Smart Growth: How To Grow Your People To Grow Your Company

By Whitney Johnson, Harvard Business Review Press, 2022

Recently, someone on LinkedIn asked me for career advice. Ha ha ha. The ink line of my career is a random squiggle with lots of breaks and stains. About halfway through the line the line may seem to be going somewhere. It was at that point where I found something I enjoyed doing that paid off enough to keep it going. I caught that life rings like a drowning man.

I picked up Whitney Johnson’s new book, Smart Growth, With similar enthusiasm, because there seemed to be a more reasonable and orderly way to look at my career. Here. Johnson might say, I haven’t done Flanders year after year; I followed the “S Curve of Learning”.

Johnson, a consultant and speaker, has the ability to pick theories from the discipline of innovation and apply them to personal growth. In his 2015 book, Interrupt yourself, He used Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation as the basis for a guide to career-changing initiatives. Inside Smart GrowthEverett M. Johnson to create a professional path. Rogers applied the theory of the spread of innovation.

In his 1957 doctoral research, Rogers showed that the number of Iwan farmers who have adopted a new weed killer follows an S-curve: adoption began slowly, with only a few farmers willing to take advantage of new products; The benefits of the majority of upward farmers became certain; And then as the rest flattened off, the most cautious farmer finally committed. By then Rogers’ seminar The spread of innovation Published in 1962, rural sociologists were convinced that the S curve of the spread of innovation represented “a kind of universal process of social change.” In fact, S Curves has been used in many cases since then, and Rogers’ book is the most quoted in the social sciences, according to Google Scholar.

Johnson’s S Curve of Learning follows this well-established path. There is a slow progress towards a “launch point”, during which you can (hopefully) canvas countless opportunities for career growth available to you and choose a promising one. Then you can hit the “sweet spot” and grow faster, while you create mobility, create new ones and live. And, finally, there is the “skill”, the stage at which you can travel for a while, reap the rewards of your efforts, before you start looking for something new, start the cycle again.

You must play six different roles as Johnson travels along his learning curve. In the launch phase, where I feel like eternity, you first act as an explorer who finds and chooses a destination. You then become a collector, collecting the necessary information and resources to make sure the destination is right before proceeding towards it. In the sweet place, you become an accelerator, utilizing the information and knowledge you have gathered, and then a transformation, for which, as Johnson says, develops into “I do it”, “I do it”. Stage, you take on the role of anchor: your destination has been achieved, and you have jumped into the glory of your development. When you get tired of the simple life, you become a mountaineer in search of a new S-curve to reach the summit.

If all this sounds a little valuable, well, sometimes it is. Johnson’s style is inspiring and ambitious, but he also bases his ideas on concrete advice and caution. In the chapter on being an explorer, for example, he provided seven questions for assessing an S-curve of learning, such as, “Is it easy to test?” And “What is the value of the prize?” In the chapter on being a mountaineer, he warns of two dangers: freefall, when the self-satisfied slips (or pushes) from their peak, and death zone, where learning stops and career stagnates.

Managers may want to grab the book, as Johnson’s S-Curve can help their employees improve their careers. Beware though: book subtitles, How To Grow Your Company Grow Your PeopleSomething a red herring. True, Johnson includes dedicated departments whose purpose is specifically how leaders can help employees on their S-Curve journey, as well as tips for managers. There is also a table that tracks or summarizes the emotions that employees may feel as they go through each growth phase and describes how people can be helped (e.g., young and / or growing, advancing and / or middle- depending on the level of maturity of the company). Stage, and historical and / or complex). But the sections are less than a total of 30 pages aimed directly at managers.

I have a couple of other precautions. One worries about the underlying assumptions of the book that career opportunities are limitless. It is clear that they are not for many people, although Johnson includes stories of many people who have overcome seemingly inevitable obstacles to success.

Another precaution is a reality test. As far as I can tell, most people’s careers are not consistent with the beautifully drawn S curve. No matter how these careers appear, they are often random, arising over time from confusion of purpose, hard work, situation, and dumb fate. In this regard, Smart Growth Should come with a waiver: results may vary.

Trillion Dollar Trias: How Jay Powell and the Fed Prevented a President and an Epidemic এবং and an Economic Crisis

By Nick Timiras, Little, Brown & Company, 2022

The first thing people know about Jay Powell is that he is the chair of the US Federal Reserve. The second is that he is not an economist. After Powell joined the Fed, he complained to a colleague: “They talk to me like I’m a Golden Retriever.” Despite his professional appearance, the former corporate lawyer was evident in a building full of PhDs in economics, yet Powell’s outspoken demeanor and evidence-based approach meant he led the world’s largest central bank in a decade. The world economy has faced its toughest challenge in generations. In the acute phase of the COVID-19 epidemic, Powell’s leadership helped stave off a recession, but how did the hiring of an outsider change the most important institution in the economy?

After being tapped by Donald Trump for the role of chairman in early 2018, Powell sought to challenge the notion that central banks are designed for quiet, slow-moving institutions that absorb large amounts of information to make small and gradual changes in economic policy. “Creating the Fed’s brand and turning the organization into a paragon of hardworking, apolitical analysis hit Powell with something he could be uniquely equipped to achieve,” wrote Nick Timiraos, chief economics correspondent. The Wall Street JournalIn his new book on Powell’s Fed, Trillion dollar trillion. He wanted the Fed to talk more and more in a language that everyone understands. He also sought to investigate whether the Fed was providing a stronger economy for ordinary Americans. To do this, he decided on a nationwide tour called “Fed License.”

What Powell has heard is that the Fed is focusing too much on inflation and too little on unemployment. That realization, globalization has changed the economy so that it is able to withstand much lower unemployment without holding back inflation, leading Powell to decide that the inflation target should be truly symmetrical: if inflation is allowed to continue below 2. % For a period, it should be allowed to exceed it for the same period. He shared a draft of his new structure with colleagues in January 2020. Then the plague struck.

The Fed was wary of the severity of the epidemic faster than the administration or Congress. According to Timiraos, it faced two formidable challenges. The first was to make it as easy as possible for families and companies to borrow and repay as much as possible. Powell has launched a turbocharged version of the rate reduction and quantitative easing using former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s playbook. The second, and more complex, was to ensure a steady flow of money around the global financial system as the U.S. Treasury market was occupied. This is an issue that the Fed continued to address in the spring of 2020 This drew the bank to more and more new areas Each time it considered expanding its reach to buy corporate bonds, municipal loans, or exchange-traded fund securities, Powell and his colleagues asked the same question: were they willing to do as much as possible to minimize a short-term possibility? -Do not know the long-term consequences of a long-term disaster? And every time, they decided they were.

According to one analyst, Powell’s desire to run a “full-court press in the market” meant that confidence in the economy was restored relatively quickly. As a result, some of the Fed’s most obsolete measures were used sparingly. Timiraus argues that Powell practiced a key principle of crisis management: showing a willingness to do more, he had to do less. The approach has enabled faster economic recovery than many expected. However, this rapid recovery inadvertently led to two major changes by Powell in the Fed – restructuring unemployment against inflation and shaping the shape of its epidemic response.

During the Fed license visit, the central bank spent a decade raising inflation. Powell was concerned that inflation expectations would be permanently low, echoing Japan’s “lost decade.” Keeping interest rates low seems to be a less risky strategy to focus on reducing unemployment. But the Fed did not count on an epidemic-related supply problem to boost inflation. As inflation began to accelerate in mid-2021, Powell repeatedly described it as “transient” and focused on the need to repair the job market. According to Timiraos, “the Fed’s new structure … effectively committed officials to respond too late.” By early 2022, the labor market was rapidly gaining strength, but inflation was at its highest level in 40 years. Powell’s Fed Was it overdone or merely unfortunate?

Timirao’s conclusion that the Fed has been asked to do too much seems to be correct. Long known as the last resort lender, at the height of the epidemic it became the “backup lender of the whole world”. In the Powell era, it took steps to reduce both unemployment and inequality in the United States. The fact that the Fed quickly realized the destructive potential of the epidemic means that it has taken on a larger and larger role in fighting it, as well as trying to correct its past shortcomings. Its financial stimulus has been delayed by government spending and has clashed with huge waves.

Here, a counterfactual can be helpful. What if the Fed didn’t pull every lever it could reach? The gamble of Powell’s lifetime was that the United States would deal with worse consequences than an uncomfortable spike in the cost of living. A year-long depression was avoided. So there was a permanent slump in inflation expectations. The sympathetic study of Timiraos gives Powell much credit for his short-term crisis management. But the long-term challenge, which leads to such reliance on the Fed, is to fix the system.

From strength to strength: Finding success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life

Arthur C. By Brooks, Portfolio, 2022

Arthur C. Brooks is a striver. As a young man, he was a skilled French horn player who was able to make a living as a classical musician. He later earned a PhD. And has run the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for over a decade. He also became a fluent Catalan speaker, a columnist New York TimesAnd a father.

But Brooks is also a seeker. Raised an observant Protestant, he converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager and has since explored various religious traditions during life lessons. He made a spiritual journey to India and developed a personal relationship with the Dalai Lama.

The combination of striver and explorer makes Brooks an interesting guide to the aging problem that kind of driven overchivers are reading this article. Aging is something that all of us sooner or later, if we are lucky. But business leaders will probably face problems long before their dot-com, for older societies and because of lower birth rates, executives around the world need to be accustomed to hiring and managing older employees.

The executives presiding over the gray workforce, and those who are gray themselves, or who can do worse than give hopeful and meaningful advice to deal with this phenomenon From strength to strength, Brooks’s short, heartfelt and delightfully enthusiastic book on the subject. As an aging striker, Brooks knows what you’re up against, and as an investigator, he provides useful guidance for finding a way forward.

His insights are sometimes obvious, yet you have to listen to them. The most important message in the book, though unexpected it may be, is that you are dying. You said you already know? Well, don’t do that. This does not mean that you should abandon your career and your long-term plans. But as we age সময় time decreases-we should allow a healthy awareness of mortality to influence our professional and personal preferences. And we must recognize that the obsessive focus on work can and cannot do for us.

Fortunately, the growing sense of nearness to the end can help us recognize the folly of sacrificing everything for wealth and dignity. Also, almost everyone who is blessed with the choice of life can benefit by paying attention to the author’s advice to find one’s “deep purpose” and remove what it does not serve. Imagine Marie Condo loosening up on your calendar.

Business leaders who embrace the author’s point of view can use it in two ways: to rein in their worst workloads and to help team members give the right weight to things outside of work that contribute much to a meaningful life (an effort that even improves productivity). .

Managers would also like to note the author’s comments about power and age. Brooks argues that in many ways our abilities begin to erode long before we really get old. He realized this when his skills in the French horn began to decline in his 20’s and then deteriorated so much that he decided to look for another job.

Yet, with age, we also gain power. Drawing on the work of British psychologist Raymond Cattle, who stated in 1971 that there are two types of human intelligence in a mixture that changes with age, Brooks writes: , And novel problem solving. We usually think of it as raw smart … “Inventors have a lot of fluid intelligence.”

Kettle’s second type of smart is “crystallized intelligence” or the ability to use a growing body of knowledge. In other words, Brooks writes, “When you are young, you have intelligence; When you grow old, you will have knowledge. ” Crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age and makes older people better historians and teachers. Brooks argues that high achievers will sooner or later abandon roles that rely heavily on analytical or quick thinking in favor of roles that harness their higher abilities to combine and apply what they know – and that helps young people.

People know this long ago; The author quotes the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, who believed that the elderly should “reduce their physical labor” and, at the same time, “increase their mental activity.” We should try to serve as much as possible. ”

For those aging like Brooks, the strategy is to play with these new strengths, leaving the energies dependent on the young. Following his own advice, he resigned as head of AEI in the mid-50’s and is now teaching at Harvard. And yet, he says, “I do not advise you to hate and reject the world; Living like a monk in a cave in the Himalayas. There is nothing bad or embarrassing about the material abundance of the world, and we deserve to enjoy it. “

Instead of closing a bucket list, he decided that he would teach, reduce his demand, and focus on people. Like many who write about happiness, Brooks strongly advocates investing in human relationships — a potentially filled area for business leaders who may find shallow, transactional friendships easy to build but not deeper that take time and if one emerges from the workplace. There was no boss. Friendship is something that works, the author says, and I agree. It’s amazing that so few people are interested in doing that.

Brooks is outspoken about his Roman Catholic religion, which I find refreshing even if he quotes many more religious personalities for my taste. He practices his faith every day, but From strength to strength Reflects a healthy spiritual cosmopolitanism, including other religions and practices, including Buddhism and Hinduism. A few comparative books address the tendency of people to become more interested in spirituality as we age, and rarely still encourage it.

Brooks is an enthusiastic guide, but he asks a lot: that as you get older, you are living a tested life, you will embrace your newfound abilities instead of being angry at the ebb and flow of your old ones and you will stop the crazy tap. You hope the dance world will gain appreciation – if only because sooner or later the applause should stop. To make things easier, he summed up his philosophy in just seven words:

Use things.
Love people
Worship God.

Good advice, and even better, he leaves each of us to decide for ourselves the divine part. As an atheist I approve. Everyone has a deep purpose, with or without religion, and getting older can help you focus on it.