Author: Patrik Bergman

Privately: Father, husband, vegetarian, and reader of Dostoyevsky. Professionally: Works as Communications Manager at www.haldex.com

Project Starman has started

Now when Haldex is moving our intranet into Office 365, we formed a formal project with global members and of course chose a great name. First off is our FastTrack collaboration with Microsoft. When you engage in this, be prepared to answer some really technical questions on Azure, authentication, proxy servers, federated identity providers, and more. “How do your users log on to their computers and applications in your current environment?” might sound rather straight forward, but then you get to choose between ‘userPrincipalName’ and ‘sAMAccountName’ So, bring a devoted server hero to your first meeting with Microsoft.

And no matter what I have heard people telling me about the migration included in FastTrack, we are left with three choices: File shares, Box, and Google Drive. This probably means Microsoft will not assist us with the migration from SharePoint on-prem, which I guess is a very typical user scenario. It also means we either handle the migration ourselves, or let a vendor include it as part of their deal.

In FastTrack you are also pointed to their Driving Adoption portal, but I often find these kinds of portals a bit too general and marketing oriented. Instead, I recommend anyone wanting to move to Office 365 the white papers from 2tolead. Yes, they somewhat pitch their company but above all Kanwal Khipple and Richard Harbridge clearly show why people appreciate their SharePoint knowledge. I browse through their guides almost daily for inspiration and to not miss vital details.

Soon the holidays are here but first I will invite about 10 colleagues to the project start-up. Our project office told me you can’t underestimate the value of meeting all face-to-face, and I believe them.

 

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

On reading Charlie Munger’s poor almanack

Ever since I started reading about mental models, there was one book that was almost universally recommended: Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Charlie Munger. The book is a long read on how Charlie Munger, a long-time business partner to Warren Buffett, describes our world. After having read it, I have a mixed impression of this praised book. On one hand, it is a long and sometimes rather self-centered way of describing the American way as the perfect way. Here are Americans describing the American way of living and investing in American companies to Americans at Harvard and more.

On another hand, it contains wisdom on how to use mental models to interpret the world. There are some deep insights and great quotes hidden among all pages. It was for sure a long read, and I learned some valuable things from it, but I don’t think it will be my go-to reference book for mental models. Meanwhile, there are some lessons that will stay with me forever, such as: 

  • “Mimicking the herd invited regression to the mean.” If you do the same things as all the others, you cannot expect different results. Common plagues privately and professionally are status anxiety, social proof tendency, and the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses syndrome –  doing what we can to be like the rest. It is not until you stop doing this, and instead find a unique way for yourself, that you will see other results. Stop caring so much about what others think. Really. 
  • “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than when you woke up.” This goes back to the compound effect – if you advance as little as 1% in an area each day, you have improved dramatically in just a few years. This applies to everything. 
  • “But if you try to succeed in what you’re worst at, you’re going to have a very lousy career.” This is a typical disease that hits us when we are children and go to school. All children have different strengths that could be developed a lot if nurtured correctly. But all too often we are expected to shine in everything from math to sports and lyrics. Yes, a solid foundation in all subjects is good, but this idea of trying to even everything out can hurt your development as an adult. Therefore, find out what your true strengths are and then nourish them. Spend your time and energy going as far as you can thanks to your strengths, instead of evening out your weaker areas. 
  • “It’s not bringing in the new ideas that’s so hard. It’s getting rid of the old ones.” This is a quote from Keynes and it still rings true. Just look at most of the change management writing – it nearly always focuses on how to bring new things to the table and have people accept them. But where are all the ideas and methods to help people get rid of old ways of working and understanding the world? 
  • The Tolstoy effect: People will forever blame their upbringing, parents, schooling, spouses, you name it, for their bad luck and misfortune. It has been proven over and over and is especially true today where there are ample chances to lead a good life, that your goals and determination can become much stronger than your previous life. Self-pity is a very sad mental state, and we should change it to something a lot better.  

If you are a big fan of Charlie Munger, you should definitely read the whole book with all the long speeches, and the praising of Charlie. But if you are not a big fan, you can come a long way with reading reviews of the book and then focus your time on other more specific books regarding mental models, investing, entrepreneurship, checklists and goals, and more.

The image: A dog free from status anxiety.

The first concrete steps towards Office 365

A week ago, the management team of Haldex said yes to the idea of moving our intranet into the cloud. So now all my ideas over the years on how to build an including digital workplace for all employees can become a reality. But what are the first steps to take? It is easy to get stuck in all the models of the digital workplace or listen to vendors who say it takes a day to install their product. For me, I instead start in an internal pay-it-forward exercise to collect great ideas and in a more formal step of signing up for Microsoft’s FastTrack. I tell you more about these steps in the short movie below.

By the way, pay close attention also to Microsoft’s Planning Services. If you already are a customer of Microsoft, there is a good chance you can use free days to plan your setup and migration together with a Microsoft Partner. Just follow the steps in the Planning Services link and ask your Office 365 admin to log in and check how many days you have. And if you are a Microsoft partner, signing up for Planning Services is a must.

Photo by Wim Arys on Unsplash.

Don’t extinguish your bad habits – change them

Any given day, we base about 40 percent of what we do on habits. Habits send us into routines where we don’t need active thinking. Some such habits save us from always thinking about to do each day. This way we don’ waste mental energy getting ready in the morning, having lunch at work, and more. But they can also, slowly but surely, send us in the wrong direction one small step per day if they are the wrong habits.

Charles Duhigg has researched habit changes thoroughly and presented his findings in the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. His basic idea after seeing what work and not can be summarized in:

“Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”

So, there are three parts to all habits:

  1. A cue that tells you to do something. For example, it can be a time (when you wake up, or in the afternoon), settings (work meetings, grocery shopping), a feeling (loneliness) or social event (when you meet your parents).
  2. A routine you kick in as a result of the cue. For example, as an answer to waking up, your routine is to make coffee, and when you are hungry in the afternoon, you eat a snack.
  3. A reward that sets in as a result of the routine. For example, you feel more awake after the coffee, and the snack makes you less hungry.

The key to changing your outcome of any habit is to focus on the routine. Don’ try to change all parts of the habit right away since you risk being exhausted and the good results might not remain. The cue might be hard to erase since we wake up, can feel hungry, meet others, and face different times of the day. For example, the time cue can tell you it is afternoon. But instead of taking a snack automatically, you can learn to point the cue in another direction, such as eating an apple. The reward can stay the same – you feel less hungry.

It is no surprise that many insightful people describe Charles’ book as revolutionary. Once we map the cues, routines, and rewards for any behavior in our lives, we can also change them into something better. I have started to apply this, and it surely works. Therefore, I ask you to do the same and see what happens. Once you build a healthy habit based on outcomes you want, Charles’ method might do wonders.

Back in black, and loving it

Last week, I did something rewarding and simple. I booked two meetings with very knowledgeable and nice people, Hanna from TetraPak and Fredrik from IKEA. We sat down on two separate mornings, had our black coffee, and enjoyed the sheer pleasure of talking uninterrupted for an hour or two about our work challenges and potential roads ahead. It doesn’t matter if our companies employ 2.000, 20.000, or 200.000 people – we all have challenges and headaches and win from talking about them.

My advice this week is don’t believe the hype: Spend less time reading about “grand strategies of implementing digital disruption” (what? be much more concrete please), “the intranet is dead” (no it isn’t, be quiet), and “our digital workplace solution will solve all your problems” (no it won’t since you don’t know even 1% of how our company functions). Instead, sit down with people you respect and from who you can learn. And drink coffee.

Big ideas require deep work

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

The productivity paradox states that even if we give workers new tools from the rapidly developing IT sector, their productivity slows down instead of speeding up. Some argue that we are way past this today, or that we are moving towards a split between GDP and gains in human welfare, but Dan Nixon at the Bank of England shows that 2007 (the year of the iPhone) was a major breaking point:

Of course, it is not the iPhone or any other smartphone that causes this decline. Rather, it is how we are using them: We check them about 150 times a day and not only to be productive. All kinds of social media and semi-interesting apps are causing big-time distractions, stealing time from the valuable work we can do. After each distraction, it can take us 20-25 minutes to regain our focus, just to be met by another distraction. As stated by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work, a “2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.”

The answer to all this disturbance could very well be Deep Work, described by Cal as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

This should be viewed side-by-side with the opposite shallow work:

Non-cognitively demanding logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

We can combine this with the Eisenhower matrix where two axels outline if things are Urgent/Not urgent and Important/Not important:

A problem we all meet is that being productive today often equals getting things done such as reaching inbox zero. This might feel great but can also fool us into believing such work is important per se. But given the enormous amount of ill-structured e-mails flying around, you might just have spent two hours in square 4 above while thinking you were in square 2. Yes, your inbox is empty, but you weren’t pushing your cognitive capabilities to their limits at all and you didn’t improve skills that are hard to replicate. Answering e-mails is very easy to do and is easy to replicate, but is it worth it compared to what you could have done instead?

A better start to the day might have been to quietly think through what is most important. And to do this while not being connected to e-mail, social media, or even other people. Cal Newport offers four rules to break our stressful and shattered work days:

  1. Work Deeply, meaning you shut off everything that can disturb you from performing your most valuable work.
  2. Embrace Boredom. Learn to put away the distractions and do nothing.
  3. Quit Social Media. Perhaps not completely, since it can be good for knowledge-building and more, but at least in periods.
  4. Drain the Shallows. Identify the areas that are most shallow in your life and cut those to a minimum.

To many, the above steps could be hard to put in practice and some might even say others shouldn’t dictate how to live one’s life, but here I agree with Cal:

A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

This means that if you are interested in producing truly valuable work, you need to learn to switch off and tune out from the busy work. And the opposite is true: If you are not interested in being truly productive, then check your phone 200 times a day and keep thinking trivia, busy work and time wasters are important. Just don’t send those e-mails to the people who want to take valuable breaks to find out what is truly important.

 

 

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

 

Minimize your regrets as you get old

Since I joined the fabulous Mental Model of the Month Club, we have started going through 12 major mental models. The first is 80/20, where the material helps us analyze how each area of our lives can improve. For example, which 20% of actions will give you 80% of the energy for the rest of the day? Or which 20% of the tasks at work deliver 80% of your most valuable output?

As we start deconstructing and analyzing all corners of our lives based on the 80/20 rule, there are many ways to do this more practically. One such method, which I view as a meta-method for all kinds of major decisions, is called the Regret Minimization Framework. When you are facing a big potential change in life, such as switching jobs, starting a café, or moving to another place, don’t just look at all the small details. These details can come later. Instead, start by asking yourself: On my deathbed, will I regret not taking this chance?

To some, this might sound a bit morbid, but for me, it works. Therefore, next time you face a big decision, also ask yourself “As I get older, will I regret not doing this?“. If the answer is Yes, then you should probably do this.

It was Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and one of the world’s richest people, who made the Regret Minimization Framework popular. Here is a 2:38-minute clip of Jeff 10 years ago:

Now, see if you can minimize the regrets in other areas of your life. You never know what awesome things will come out of it.

Ray Dalio’s ‘Principles’ – a reading and some reflections

After I was recommended Ray Dalio’s book ‘Principles’ by many others, I decided to read it. After all, I should not miss an author that people refer to as having written a revolutionary book. One one hand I share the enthusiasm for Ray’s way of turning simple to-dos into principles and algorithms. Once you start doing this your life can change. On the other hand, I think we should complement Ray’s principles with the work of others, to create a fuller picture of what it means to be a human and what it means to work.

My biggest gain from reading Principles is that we can escape the often egocentric and rather flimsy decision models we have created through life, and instead use principles as “a good collection of recipes for success.” On every page, Ray focuses on the absolute ownership we have over our decisions. We must face hardships straight on and be radically open-minded and radically transparent towards ourselves and others. We should dream big but also stay firmly grounded, leading up to algorithms like “Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.” To be successful in any area, you need to set big goals, plan what is needed to get there, and then act without giving up. Yes, we have heard this before, but Ray’s algorithms helped me remember this more easily. The same goes for the deceivingly simple algorithm “Pain + Reflection = Progress.” We all meet pain in life, but if you learn from reflecting on it, you are moving forward.

Ray also has a view that organizations should be hierarchical, and that people should adjust to the organization and not the other way around in quotes like:

“Create an organizational chart to look like a pyramid, with straight lines down that don’t cross.” […] “Don’t build the organization to fit the people.”

Towards the end of the book, Ray covers the idea of idea meritocracy and some interesting tools they use at Bridgewater during meetings and as daily follow-ups. Meritocracy is a philosophy which holds that certain things, such as economic goods or power, should be vested in individuals by the talent they bring. At Bridgewater, the best ideas should win, and Ray shows us how they succeed in building such a workplace. My impression is that this can also happen under rather tough situations, and some passages in the book had me relate to military principles.

This led me to some reflections that could complement Ray’s ideas. Instead of only focusing on strict hierarchical business models, we should also investigate how well we could work in networks and wirearchies, as stated by Valdis Krebs and Jon Husband (pdf file). Combine this with the proven value of open, collaborative social enterprise networks as described by people like Rita Zonius, plus knowledge catalysts as described by Harold Harche, and we can find new ways of collaborating outside the formal structures.

Connected to the wirearchies, we can also reflect on the work of the future in networks, as done by Stowe Boyd and Esko Kilpi in “Perspectives on new work” (pdf file):

What form, then, will companies take? Kilpi tells us that businesses will be transitioning from Coase-style corporations with clearly defined ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ to semi-permeable platforms, on which ‘architectures of participation and choice’ will be devised, and they will be fast-and-loose: “Work systems differ in the degree to which their components are loosely or tightly coupled. Coupling is a measure of the degree to which communication and power relations between the components are predetermined and fixed or not. Hierarchies and processes were based on tight couplings. The new post-industrial platforms are based on loose couplings following the logic of the Internet. Some people will work on one platform every now and then, while others will work simultaneously and continuously on many different platforms. The worker makes the decision about where, with whom and how much to work. The old dichotomy of employers and employees is a thing of the past.”

Reading Ray’s book was rewarding, and I will revisit my Kindle notes from this book for years to come. Above all, Ray’s idea of moving from busy to-do lists, over to principles, and finally algorithms can truly change people’s lives. I also like his daily updates with colleagues – something many companies miss. Meanwhile, we should remember that Ray runs an American investment fund and that the rules set up for this business automatically don’t suit all other companies in all markets. Ray often describes his company as a machine, but running a company is as if it is a living organism can also be very rewarding.

 

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

How to invest smarter thanks to the liberal arts

We all want to make smart investments, and there are many ways of doing so. One, for many probably a surprising way, is by knowing your liberal arts too. Yes, of course, traders can make money without knowing the companies and just act at Buy and Sell. But to see your money grow big time thanks to compound interest, it can take more. An interesting perspective on this is presented in “Investing: The Last Liberal Art” by Robert G Hagstrom. It is not a traditional how-to book on investing. Instead, it is more about “stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom.”

How the does the author suggest that we obtain this worldly wisdom? It happens in two broad steps:

To state the matter concisely, it is an ongoing process of, first, acquiring significant concepts—the models—from many areas of knowledge and then, second, learning to recognize patterns of similarity among them. The first is a matter of educating yourself; the second is a matter of learning to think and see differently.

To help us obtain this blissful state, Robert guides us through a set of major mental models created within physics, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. They help us move into step one where we learn about everything from our biases and miscalculations, via evolutionary biology and information overload causing an illusion of knowledge, over to Kahneman’s two types of thinking, and William James’ pragmatism. Also, we should never ignore the classic books such as the Brothers Karamazov, The Great Gatsby, or To the lighthouse:

“The great works of literature have enormous power to touch our hearts and expand our minds.”

The second step, which is harder than the first but which also has a tremendous potential, lies in building a model where all these parts fit together. Based on the models you have chosen, you create a way of looking at the world and then investing accordingly. We aim to avoid Charlie Munger’s classic trap: “To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail.”

I must say I loved this book, for several reasons. One is that it shows how investing in companies can be enhanced by improving our worldly wisdom. Of course, such worldly wisdom is a gift in itself since you understand more about your place in the universe. Another reason I love this book is since it also got me to think about the lines between robot investors and people. The book didn’t mention this but given how the financial tools evolve I came to think of it.

Surely, someone will state that the machines can do all the investing for us. For me, that will not be true in a long time. The reason the machines will need us? Humans are also deeply illogical, lazy, and can suffer from “dysrationalia”— which is the “inability to think and behave rationally despite having high intelligence.” Many business decisions are done based on fear, revenge, or vanity and then covered in the latest business lingo. We also base many decisions on older models such as regression to the means – what goes up must go down. This can be true in several areas but the stock market is more complex:

Stocks that are thought to be high in price can still move higher; stocks that are low in price can continue to decline. It is important to remain flexible in your thinking.

So I guess that the investment robots will do a much better job when they work alongside humans. The robots can present their investment suggestions, and then we can add a human side of it. To avoid mindware gaps, we should strive for a broad education and for checking our egos and their limitations at the door also when investing. Think you have no biases, assumptions, and always act based on reason? Don’t fool yourself. We humans are much more complex than we allow ourselves to realize, but knowing we can be both rational and illogical can be an important knowledge not only when investing, but when living. As Robert says:

“What all investors need to internalize is that they are often unaware of their bad decisions. To fully understand the markets and investing, we now know we have to understand our own irrationalities.”

So let’s accept our limitations while striving to build wordly wisdom. Not only can we invest smarter. We can also be better parents, lovers, and friends. I will let Warren Buffett end this post:

“The formula we use for evaluating stocks and businesses is identical. Indeed, the formula for valuing all assets that are purchased for financial gain has been unchanged since it was first laid out by a very smart man in about 600 B.C.E. The oracle was Aesop and his enduring, though somewhat incomplete, insight was ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ To flesh out this principle, you must answer only three questions. How certain are you that there are indeed birds in the bush? When will they emerge and how many will there be? What is the risk-free interest rate? If you can answer these three questions, you will know the maximum value of the bush—and the maximum number of birds you now possess that should be offered for it. And, of course, don’t literally think birds. Think dollars.”

 

Photo by Neil Cooper on Unsplash

Kate Bush was right: Don’t give up

On my quest to understand the world and the human nature, I just read ’Peak’ by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. They describe the research behind the (in)famous 10,000-hour rule, and what experts do differently from others. It is a fascinating read that focuses on skills like memorizing long number chains, working as an expert surgeon, or becoming a chess master, violin virtuoso, or tennis pro.

People who have achieved world-class in such areas have all used the same pattern – a pattern that Anders and Robert display. It is not just that they have spent at least 10,000 hours doing the same thing over and over. If you don’t use what they call ‘deliberate practice,’ you soon hit a plateau and never become better. But if you use deliberate practice you will add the following ingredients to all those hours:

  • Someone else has already done it so you what success looks like.
  • You set stretch goals that you almost find impossible and that are outside your comfort zone.
  • A mentor can coach you and give you feedback on how you can improve.

A fascinating conclusion in their book goes against most of what I have experienced growing up: They say that except for clear cases like basketball where you need to be tall, there are no naturals. Anyone can master anything. Meanwhile, all of us have seen kids who dance, play soccer, charm others, apply spatial skills, master PlayStation games or use a vocabulary that far outreaches their peers’ already at very young ages. Is it only deliberate practice that causes these children to excel? From a layman’s perspective, I would still say there are naturals, even though I can’t prove it.

Perhaps such children have mastered not only the above skills by practicing. Perhaps they have done the same thing as master chess players have done according to Anders and Robert – analyzed what others are doing:

“The ability to recognize and remember meaningful patterns arises from the way chess players develop their abilities. Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis—not the amount of time spent playing chess with others—is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability. It generally takes about ten years of this sort of practice to reach the level of grandmaster.”

Today, such analysis has become much easier since YouTube and other tools can show any expert. Add a deliberate practice routine to such a review of masters, and you are on your way to becoming if not a master, at least much better at what you do.

On the one hand, I think what Anders and Robert have done is superb. They uncover what is necessary to become great at something. On the other hand, it is quite hard to apply their ideas to what typical knowledge workers do. They mention meetings and more briefly, but I constantly wondered how their ideas could, for example, make me a better communicator or work smarter to support a corporate strategy using digital tools. The three points above and the chess players’ analyzing could apply to such areas as well, but how is less clear in ‘Peak.’

I recommend the book to anyone wanting to know more about what can make us much better at something. It doesn’t provide answers to how we can excel at just about anything, but for sure made me think. And Kate Bush was right: Don’t give up. Want to become a master at something? It will take a nearly stupid amount of uncomfortable hours before you arrive. Will it be worth it? I guess that will be up to each person applying those rules.

 

Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash