Hello all,
it’s good to be back after nearly a month; I blame being sick, my kids being sick, and work; however mostly I blame laziness and a lack of inspiration. This edition is slightly different, as I’m talking less about strategy happenings and more generally about approaching careers and work.
Here’s two acronyms that I don’t have on my CV:
MBA
MBB
Unlike the majority of people in my line of work I’ve never been to a business school, and I‘ve never been a strategy consultant. Yet I’ve somehow found myself consulting big tech leaders on their strategic decision making.
I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned in my journey that have helped me move my career forward. I hope these might help you if you’re thinking about your own career path. I’ve tried to stay general so that this benefits the widest variety of people.
Recognise your strengths, then play to them.
This is at odds with my generalist career choices, but my training was in a fairly technical field - marine biology. Though I continue to be intellectually fascinated by the space, I found early on that I wasn’t gravitating towards the depth of knowledge required to be truly successful as a biologist. The earliest indicator should have been that my GPA was mostly held up by electives versus my major; I would get near-perfect grades in things like Political Science, Sociology and Music History, but flounder in any biology topic of depth like genomics or anatomy. However, I found I really enjoyed taking my biology knowledge and finding ways to transfer it to others; one of my favourite early ventures was tutoring high-school and junior college aged youth.
The pattern continued a few years later when I became a recruiter but wasn’t happy just recruiting; I wanted to drive conversations about how recruiting is done, and drive change there. It was the same story when I entered the strategy space as an analyst; I had no love for dashboarding or SQL. I was adequately competent at these of course, but they did not spark joy. Instead, I enjoyed picking apart problems, pinning hypotheses, debating solutions and deploying levers.
In hindsight, these weren’t just preferences. I was subconsciously gravitating towards strengths: I was not happy going into serious depth on any one topic, but was very keen to be ‘adequately competent’ at a variety of things. Because of this, I was strong in situations where I needed to be a somewhat technical, somewhat creative, strong communicator. Once I recognised that this wasn’t just a preference, but an actual area of strength, I was able to lean into it and carve a path within the strategy space that made sense for me. This meant finding roles / companies where my core value add went beyond my ability to build beautiful dashboards/reporting, or a deep understanding of any one product area. Instead I chose - and thrived in - situations where I could call on a variety of experiences and skills.
The takeaway: spend your early career exploring many interests and failing quickly to identify what you’re strong at. “What you’re strong at” will probably be the work you find yourself organically drawn to.
Grow your serendipity surface area.
Luck has been a huge lever for making my career in the strategy space, but I don’t actually believe luck just happens; you can make your own luck. This involves a bit of math:
Luck = (preparation x serendipity) / (hubris x fear)
Some specific tactical steps I’ve taken to build luck - these all address the 4 factors above in some way.
Goodwill banking I try to be helpful without expecting much in return except a cachet of goodwill. This capital comes in very handy when the goodwill is from the right network (leaders, influential people); a good example of this was that in my early recruiting career, I was constantly getting thrown into talent-review type discussions with the HR team. Though this was outside my scope, I tackled the work with interest and tried to lean in as much as possible. The upshot was that when I wanted to make a move to strategy, the HR team came to bat for me and spoke highly of my ability to collaborate and bust silos (Thanks Ken!). Working in this way also helped me to see beyond my own biases and priorities, and appreciate other teams. I also learned to not worry about straying past my job description.
Participate in the culture This is probably me seeing work through rose-tinted glasses, but if you’re going to spend upwards of 40h a week doing something, it should bring you joy beyond just the actual thing you’re doing. I’ve always been actively involved in company culture wherever I go; at Airbnb this meant leading the Core Values Council, and at Google it currently means leading our music and running clubs. Participating in the culture has a way of expanding your network and reach far beyond your org, which is very handy in big companies like Google. A large network inherently generates opportunities and advocates, and builds a healthy ability to manage up/down, because in culture situations hierarchies sometimes get tossed upside down.
know your brand and get it out there I’ve become very conscious about authentically “being me” even at work, and this has helped me to hone in on opportunities that value what “me” is. I don’t mean that I put tons of thought into a personal brand and a curated persona, but rather I’ve become very comfortable with who I actually am and try to bring that whole self to work. For example, I am known to be blunt. I’ve learned to leverage and tweak this to ask tough but objective questions at all levels. At Airbnb I became somewhat notorious for this, but in doing so I’ve been able to 1) learn a lot, very fast 2) be me and be recognised for being me, thereby filtering out opportunities where not being me would be expected 3) demonstrate the humility to be wrong even when I’ve asked a bold question in a open space, only to be shot down. Another area I consciously try to bring to engagements is “it’s ok to be wrong” - I have very strong, very loosely held opinions that I will debate to death, but change as soon as I am convinced. This has helped me build a healthy ability to dissect arguments, but also comfort in the fact that I know very little, and I can learn a lot, from almost anyone.
Mentor and be mentored I’m constantly surprised by how much I’ve learned from trying to impart knowledge to younger professionals; it really is a two-way street and beyond once again building goodwill and your network, it becomes a way to be very clear about how you communicate your principles, thoughts and values.
Be vocal about your goals my somewhat pantang spouse says I shouldn’t put all my cards on the table, but I like to believe that most people in my network mean well and want me to succeed. I’m often vocal about goals, ideas and future plans. This has helped a lot - when you have advocates built through goodwill, they’re keen to give back. Expressing clear goals they can help lever you to essentially tosses them a softball to return the favour with.
Strategy-work is everywhere
Finally, I’d like to spend a little while on strategy-career specific advice. Much like a non-programmer trying to hustle into a SWE role, if you are coming in from beyond the MBA/MBB world you need to build up your portfolio. The good news is there are opportunities to flex strategy muscles in every space. Here are two examples from me and people I know:
When I first became an in-house recruiter, I was appalled by how long and how many interviews it took to hire me. I set about changing this by analysing data, identifying gaps, proposing and deploying solutions. These same skills are what I use in sales operations and strategy today.
A friend in the US who runs a restaurant was hit hard by social distancing measures the last few years. Rather than just following the same playbook as everyone else to do delivery and host a limited number of patrons, their core focus became food-education; teaching people how to cook their own food at home. They arrived at this lever by looking at their business (home-style cooking), what their customers came in for (home-style cooking at affordable prices and relatively near home), and the tools available to them (they were tech savvy and one partner had run a youtube channel in the past). They were able to build a small community around their food education service, which helped reinforce delivery and eat-in lines of business. They assessed capabilities, assessed technology, and assessed customers to arrive at a strategy. Once things started to pick up, they were able to expand their business into multiple concepts, and the partner responsible for this pivot became their chief strategy person.
Strategy work is everywhere, and is not gated by professional certifications or ‘hard skill’ knowledge. Building a portfolio of projects helps to position any pivot into the space, but more generally builds the toolkit that you need to ‘be strategic’ anyway.
In closing
This is completely non-exhaustive, and a bit of a ramble to be honest. I’ve tried to piece together the advice I most often give during mentoring and coaching. I hope this helps some of you navigating your own generalist paths - comments and questions are obviously very welcome and I’m happy to go deeper into any of these.
media I’m consuming this week.
3 recommendations to help you learn and grow.
Power and Thrones - A New History Of The Middle Ages by Dan Jones
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Reading this has opened my mind to how much The Middle Ages shaped modern practices: for example, chivalry as a concept didn’t become popular due to any inherent goodness, but rather through association with knights, who were essentially better paid, better armed McKinsey consultants, deployed to conflicts to address hotspots.
Effective Slide Blueprints for Business Presentations by Firm Learning
Super-actionable advice on slide-building. Again, a little too McKinsey, but still valuable as a starting point. Recommend consuming but modifying to suit your tone/style.
Sell your By-Products by the REWORK podcast
Particularly enjoyed the discussion about pricing your products as a datapoint, versus purely revenue.