Robert Rose

As someone who spends a good deal of time in technology, it’s always hard for me to gauge when something “big” has really arrived. I’ve come to depend on my lovely wife as that signal.  We have a daily ritual where we end our work days, and a bottle of wine (or Tequila depending) comes out. And if she opens the cocktail hour like a comedian (“So, what’s the deal with this thing”), I know that the thing is starting to get some buzz.  Well, like many I’m finding,  she’s equally frightened, fascinated, and filled with wonder with what’s going on in AI right now.

One of my favorite places in the world is Big Sur California. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 35 years now – and my wife and I have made it a habit to get up to Big Sur at least once a year.

Now, of course, because of the pandemic, we hadn’t returned since 2019. Has it really been three years? Yup. It has.

So – we recently made a trip to Big Sur, and I took the opportunity to bring along a copy of one of my favorite books…

Do you ever wish you could just start over?

Right before Thanksgiving I was on my last (and only my third of the year) business trip. The woman next to me on the plane noticed I was working on a presentation, and we struck up a conversation about our respective jobs. She wasn’t happy in hers.

She said to me “I wish I could just start my job over. I’ve been the head of marketing at this tech company for 3 years now, and now that I know what I know, I would do so many things differently.”

We’re in this liminal period it seems.  We’ve left something behind, but we’re not quite fully in the “something else”.

The world is opening up, but it still feels so closed.

We’re taking off our masks but keeping them on right now feels more important than ever.

We’re free to go back to work, but no one wants to go back to work.

We’re all ready for another “roaring 20s”, but it doesn’t feel right to roar at all right now.

What the hell?

The “re-opening” we were promised wasn’t this.

Have you ever lost your keys? 

If you’re like me, you walk around telling yourself, “They can’t be there,” (then you look anyway). “They should be here,” (though you’ve looked there four times). 

 At some point, you say to no one in particular, “I know they’ll be in the last place I look!” 

Well duh! Of course they will. Once you find them, why would you keep looking?

So, I attend a TON of Zoom Meetings these days.  Just me?  Yeah, I didn’t think so.  Anyway, last month, I was talking about creative brainstorming with a colleague of mine. We were talking about his team’s struggle with their creative brainstorming meetings. Since the meetings have moved to a virtual format, she said, it’s been increasingly hard to generate quality creative ideas. I could totally relate. Our feeling was that the limitations of virtual meetings and the lack of in-person chemistry seemed like a “new reality”. 

What is the new normal? What’s the next normal?  What even is normal?

In my work these days, almost every business I speak to is doing one of three things. They’re preparing for a reorganization, they’re in the midst of a reorganization, or they’re emerging from a reorganization.

I have no idea if that’s factually true, but it feels true.

In all three instances, I’m personally finding this weird paradox. Everyone wants to do meaningful things, but no one wants to start anything meaningful – including, ironically, me. And I think: How do you even begin to plan for the now when you don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring?  Maybe I’ll write a book about it. But, oh god, why would anyone read that when, you know, <broadly gestures at the world>. 

It seems like everybody’s asking us to be patient right now.

 We seem to have a very strange relationship with patience. We’re told patience is a virtue – that the ability to calmly wait for something without becoming upset is a trait of a good person.

But we’re also taught that impatience is a motivator to innovation. We applaud the entrepreneurs who invent better ways to do things because they couldn’t accept the inefficient processes required to complete some task.

We’ve all been through moments in life when a crisis disrupts the patterns of how we spend our time.  For me, it might be something as small as missing a flight, which forces me to spend the entire day reconfiguring travel arrangements. For others it might be caring for a child with a broken arm, or dealing with a work issue that upends an entire week.  

Or, as the case is now, the crisis might be as shared and massive as a global pandemic. It appears to have forced almost half the planet to reconfigure their time to do…. Well….. nothing. Just sit. Nothing. 

So – in my experience one of the more common challenges we have as leaders is to make decisions under pressure. Where should we focus our time? Where do we start with our new strategy? Will the other team think we are stepping on their toes with our new approach? Should we back off our ambitious goals? 

 We can become so focused on what the right decision is, we lose the ability to even make one.

 We think rehashing problems in our head helps us figure out the answer. It almost never does.

Overthinking often rears its head as we plan out a complex change we have to make. Mapping out all the things to we need to create, stop creating, or modify usually involves more unknowns than knowns. 

It’s been a weird year out there. A key lesson that has helped me this year is to continually ask, “What “eyes” am I currently judging this situation with?” I won’t belabor all the versions here – but you’ll know what I mean if I just say that there are “child’s eyes” and “adult’s eyes,” “cynical eyes” and “the ego’s eyes” etc... Put simply, I’m compelled to ask what lens is coloring my judgement in any given situation. 

I can remember, not that long ago, when the phone rang at your house, it was lottery time. There was no caller ID, no text messaging to deliver “I’m calling you now” alerts. The phone rang. It could be anybody – your sister, your mother, your best friend, a telemarketer, or even a prank caller (“Is your refrigerator running”). But you’d always answer it. You picked up the handset and said, “Hello?”

It’s been a trying week for me and my family.

So, last week I’m in Europe – you know just doing my usual consulting thing - and I get a text message from my wife: “we’re being evacuated – big fire in our neighborhood. Will text you soon. Love, Elizabeth.” 

I kept up through Google News and texts from my wife for the next four days. I’ve been back with my family for four days now, and safely ensconced in our temporary place – and we’ve just been notified that we’re allowed to go back to our home. It’s relieving.

So, sixteen years ago, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say that there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

While I think we can all agree that Rumsfeld’s language was a bit clumsy, I’ve come to find out he was actually capturing a fairly well-known analysis technique called the Johari window. Put very simply there are four things that are challenges:

Can we talk about LeBron?

I Just got back from another extensive trip throughout Europe. As a result, I only got to follow the NBA championships from afar. But, wow, LeBron James is simply a magnificent leader for the Cleveland Cavaliers. They had no (statistical anyway) business getting as far as they did – and it was incredible to watch.

I’ve just returned from a week and a half in Denmark. There, I learned about, and experienced, a Danish concept called “hygge.” Most pronunciation guides simplify the sound to hoo-ga. But it’s NOT like Chatta-NOOGA. I’d spell it phonetically as heueu-gae – where you breathe out the H, make more of an “ew” than an “oo” sound, and finish with a “gae” sound like the “ae” sound in “Michael.” In short, pronounce it like you’re pretending to be on an episode of The Californians.

Julie Sun wrote a powerful piece about being “busy” and how, in Chinese, the word itself was a 2-part word that read separately meant “heart dying”.  At the recent Road Makers gathering, we were talking about the idea of being busy in a few of our groups.  The always wonderful and thoughtful Reed Lowenstein offered that he avoided the word “busy” because it meant someone “did it to me” rather than “doing it to myself”.

Have you hear this old Joke? When you and your friends are out in the wilderness and you’re confronted by a bear, you don’t have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than your friends.

While that advice might work in the forest, in business it tends to be trouble.

I was having this wonderful conversation with a colleague about their company's thought-leadership program. They have this whole program where they create white papers for their customers and teach them about leading trends in the industry. And their white papers are amazingly good.  I was asking my friend about how in one paper, in particular, and how they had included details that would elude most of their beginner audience (including me).  But after I’d read it a second and third time I had finally noticed.

It was a bit of a rough holiday season for my family. The day after Christmas we had to say goodbye to our beloved Golden Doodle Daisy. I’ll say this: cancer sucks. But, as she did for her 12 years on this earth, Daisy made things as easy for us as she possibly could. It was as beautiful, and immensely sorrowful as anything we’ve ever been through. Because of their unrelenting and unconditional love, there’s a saying that has been around for some time that says “we don’t deserve dogs”. I don’t know if we deserved Daisy or not. But I do know we are infinitely better humans because of her.

Why Are You Cutting Stones?

I find myself sitting here thinking about Brinton and, as he laid out in his recent post, that room listening to a CEO “lay out his 100 year plan”, and how that naturally led him to a "set of guiding values wrapped up in the preservative of culture.”