Hire a good boss. Good bosses see through bullshit and don’t tolerate it. They run results oriented meritocracies. Bad bosses are bad decision compounders.

Employees often think too highly of managers who like or promote them. It’s natural. We like those who like us. As a consequence, one may stay too attached to a manager or team because of this even though the manager may not be that effective. Yes, a manager can be ineffective in terms of business strategy but competent enough to recognize talent. One unintended consequence would be for a high performing employee to stay too loyal to mediocre manager.

Spend 15 minutes at the beginning of every day thinking about your work priorities. Think through what you have to do for others in the short & long run but most importantly, dedicate time to think and work on tasks that you assign yourself. Work that you know will improve the business.

If you find yourself always on the Inbox treadmill, you’re letting others set your priorities and time management.

People struggle with uncertainty. I have had personal setbacks in life that forced me to deal with uncertainty but some people haven’t. Know your team and assign tasks & roles accordingly.

Meet failure early in your life and develop the emotional tenacity to plough through adversity.  Help foster a similar culture among your colleagues.

Any and all interactions should be based upon what if the tables were turned. What if I was on the other side of the negotiating table? Review? Meeting? Strive for a fair outcome regardless of your position, even if it means leaving something on the table. Why? Because mutually acceptable solutions are the only durable outcome.

Being candid is not easy and takes effort. Best done straight up, one to one.

Intellectual honesty is hard for many people. Their identity and self-confidence is too wrapped up in the situation to be intellectually honest. Most people think they are special, their product is special or their service is special. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people, products and services are in the “me too” category. Undifferentiated & indistinct. Don’t drink the Kool-aid

Integrity over ability any day of the week, all year long.

Everyone can have a moan or whinge but get on with it. People who point out problems are a dime a dozen. Find and propose solutions.

If you walked into your kitchen and saw a spilt milk carton, you’d clean up the mess. Do the same at the office. When you see something is broken, literally or not, fix it.  Treat it like it was your own home.

If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it in their absence.

Conduct yourself at all times as if everyone had transparency into what you were doing. Whether that be your clients, colleagues, boss, regulators, etc.

There are no short cuts to a good business model.

If you keep employing the same strategy and don’t get the result you want, try any other strategy.  I picked this up from playing squash. If you keep playing a drop shot and your opponent handles every drop shot, it makes no sense to continue doing the same thing. Try anything but the drop shot!

There are 6-7 billion people on this planet. You will continue to be surprised by both the positive and negative qualities of people.

Base your strategy on what won’t change. Here’s an excellent quote from Jeff Bezos.

“I very frequently get the question: ‘what’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘what’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time….in our retail business, we know that customers want low prices and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery, they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher [or] I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible [to imagine that future]. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long-term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

 “On AWS [Amazon Web Services], the big ideas are also pretty straightforward. It’s impossible for me to imagine that 10 years from now, somebody’s gonna say, ‘I love AWS, I just wish it were a little less reliable.’ Or ‘I love AWS, I just wish you would raise prices…’ Or ‘I love AWS and I wish you would innovate and improve the APIs at a slightly slower rate.’ None of those things you can imagine.

“And so big ideas in business are often very obvious, but it’s very hard to maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times. But if you can do that and continue to spin up those flywheels and put energy into those things as we’re doing with AWS, over time you build a better and better service for your customers on the things that genuinely matter to them.”

How does senior management choose or evaluate their managers?

At a certain level in the corporate hierarchy, the vast majority of mid-level managers are intelligent, articulate, and professional. Many managers of managers rely upon these attributes in evaluating the managers that work for them. This is a colossal mistake. Being effective at one’s role is not an inevitable consequence of being intelligent, articulate or professional. Without tangible, objective measures of success, thick layers of corporate management become populated with smooth talkers or political mavens. If you are a manager of managers, it is imperative you base your evaluation of each manager on their actual performance. What did they accomplish over the short run? Over the long run? What successes? What failures? How much planning or driving did they do versus you having to ask them to do something?

Another colossal mistake that managers of managers make is not kicking the tires on their managers. Go one or two levels below to hear feedback. Otherwise, you’ll never know if you have someone who manages up very well but is poorly regarded by his colleagues or direct reports. Granted, this is not a popularity contest but one need only consider the fair and objective feedback on the manager. That a manager is tough or demanding is not really a criticism.

Do not overvalue the loyalty of your managers at the expense of their competency when placing them in important roles. All too often, a very senior manager wants to surround themselves by people they trust. This desire often leads to the senior manager placing a long-time colleague in a senior role without really asking the critical questions above – Is this person competent at this role? Have I checked with the teams below for feedback? Having loyal and trust worthy direct reports is imperative but not at the cost of competency. A loyal clown is still a clown. No quality employee will want to work for or with a clown for a long time.

Ask yourself one basic question when you evaluate your team. If you could do it all over again would you hire them again for the same job? If not, you can’t leave the situation alone. You’ll need to act and either find a new role for the questionable ones or let them go.

People respect fair but firm.