Career Hacks: 2 Ways To Supercharge Your Career
I was recently asked to give a talk to students at Stanford GSB about “life hacks” and “career hacks.” People have different definitions of the word “hack.” I tried to focus on activities that meet one or more of these criteria:
They are not widely followed,
They answer the question Tim Ferris poses, “What is the one thing you can do which will make everything else easy or irrelevant?” and/or
They produce a wildly asymmetric impact, in which a unit invested produces a disproportionately large positive return.
I came up with four life hacks and two career hacks. This is part 2 of the talk, which focuses on career hacks. A link to Part 1 of the talk, which focuses on the four life hacks, is here.
CAREER HACK 1: Win through hiring
Your biggest strength–individual contribution–will be your biggest weakness as you become a leader. You're going to have to start to build some different muscles. I run a private equity firm called Alpine that I started 20 years ago. We have about 200 full-time people, including leaders that we have hired and placed into companies. Numerically, I represent one half of 1% of the people. Said another way, 99.5% of all the work that gets done at Alpine is done by someone not named Graham. But that number is actually much higher because As hire As, and Bs hire Cs. If I have a leader at a company that's an A, they're going to compound that entire company with As.
My contribution to Alpine is not as an individual contributor closing deals or serving on boards, that contribution rounds to zero when you really think about it. However, if I measure my contribution by the organization that I'm trying to build, the kinds of people we're trying to bring on board at Alpine, the culture we’re trying to create, and the lifetime career opportunities we’re providing for people, my contribution is significant. I've built a container where people can be empowered and unleash their full selves. While most people in the private equity business define their contribution based on deals closed, that execution-focused mentality doesn't scale. That's a very poor scorecard as you get further out in your career. You will be in rarefied air if you can actually build a place where people want to come and work and be the best versions of themselves. Seventy percent of people in the U.S. dislike or are disengaged from their job, 70%. There's a huge need for people to build cultures where people want to come and work. It's also the formula for success. And it's also, to use Tim Ferriss's line, the one thing you can focus on that makes everything else irrelevant. So define your success by who you're bringing onto your team.
Now, let's say you join McKinsey and you are going to inherit a project team. I would argue the same thing is true. How are you making those people successful? Are you coaching them, mentoring them? How are they prioritizing their time? What's your role in that? How are you letting them become their full versions of themselves? That'll still be the highest use of your time. And again, you're going to have to unlearn the muscles you've been using, which is hitting the “more” button and working harder.
The first 20 or 30 years of my life, the only hammer I had was working harder. And working harder actually works against you as you become a leader. You're going to win through people and you're going to win by building a team.
CAREER HACK 2: Schedule invention and innovation
This has been an absolute game changer for us at Alpine. If you had asked me 10 years ago to share a list of my criteria or attributes, words like “creative” or “innovative” or “groundbreaking” wouldn't have made the list of my top 50 attributes. I would never have thought of myself that way. I'm an engineer, I work in private equity.
But after hiring, the thing that's really differentiated performance in our portfolio is that we schedule innovation. If you think about great companies, Apple, Tesla, or Amazon, you would probably put innovation and invention at the very top of that list.
Peter Drucker says, "There are only two functions of a business, innovation and marketing." Peter Drucker was a great management scientist. And he believed there are only two critical functions in business. You can't interpret that quote literally, but he's basically saying you've got to create stuff and you've got to sell it. And we forget this, right? Where do we spend all our time? If we're not innovating, what are we doing? We're optimizing along a frontier. We're trying to get better at what we're already doing, which is usually the same things that everyone else in our industry is doing. Now is that important? Sure, that's important. In private equity for example, you want to be a little bit better at doing deals, and a little bit better at winning an auction.
But if you want to play in a place where no one else plays, if you want to find air that's totally clear, then you're going to need to invent and innovate. There's a book called “Blue Ocean Strategy,” and this great article on HBR about it. The authors talk about how there are red oceans and blue oceans. And in the red oceans there are sharks and people killing each other and working hundred-hour weeks and fighting each other. They're just fighting over this fixed pool. And then in blue oceans you have companies like Apple and Tesla and Amazon that are playing a totally different game. You have to actually spend time making that happen. You must schedule innovation. But the payoff is you get the whole ocean to yourself.
So why are people so bad at innovating? They don't consider themselves creative. That was true for me. Or they don't see the importance of innovation. They don't even define their business that way. My business is closing deals. Where's innovation coming into that, right? We buy stuff. Most people succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. They say, “What am I going to do? What's on my to-do list? I've got a deal, I've got to put this fire out.” And inventing is important but not urgent.
One of my early coaches described the difference between working in the business and on the business. Working in the business is closing deals, selling stuff, being on boards, whatever. Working on the business is making the process of doing that better. Things like investing in people and coming up with innovations. Leaders often don't give themselves and their teams permission to spend time thinking. They will say, "I want you to be more innovative, but you actually still have to do your a hundred hour a week day job."
The simple formula for innovation involves three things. First, schedule the time, put it on the calendar. Second, ask presumptive questions, and finally, allocate resources and give people permission. To truly be innovative, you have to do all three.
Presumptive Questions
A great coach will ask questions. I'm going to give you an example of some of the questions we would use to start with these innovation pods. A presumptive question is basically a question which presumes success, and then essentially asks, “How do we back into that?” If that were true, what would have to be true? A few examples:
If we were the best in the world at sourcing founder-backed, small cap, SaaS business, what would that look like?
If we were to build a database of every SaaS company in the world, or over five million of revenue in the U.S., how would we do that?
If 100% of founders we engaged with did a deal with us, what would need to be true?
When you start with a presumptive question, it's amazing how people start leaning in and saying, "Oh, okay." Part of them assumes the identity of someone who has already achieved this goal, "All right, we're the best in the world." Now when I put myself in that mindset, what's true? This is a powerful tool.
What if you didn't need to have all the success today, but you were willing to invest in being successful in two years, three years, five years, or 10 years? If you just invest in the long term, wherever you're going, whatever business, you will differentiate from 90% of the competition. Great things take time, they don't happen overnight. Give yourself and your team permission.
Other questions to ask yourself:
What are your competitors unwilling to do?
What do your customers hate?
I had Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Herd in my class this year and she asked, "What breaks your heart that you can solve?"
Where can you upscale your talent?
If we had to hit our 10-year goal in six months, how would we do that?
If we had to double revenue from existing customers, how would we do that?
What if we had 100% retention?
Then ask, what would need to be true? We'd have to hire a lot more people. We would have to raise a lot more money, we'd have to do whatever. Okay, great. So what's wrong with that? What are the barriers? The magic of the first bullet here about the longer horizon is that if I start my sentence “Within 10 years,” then pretty much any barrier that anyone can come up with can be knocked down.
I'll leave you with Jeff Bezos' final thought here. This is what he said when he retired. He said, "Keep inventing, and don't despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander, let curiosity be your compass. It remains day one."
Jeff Bezos built one of the largest, most valuable businesses in the world. He's always describing himself as an inventor. He's not afraid to fail, but he gives people a lot of runway.
Click here to read Part 1: Life Hacks.