (A mentor …Continue reading →

Have a Plan

March 2, 2013
Clarity of Thought, How To, Startups
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Yesterday someone asked me to share my thoughts on the secret to building excellent things. I summarized what I know as: “Put the customer first, have a plan, create a shared mission, get early victories, remove process, and make it fun.” – me, yesterday. This was the formula my cohorts that built the Windows Phone app platform used. It worked. This is what the small team that created www.milelogr.com did. “No battle was ever won …Continue reading →

Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You

January 9, 2013
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
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Leaders are often visionary “idea people”. The difference between success and failure is how good these leaders are at training their teams to say No. Idea People often forget they are disrupting their own teams by voicing their ideas. If leaders don’t learn and practice skills for controlling the flow of ideas, their teams will fail. When I was building home networking for Windows at Microsoft, I learned getting a team to a focused plan, …Continue reading →

Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes

December 3, 2012
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
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While in Amman Jordan last month, I had the opportunity to speak at Amman Tech Tuesdays, a local startup event held every month there. I was asked to talk about what I’ve learned in my career to an audience of about 500 geeks and entrepreneurs. I decided to talk about focus, a topic dear to my heart. The title of the talk is “Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes”. Below the video …Continue reading →

The Job Decision Matrix

April 26, 2012
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People
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A Job Decision Matrix will help identify what is actually important to you in your career (and life). Gaining clarity on what is important to you, right now, will help you identify new job opportunities, avoid wasting time on job opportunities that are not right for you, and make a job decision with conviction. This blog post is one of my oldest on leadership and by far the one I’ve gotten the most positive feedback …Continue reading →

You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong

April 8, 2012
Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
15 Comments

Most people think about their career trajectory as being like a bell-curve or that of a cannon ball fired from a cannon. Something like this: For 99% of all successful people, this is completely the wrong way to think about it. For that other 1% (the Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerbergs of the world) it might work. For the rest of us, there’s a mental model that will help keep you sane, help you appreciate …Continue reading →

90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter

August 6, 2011
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Startups
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In my post The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor, I noted that “90% of the decisions you make don’t matter; real success comes in being able to identify the 10% that do and focus on those.” The best, most effective leaders can free their teams up to get stuff done by making lots of decisions quickly and enabling those decisions to stick. We all regularly hear criticisms of ineffective leadership voiced as “Decisions …Continue reading →

The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor

June 14, 2011
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Startups
16 Comments

Always have a plan. Always. A great, simple, framework for any plan is the 5Ps:  Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and Plan. This framework applies to software development projects, job searches, building a garden, or a phase in your life. I have personally found the 5Ps a useful tool for small projects (e.g. prepping for a VC demo/presentation) as well as large-scale projects that include 1,000s of people. The 5Ps : Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and …Continue reading →