We’re in a ‘serious’ mood, judging by the takeaways and links you’ll find below.
It’s a mix of simple but powerful, disheartening, inspiring, and thought-provoking reads and listens.
Let’s say it represents our intentions heading into 2021: To seek new sources of insight, to reflect on new ideas, and to challenge our current thinking.
On that note, we’d appreciate you sharing an article, podcast episode, or book that you really enjoyed in 2020 with us. (Seriously.)
Hit reply with a link, click through and leave a comment on our post, or send one of us a DM.
Personal or professional growth, business, marketing, strategy, culture—we’re interested in all of it! And if you need more material, a reminder that we’ve got our fave podcast episodes in a North and Now Spotify playlist.
What lies below
Three words to get comfortable with
A ridiculous December 2020 occurrence
An interview with someone who’s helped scale massive brands
An interview with someone who founded a massive brand
A reflection on leverage, then vs now
💡 “I don’t know”
5ish minutes
Give it a read (And ignore the date on the image below bc this is timeless advice!)
//Moly: Saying ‘I don’t know’ is absolutely a trait I notice in leaders at all levels who I respect. Sometimes they just pause to think and that’s enough to make me feel more confident in their response.
This article implies we struggle to say ‘I don’t know’ because we’re trained in school to always have an answer—I buy into this and we must resist! I think we should be wary of trying to find fast answers to everything. All the really great ideas that get us excited as marketers and consumers are things we’ve never seen before so it’s pretty likely that takes some reflection and research.
//Moirae: I so appreciate when I witness this response in business and in my personal life verses a feeling-fact or bullsh*t answer. And you are right, Moly, especially in the digital space there is so much information, data, and results to sift through and analyze, it’s impossible to know it all. So taking a moment to pause, reflect, and say “hey team, I don’t have the answer right now, but I am sure going to find out” is a powerful tool that is not nearly used enough.
My goal in 2021: do this more!
//Faaiza: I definitely struggle with this. Saying 'I don't know’ for me is as tough as letting there be silence in a meeting without trying to fill it. Both skills take way more restraint than I would have imagined, yet both are great leadership qualities. I am really going to work on this!
🙄 That time AdAge disrespected Bozoma Saint John
6ish ridiculous minutes
To recap: Adage published a 2020 year in review and ran the headline that Bozoma Saint John, the CMO of Netflix, was ‘the CMO most likely to jump jobs in 2021.’ They were called out and now the article is called ‘the most in-demand CMO of 2020’ and has been rewritten to have way more substance, but Twitter takes screenshots 👀
//Faaiza: I saw Rachel Mercer share this story, and how eventually AdAge changed the title of the article. I didn’t actually read the article so maybe my views here are not entirely in context, but there are two key takeaways for me:
Mainstream media and business culture loves to continue its double standard of what characteristics make a man successful and valuable, vs making a woman difficult and ungrateful. Similar to a lot of lessons I learned from Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, why is it wrong for a woman of Bozoma’s stature to strive to be at a company where she feels valued and challenged? No one would question a man for making any of these moves.
How have some of these media outlets not learned from the new trends of journalism? The rising popularity of paid newsletters shows the power of a journalist/writer’s brand over the publication’s brand. AdAge is just looking for more clicks on a story that isn’t even a story. Who cares about Boz’s time at these companies? I’d rather know about the impact she’s had at these organizations, and how she’s made herself such a value to these high profile brands, even in a short time. Show me some examples of her work so I can aspire to do something as great.
TLDR: AdAge, come up with a new strategy. One for 2021, not 2001.
//Moly: There is a Black female CMO at Netflix (imagine having that job!), who’s previously worked for some of the biggest brands on earth (including Beats and Apple) and you diminish that by calling her a job jumper?
I think this is a wake up call heading into 2021 for a few things:
The BIPOC community—and this Black woman in an amazing, visible role—deserves support and spotlight and are we going to follow through on our 2020 reflections and promises in 2021?
Are you adding to a conversation or being negative to no real end other than being a shit disturber because we don’t need that intention coming with us into a new year.
//Moirae: My takeaway is that if we are taking a page out of Sheryl Sandberg's book, let’s just get better at asking for what we need and want from relationships, workspaces, boss, colleagues, and yes, the media. Stop the blame game, and start setting the tone. Teach people how to treat you and move on.
🧠 The Knowledge Project interviews former Slack chief of staff, Kris Kordle
//Faaiza: This interview got me thinking about how you build teams or groups that work together better than each individual on their own. It's less about their skill (which is a given at most points), or even about organizational fit. Rather it's about the collegial fit between team members who work closely together. In large organizations, the team culture might matter more than the organization’s culture.
🎧 Tim Ferris interviews Spotify founder, Daniel Ek
//Moirae: The part that I perked up for was that Spotify evaluates their employees on a project basis. Once the project is over, the question is asked if that employee is the best person to take on that next project.
This is also similar to how Netflix operates and is very vocal about not retaining people who are no longer right for the company, whether that be for reasons of culture, positioning, growth, team expansion etc. Just because they were the right person to get the company to X level it doesn’t mean their skills are indefinitely a fit. As harsh as that can be, I think it’s a way of setting both parties up for success. Radical honesty of operations. Be brief, be bright, be gone. Love it. 💥
//Faaiza: One of my favorite soundbites was “the quantity of iteration matters more than the quality of iteration.”
On the surface, it sounds like a nicer way of saying ‘fail fast,’ which I am not a fan of. What Daniel means is that you should make quick, incremental progress through smart, intentional, successful iterations. You learn from each iteration, so the more you iterate, the more you learn, and the better your outcome ends up being.
I would love to hear more from international founders, especially when they run huge companies like Spotify.
//Moly: Interesting to reflect on his thoughts about evaluating the potential of a leader by how fast they can learn.
His examples were very startup-specific, no surprise, and it’s so true that your role in a startup changes so quickly as channels grow or new channels come up and your ability to adapt—or not—can make you a great fit or turn you into an awkward fit.
Yes for some learning and adapting comes more natural, but I take this as a reinforcement of how you *have to* put time into developing your knowledge base if you want to advance in your career. Becoming smarter and more knowledgeable isn’t going to happen by accident.
🪓 Investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant on the importance of leverage
2ish minutes
"Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage. If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output. Now we've invented leverage... As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.
A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.
For example, a good software engineer, just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application, can literally create half a billion dollars' worth of value for a company. But ten engineers working ten times as hard, just because they choose the wrong model, the wrong product, wrote it the wrong way, or put it in the wrong viral loop, have basically wasted their time. Inputs don't match outputs, especially for leveraged workers.
What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your time and you're tracked on outputs."
Source: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
//Faaiza: I read this in James Clear's newsletter and it got me thinking about two things:
1. How do you recruit and manage team members (direct reports, contractors, etc.) who can highly leverage their time to produce amazing results without tracking their input? How do we start changing our metrics and our goals to suit that?
2. What systems do I use that I need to improve upon or define better so I can keep leveraging myself more. And are there tools I use to help me or harm me in that goal?
Lots to reflect on.
//Moly: I’m going to reflect on Faaiza’s reflection.
1. I believe that “define” which Faaiza uses in point two above could be the key to assessing teams and systems, and I think it works for plenty of other things frankly. Definitions help us get on the same page and set expectations.
For example if you put the time in to define *exactly* what you’re hiring for to assess and compare the candidates’ skill sets and set expectations with the successful person from the start, you’re in a better spot to get leverage from that hire than if you’re just focused on checking off ‘X position hired.’ I feel great about hires where I spent a TON of time defining the qualities and skills I was looking for (things like ‘has to have epic judgement about X’) before I wrote the formal job description.
2. Faaiza’s systems and tools question reminds me of the quote from W. Edwards Deming: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” This reinforces that there’s a lot of merit in taking the time to design and reassess.
A little background
North & Now started as an idea for a conference in 2016, and though we shelved that, we’ve continued to gather around these beliefs:
1. Look at leaders in other industries in order to be leaders in your own
2. Identifying opportunities is a learned skill (this one’s our favourite)
3. A fresh perspective on something familiar to you can be a game changer
If you want to send us links you think we’d like or want to discuss a fun idea, hit reply or send us a note:
Faaiza → Twitter (most active) / Instagram (infrequent posts, frequent scrolls)
Moirae → Instagram (her stories are 🔥) / Twitter (all business, no play)
Moly →Instagram (follow for wine/podcast recs) / Twitter (all things community)