Issue #2

Welcome to Issue #2 of Stride, where we serve up the best stuff on the web to help make you a better leader, team player, and lifelong learner.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• ⛳️ With Q4 on the horizon, there’s still a lot of question marks on how the rest of the year and start of 2023 will shape out. In times of business or macroeconomic uncertainty, we discuss ways to both influence your fellow execs and support your team in times of stress

• ⚛ Working on a tough problem at home or work? Reasoning by first-principles is a super effective way to find an innovative solution to a complicated problem

• 🔎 Lead remote-first culture-setting at Grammarly, or support product leadership at Coinbase

• 🦷 How can understanding the psychology around brushing your teeth make you better at sticking to diets, saving money, and other habits?

A DEEPER DIVE: MOVING FORWARD IN TIMES OF STRESS

For many of us, the last couple of years has been a bumpy ride. Following the initial jolt of the pandemic, the economy rallied to unprecedented highs in 2021, before tumbling once again this year due to inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy shortages, and ongoing supply chain challenges.

Many of us are in ‘wait-and-see’ mode while we watch our global leaders try to manage their way out of the crisis, with the Fed noting that there is more “pain” to come as they try to curb inflation and The Big Short’s Michael Burry echoing that sentiment saying the worst is yet to come 😬.

As team leaders, we balance keeping an eye on broader market developments while continuing to motivate our teams to execute on the tactical day-to-day. Here’s some tips for supporting your people and driving business performance during times of stress and uncertainty

Finance is Narrative, Not Numbers

What it's about: Whether you love or are afraid of numbers, this article shares a unique point of view for how operators can use finance to drive credibility and influence within their organization.

TLDR / Key Takeaways:

• Even if you’re not directly in a finance role at your company, knowing how to use finance for storytelling will make you be seen as a more capable and effective leader

• “Working in business without knowing the language of finance is like going to Paris without speaking French. Sure, you might be able to bumble around the city, but to truly navigate it successfully you need to speak the native tongue”

• “Finance is not what determines a company's success (the ability to actually make and sell compelling products does that), but it is what determines the ability to gather resources to make the products”

How Leaders can Manage the Disconnect between Mental Health and Productivity

What it's about: More employers than ever before are considering their employees’ mental health — and that’s a good thing. But there’s still a long way to go before employees everywhere can feel fully supported when sharing their mental health challenges at work. Healthtech startup Options MD shares some tips for supporting your team members’ mental health.

TLDR / Key Takeaways:

• Your team members can benefit from clearer, shorter goals that allow them to accumulate ‘quick wins’ and gain momentum

• When possible, drive your team’s focus on output rather than ‘face-time’ or number of hours worked, so that your employees can set the working environment that works best for them

• Managers should be knowledgeable about their company’s employee assistance programs and proactively guide their direct reports to effectively utilize these resources

The Hidden Power in Employee Dissent

What it's about: Many businesses miss a great opportunity to get a pulse on all levels of the organization because they implicitly or explicitly squash dissent. BCG shares thoughts on how to build a culture of candor and leverage it to improve the company

TLDR / Key Takeaways:

• Employees that feel they are empowered to voice disagreements are more innovative, more productive, and stay at their companies longer

• Leaders can build constructive debate into their organizations by explicitly stating it as a priority in their corporate value statements, model these values personally (such as openly admitting mistakes and publicly changing their minds), and integrate debate into their organization’s internal operations

• One great caveat from a Qualcomm exec in the comments section said “…but don’t be stupid about it”. Ensure debate is constructive in its intent and doesn’t unnecessarily add to the manager’s workload, derail conversations, or promote toxic traits (e.g. aggressive or passively aggressive attempts to undermine others)

FRAMEWORK OF THE WEEK: FIRST PRINCIPLES THINKING

Elon Musk says he used first-principles thinking to build his multi-billion dollar aerospace company SpaceX.

First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer a complicated problem by separating the underlying ideas or facts from the assumptions being made about them. In other words, it’s an effort to find the basal, unvarnished truth about the problem, free from any of the cognitive biases we may have accumulated as the problem grew in complexity.

A lot of the problems we encounter in life can be broken down into two types of solutions: innovation or imitation. The engineer vs. the technician. The chef vs. the cook. Reason by first principles vs. reason by analogy. We either understand the core building blocks and rules that constrain the set of possible solutions, or we look to how we’ve solved a similar problem in the past and recreate or tweak from there. Neither approach is bad, but the first-principles approach is generally a more flexible problem solving tool (e.g. a swiss-army knife), especially when new complications arise.

For: Problem solving

What is it: A way of reverse-engineering a complicated problem into its foundational components

When it’s used: Starting a business, building a stock portfolio, or any other complicated problem

When it’s NOT used: 

1. If speed is the priority, imitation wins (i.e. Need a dish for the dinner party in an hour? You should probably just look up a recipe online rather than try to understand the taste profiles of everything in your pantry)

2. If you’re dealing with flawed assumptions or ‘unknown unknowns’, first-principles thinking could take you down the wrong path (e.g. When pre-Copernican scholars thought the earth was the center of the universe, it impacted how people thought about Earth, the galaxy, and humanity’s place in it).

Additional resource: Root cause analysis (five ‘whys’)

YOUR NEXT STRIDE

For a full list of open roles, click here. We refresh this list every week and only add the best high-profile roles suitable for senior (e.g. 10+ years of experience) operators.

If you want to share an open role, please use this form.

This week's featured roles

LIFESTYLE

Wellness 🏅

Tim Ferris and Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman share real-time breathwork techniques to reduce stress and anxiety

Watch 📺

After last week’s documentary on psychedelics, we bring you something a little lighter this week. We love a good who-dunnit murder mystery, and we’re excited that there’s a sequel to Knives Out (97% on Rotten tomatoes!). Daniel Craig is back as Detective Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion. 

Read 📚

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. The Green Brothers produce really great content (they're one of the OGs on Youtube). This book is a collection of non-fiction essays about the shared human experience that are both funny and thought provoking.

Listen 🎧

How I Built This is a great podcast full of stories about the early days of some of the most iconic brands. This episode on Calendly talks about how Nigerian-born founder Tope Awotona emigrated to the US and built Calendly with an outsourced dev team in Ukraine (and even personally flew there before hiring them!)

RANDOM BUT INTERESTING

This section is going to feature one material a week that we found interesting - but couldn’t really fit it in anywhere else. You can think of it as coming down the rabbit hole of curiosity with us just because — or fodder / anecdotes for your next speech 🤷🏽‍♀️

The Power of Habit: How the history of toothpaste explains why you can’t lose weight

In the early 1900s, a marketer named Claude C. Hopkins at Pepsodent helped turn brushing into a daily ritual. He did this by employing the 3-step process of habit-formation: create a cue, establish a routine, and deliver a reward (thus creating a craving). When he noticed that a biofilm forms over teeth between periods of not brushing, he tied that cue — something everyone could physically feel — to a marketing message around beauty. When consumers were told that biofilm causes teeth stains and decay, and brushing your teeth removes the film, sales exploded and the toothbrushing ‘habit’ became the norm. This same manipulation of cue and reward signals can help you curb bad habits or establish good ones!

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 Hasta Luego 👋🏽

​Jay & Zi