What do I do in an enterprise IT department

1. Beg for permissions to get work done — about 20% of work time
2. Attend meetings just to be polite and show good will to others; most meetings have about 5% related to my work– about more than 40% time
3. Document all the steps of tasks that no one  will spend even one minutes to review and pile up somewhere– More than 10%
4. Cover ass: report everything I will do; "communicate" impacts incase something goes wrong — 20%
5. Make things happen: the real work that require technical knowledge and contribute to company bottom line value — about 5%

Some truths about corporate life that you can’t tell to others

Over my 4 years spent on  corporate envorionment, I had found some truths that can’t share with anyone in my company:

 

1. A lot of unqualified people. It is easy to indentify these people: when there is a difficult problem, you instinct is not to talk to them first, because that will take up a lot of "communication" time…I should say, "explaination" time. However, you might get into trouble not to talk to them first. And When they talk, you are not sure if they really know what they are talking about, although the words all sounds important and correct.

 

2. Your boss always think he is smarter than you, because same problem that you can’t solve, he can solve it by making the exat same call. The fact is, he can solve it while you can’t was because he has a bigger job title than you. He ignored the job title effect to show his smart; you can’t point that out because you are smart too.  

 

 

3. Performance is an abused words. What you have done is not important; what you show that you have done is important. I had seen people made a big deal on something really simple, and people ignore many hours hard work because they just have no idea.

 

4. Unfair is a fact, accept it. Don’t ever dream of fairness. There are always people who did nothing but talk get promotion; and people who had done almost all the works being ignored.

 

5. "Communication" is the only important skill. Because you need to constantly expain to others who have no idea, you need this "communication" skill, to expain in a way that dummy and executives can understand.

 

6. Never put high expectation on anything. Your boss won’t expect you work 100% of your effect, so do you expect your direct reports and your colleagues.

 

7. Never think that your surroundings are "professional", they are only your nice neighbors. Treat them nice and they will like you, and no matter how bad you do you work, you will be fine.

 

8. Don’t be scared by the big talkings — it really means nothing.

Survival tips in a corporate enviornment

Some tips I had learnt over time that may be helpful:

1. If you don’t want to do some tasks, for example, documenting every steps you have done, instead of saying "no" to your boss, do it very slowly. Or, find a step that may need cooperation from your colleagues, find the one who is on vacation, and tell you boss you are waiting for this colleague to come back from the vacation.

2. If you want something done when you send out a request, CC to this guy’s boss. This will not help you make a friend, but help to get the things done much quicker.

3. Don’t say "no" to any one; don’t quarrel with any one. Ignoring is always better approach; and later just blame on too much work, and how busy you were.

4. If you want to argue, begining with " I agree with you, but.."

5. If you have no idea about certain things, request a meeting, and bring in any one who might have idea.

6. If you have no idea during the meeting, use these words will always save you "Based on industry best practises,…"; "To ensure we have cover our contingency, we want to make sure our policy inline with…" No body can argue with these statements, because these statements really have no meaning at all, but make you sound intellgent and know what you are talking about.

7. The key is not to really get things done, but to make everybody feel that you are getting things done. There is a big difference here. It is all about "perspective", a key word I learnt from North American cluture. 

8. If you really hate the enviornment, don’t try to change it, you wil fail for sure; leave it and find a better one that will fit better for you.

Limits of human brain

Have you ever wonder that your mind might not tell you the reality? Or, your brain only tells you what is convenient and useful, not what is real?

Let me start by giving couple of examples: When you grasp a rock in you hand, what could your brain tells you about the rock? It will tell you that, the rock is solid with no doubt.  When you see the Sun raises in the morning and goes down in the afternoon, what will your mind tells you “intuitively”? – The Sun circles around the Earth! Also, after decades of research, why it is still so hard for human being to understand Quantum theory and theory of relativity?

Yes, our brain choose information that “seems” convenience and useful for our existence, by not showing us the reality. Over million years of evolution, our brain was evolved to make sure we can fit into the environment we lived in. So that, knowing the rock is solid is a useful information for our ancestor to use to rock as a weapon against other large animals, but knowing the rock is consists of billions of atoms with 99.9% empty space and nucleus will not be immediately useful; knowing Sun circles the earth help us farming agriculture products, which help us avoiding hunger.

Further more, we use ourselves as the scale to measure reality around us: We understand seconds, days, years, and maybe thousand years, but when the scale is far beyond our living environment, such as billion years, or travel in light speed, our brain loses it’s ability to conceptually understand.

To illustrate that our brains always use provide us with “useful and convenient” but not “real” information, let me demonstrate the limits of our brain in these areas:

We use to look for patterns, especially patterns we already know. Do you ever wonder why we see faces, from clouds, rocks on the moon, mars? Because as social animal, a large part of our brain is wired to just recognize faces than anything else!!  More over, even in our modern academic research area, studies are full of patterns searching: what are the merits of most success business individuals and companies? Unfortunately, most of time, these research failed to understand that, same merits and characters exist in individuals or companies who failed too.

We prefer stories to statistics. I don’t think I need to give any examples on we as human being related to stories much better that statistics, or boring numbers. We loved stories, especially stories that we had experienced, or we can relate to: somewhere in our brain, the connections of the memory and stories excited us.

We seek to confirm, not to question, our idea. Just to give a quick example, stock market investors always quote the news that are in favor of their current proposition, and ignore bad news. We selectively process information with bias, based on our experience, our “comfort zone” and our emotion.

We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events. Our mind can hardly process possibilities well, even with well trained statistician. 

As we can see, our human beings had broken through those limits, by extending our measurement ability using tools such as microscope and by constantly challenging those limits. Conscious knowing the “boundary” and “biological purpose” of our brains, it will only help us think further beyond these limits.

Communication strategy

When I was a young man, I always hated strategy. Too much thinking that may not be necessary; having a simple and easy mind had been all I desired. And for some philological unknown reasons, I started to enjoy thinking ahead, thinking about possibilities and consequences.  And for communication, I had never thought I had any communication issues; even when I was in the foreign territory, I blamed my English level, not my communication skills. 

However recently, I am starting to realize the education background left this communication as almost blank hole to me without my noticing. I had not taken serious on communication efficiency and communication strategy, until I got into the EMBA program. During the entire program, the ability to think did not drag me down at all, but I saw the huge difference on the ability to talk effectively between me and my other classmates.  

After the program, I joined local toast master club, and surprisingly got to understand more about communications. Many may though that, not being talkative was a sign of being honest, introvert and thoughtful; in fact, it was a huge social disadvantage for people living in today’s society.  

To be able to think at you feet, organize the words right before it comes out of your mouth, thinking while talking, making emotional connection to audience using words, gestures, voices are all essential skills in toast master.  

After mastering these skills, there are more profound strategies to make communication work, and eventually make things work. There are no simple sentences that could describe these strategies, but one principal: watch out for the possible outcomes and choose the best outcome before the words get out of mouth.  

Life is unfair

The lesson that life is unfair and luck contributes a great portion of success could be benefit to  who are seeking panacea from solely imitating other success stories to be realistic and more practical, to be more focus on the joys gained from the processes and be less frustrated by the end result.  

 

There is no intention to find excuses of not-so-success middle age life. Of course the conclusion solely depends on who to compare to and what is ultimate goal. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor; wild success is attributable to variance.

 

Never the less,  it is important not to rely too much on “rationality”, and more utilize our guts feeling and instincts.  

 

At the end, the understanding would help to make true life decisions under uncertainty — away from textbooks and formulae, by gaining familiarity with the role of luck in business, finance, society that involve randomness, and by understanding the relation between human nature & the perception of randomness.

If you are so rich, why aren’t you so smart?

From the beginning of the MBA study, I skeptically questioned  the assumptions of business academics, that there were certain “traits” of successes can be studied, learned, and can guide for future success. Tones of frameworks, cases tried to prove that, we were not so success compared to those CEOs because we needed more “vision”, “hardworking”, or “strategy”. Unfortunately, I saw a great “trait” missing, which was: luck!
 

I struggled to imitate those “traits”, follow the “thought process”, and wonder if those smart CEOs really thought though the process like that. My thought was so unsuitable for the enthusiasm of the program, that I had to keep my mouth shut. Until one day I saw this book “Fooled by randomness”,  I knew that I was not alone, that someone else thought about same question like I did.

 

The author, Nassim Nicholas Tales, apparently was not a nobody like me. As MIT professors on uncertainties, he thinks that the habits of mistaking luck for skills was most prevalent – In my opinion, especially in business academic areas – and it is our inability to think critically that can’t realize 99.9% “success performance” is attributable to chance, and chance alone. 

 

Quickly people would argue that, if you are not working hard, how could you be success? This is a typical logic mistake of mixing necessity with cause. Hard work is as important as to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win, but buying a lottery ticket will not cause the win.

 

It happened to me that, the fact was not always as pretty as our mind wanted to accept. However, one of the greatest lessons I leant over years of philosophical thinking was to face the brutal fact, because that was the only helpful way. 

Emails to Strategy Teacher

First, I want to mention how much I enjoy your class. After suffering on marketing strategy, global  strategy, organization structure strategy classes, trying to follow the frameworks and dig into case numbers with confusion, I finally feel "Wow, I got it" in your class. It all started from reading the "contemporary strategy" text book, which enlightened me a lot.

In other strategy classes, I strongly questioned the usability of the frameworks teachers tried to deliver. To me, the frameworks seemed too "Bible" to some people. Now I know that I was right, these frameworks were no more than tools to help, not the real core of the strategy.  For example, the 5 forces are merely a check list for a real strategist. Like you mentioned well in pub session, people always found it was easy to follow when guided by "frameworks". On the other hand, I like your style of deemphasizing the importance of these frameworks, as well as cases. It helps me to focus on the core of these strategies, not the tools to get to the core message.

I also found it was very true when you clearly drew a line between academic and real business. Without seeing this line, we will be those useless "MBA", trying to judge other businesses using our academic knowledge that leads to fail. Only seeing this line one can make academic knowledge useful in the real life.
Here are my suggestions, just for you as a reference.  

• You should keep your own style. Keep your own style and what you good at is one of the cores of strategy. More discussions or fewer discussions should really depend on the content. At the end, we are not coming to school to feel good about ourselves, we are here to learn. 
• You can take a look at other teachers’ cases and their theories. To me, global, organization structure, operation, finance, marketing are all internally interrelated and have same message. At the end of all the themes, integrating these cases in your lecture will keep these strategies into our blood.  
• Use more day to day life examples of strategy. I had found that I had been using the core of strategy all the time unconsciously in my day to day decision making process. For example, which new technologies I need to learn in order to keep myself ahead of my IT career? Is IT or management a better fit for my long term goal? Most of us are not the CEO of fortune 500, and most of us will unlikely be. However, strategy is not only for business, like you said, it is a way of life.

Is the EMBA worth taken?

The tough 2 years EMBA program is coming to an end. At the beginning of the program, I was very skeptical about the value of the whole process. Now, at lease, I have my answer.

Overall, I think I had gained much more than I thought from the program. The single most important value I gained was a unique opportunity to close the gap of culture and language barrier. I am no longer afraid of writing, talking and expressing in business environment, and feel much more comfortable to understand business languages people use. Still needing more practices, I gained my confidence to compete with those local business elites, and was no longer afraid the way of their speaking which usually can make nonsense to be like singing a  song. Further more, I am getting familiar with business context and business thinking. But unfortunately to my local classmates, these cultural benefits were exclusive.

The second benefit is that, I had an opportunity to really know my strength and weakness, under the contex of my EMBA class. This 2 years study might be the first time in my life that I wished I would be smarter, when I met and competed with so many smart people in the class. Seeing these classmates’ amazing soft skills, the way they analyzing, presenting, thinking, talking, and their spirits of team work and cooperation, I realized how bad Chinese education system was, how difficult it would be for me to catch up with them and the reason that America is so strong. 

Unfortunately, to the content delivered in the class, I didn’t really feel the value, especically those cases and frameworks. I know I will forget all of those cases and frameworks in lease than a year; the thing that may matter for a while could be that piece of paper I will get in about a month. 

Luckily, the program didn’t completely kill my self-esteem. I know this is just the beginning of the journey. While most of my smart classmates head back to enjoy their sun shine, beach and beers, I am setting up my plan to utilize this knowledge platform and trying to make the hard-working study as my habit, and at the end, my competitive advantage to take me to the next stage. 

Steve Jobs’ Speach

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

 

My third story is about death.

 

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

 

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

 

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

 

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

 

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

 

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

 

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

 

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

 

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.