| Sunday, 10 September 2023 | Good Morning edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com! As we approach the September equinox, the days are getting brighter. And after a few really good spells of rain, Bengaluru’s skies are bright electric blue. The rains have breathed new colour into the trees and plants too. Even the air smells fresh and crisp. No wonder that Gabru, our five-year-old indie dog, loves to laze near the balcony doors and stare out into the green and blue horizon. I hope you are having a content Sunday too. My theme today is very much in keeping with the overall mood. Let’s talk about subtracting, deleting, and forgetting. I had an entirely different subject planned for today till I saw a LinkedIn post by a business leader I’ve also known as a friend since the late 2000s—Srikanth Rajagopalan, the CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation. We first met when Srikanth was a founding team member at one of India’s earliest “fintechs” in India, ngPay, a company that was perhaps five years too early in my opinion. He’s incredibly opinionated, energetic, and ambitious, perhaps even infectiously so. Srikanth’s post said, “Beware the addiction to busyness. The best leaders I've worked with have asked clarifying questions rather than given directions, and been available when I needed them, rather than insisting on being consulted on everything.” But it was the article from The Economist he had linked to that stood out even more. It said, “The best bosses know how to subtract work. | Companies are used to celebrating addition. Profits, customers and share prices should go up rather than fall. Innovation is the adding of new products. Larger numbers are a measure of career success: managers climb the corporate ladder by taking on more reports, running heftier budgets and trousering bigger salaries. Genuine superstars don’t just add. They multiply. The best software programmers are tagged as “10x developers”, for supposedly being ten times more productive than their peers. Firms are not always opposed to subtraction. There are good kinds of cuts: carbon emissions, most obviously. Reducing costs is a necessary part of management, though not a welcome one. But the value of doing less is underestimated. The best bosses are those who take things away as well as add them on. […] Subtraction is not just about removing day-to-day distractions. It’s also about taking decisions to kill off projects and products that are going nowhere, and to focus efforts on the most important bits of the business. Peter Drucker, the doyen of management theorists, was an advocate of “planned abandonment”, so that resources that are tied up in marginal activities are freed for more profitable use. Executives should, he advised, routinely ask the same question of every aspect of the business: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?” | | | When we’re kids, addition and subtraction are two sides of the same coin. We don’t see one as more important than the other. Yet, as we grow into adults and enter our professional lives, we start drifting towards addition. We can’t help it, because that’s how we’re wired. Presented with a problem, we look to solve it by adding things to it. It could be slides in a presentation, paragraphs on an essay, or features in a product. | “Additive ideas come to mind quickly and easily, but subtractive ideas require more cognitive effort,” Converse said. “Because people are often moving fast and working with the first ideas that come to mind, they end up accepting additive solutions without considering subtraction at all.” The researchers think there may be a self-reinforcing effect. “The more often people rely on additive strategies, the more cognitively accessible they become,” Adams said. “Over time, the habit of looking for additive ideas may get stronger and stronger, and in the long run, we end up missing out on many opportunities to improve the world by subtraction.” | | |
There’s also the fact that adding is seen in popular and workplace cultures as “positive”, whereas subtraction is the opposite.
There’s scientific research that also suggests that forgetting many things is good for the brain. | “Without forgetting, we would have no memory at all,” said Oliver Hardt, who studies memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal. If we remembered everything, he said, we would be completely inefficient because our brains would always be swamped with superfluous memories. “I believe that the brain acts as a promiscuous encoding device,” he said, noting that at night many people can recall even the most mundane events of their day in detail, but then they forget them in the following days or weeks. | | | At our workplaces, subtraction is a powerful decision-making tool. Because it forces us to think about two things very clearly—constraints and outcomes. Everything we do is bound by constraints, like the hours in a day, the dollars in a budget, the days to launch, or the members in a team. Subtraction makes us focus on optimising the resources we have to generate the best possible outcomes. Last year, I read a wonderful book that talked about additive thinking in the context of product management called “Escaping the Build Trap” by Melissa Perri. | The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce. When companies stop producing real value for the users, they begin to lose market share, allowing them to be disrupted. Companies can get out of the build trap by setting themselves up to develop intentional and robust product management practices. At that point, product managers can find the opportunities to maximize business and customer value. | | | I’ve been guilty of pushing myself and my colleagues to do more. It's only in the last few years that I’ve developed the ability to not just accept subtraction, but to also suggest it proactively. I’ve been practicing telling my colleagues that when I (inevitably) go to them with a new idea for a product, story, or process, they should ask me, “So, what do you want me to drop from what I’m currently doing?” What I’m doing is just one of the points suggested by the authors of a study on subtraction in this Harvard Business Review piece. | In our research, we tested how participants’ ideas were influenced by cues: simple reminders to consider subtracting or adding. Reminders to consider adding had no noticeable effects; they were superfluous because people were already thinking of adding. Reminders to consider subtracting, however, had big effects. They brought ideas to mind that would have been overlooked otherwise. As a result, significantly more participants identified advantageous subtractions. 1. Remind people that subtracting is an option.
2. Make subtraction policy.
3. Make evidence of good subtractions visible | | | That’s all for this weekend. I’ll leave you with some wonderful quotes on subtraction from the world of writing. | “Don’t be afraid to throw things out. Don’t worry about what other people might think about what you throw away.” – Margaret Atwood “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” – Truman Capote “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson | | | | I have a great new episode of the First Principles podcast coming up next week with a CEO who told me she has learnt to ruthlessly say no to the things that don’t fall into one of the three columns in her personal Excel sheet—Professional, Personal, and Growth. | | | | |
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