Inside this Sunday:
- I’m reading about leadership lessons from award-winning TV.
- I’m working on visualizing my ideas on course creation.
- I’m thinking about creating leverage.
So Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta this week.
Regardless of what you think of Facebook and whether or not this rebranding is just a way to divert attention from the myriad controversies miring the company, you have to admit it’s a bold move.
They’re planting a flag in a fuzzy future like no company of this magnitude has done before (and few can emulate, given they occupy such rarified air with their $900B market cap).
The fuzzy future I’m referring to is the Metaverse.
What is the Metaverse?
It’s outside the scope of this newsletter to break it down for you, so let me refer you to the excellent Packy McCormick for that.
For a quick and dirty definition from Wikipedia:
Metaverse is a speculative future iteration of the Internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe. The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds but the Internet as a whole, including the entire spectrum of augmented reality.
The keyword there is speculative.
I’ve been hearing and reading about it for the past year. Many believe the Metaverse is the future of the Internet. Some believe it’s the future of society.
Mark Zuckerberg certainly agrees. He’s betting his whole company on it.
He believes the Metaverse is the successor to the mobile internet (which helped launch Facebook into the stratosphere).
What has caught my attention the most is how hard they’re working to create a shared vision.
Just take a look at this mini-movie they produced.
The word “imagine” is uttered every few minutes.
It’s a remarkable production, but part of it feels opportunistic to me.
Like I said, I’ve been reading and hearing people talk about this for months now. The very nature of the concept is decentralized. To stake a claim as the company doing the metaverse seems a very ‘un-metaverse’ thing to do.
If they really want to foster the genuine commitment and enrollment that Senge is referring to, they may have to embrace the very thing regulators and the public are asking them to do: break up and decentralize.
I don’t see it happening, but it will be fascinating to watch this unfold.
See you in two weeks,
It was a dead heat two weeks ago with both my new products, Course of Action and C3, getting 77 clicks a piece.
The 11 Laws of Showrunning
I came across this brilliant essay from the Emmy-winning television producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach in which he compiled his best advice for other showrunners into 11 laws of showrunning.
Substitute the word “showrunning” for any business you’re running (and substitute your product wherever he refers to “scripts”) and you have a manifesto on leadership.
Here are my top takeaways:
- have a clear vision and be great at communicating it constantly to people who can execute in their field of expertise
- don’t abdicate responsibility for the vision to your people
- empower people to express themselves within your vision
- paint a path to success by defining problems and/or describing desired outcomes clearly
- commit to decisions early and often to give people time to use their talents to expand upon the direction you provide
- do not demand a final product at the idea stage, trust in your people to execute on ideas and give them time to do so
- write out your vision for your business and any of its future products and publish as soon as possible
- give feedback on your people’s work as soon as possible
- get the learning flywheel turning as soon as possible
- treat your team like an academy, teach them
- share your vision, be clear about what success looks like, and trust them to go out and bring it to life in your products for you
- resist spending time in the sexy glamorous parts of the business by staying focused on the vision and delegating responsibility for execution
- understand the difference between professional execution by your people and your subjective judgment of their final work
- your team has different levels of experience, so don’t have the same level of expectations and be more patient as a teacher with some
- encourage and teach inexperienced people to build consensus for new ideas before they bring them to you
- if someone on your team disagrees without providing solutions, coach this behavior out as soon as possible
- you are not everyone’s best friend, you’re the boss
- the desire to believe you can abdicate your teaching responsibility is aided by how tangential and time-consuming it feels
- make everyone responsible for the teaching of those less experienced than them
- deliver good and bad news early and often to avoid secrets and surprises
- never miss an opportunity to point out how another’s work has made you look good
- never throw one of your people under the bus: what can cripple a career is often only a ding on your door
Visualizing My Ideas
I worked with the incredibly talented Sachin Ramje from Mumbai to visualize 8 of my ideas on course creation from the past year. I’m stoked with how these images came out.
Learning Flywheel Course
We landed a pretty large client for Curious Lion which has taken most of my attention recently, but it also reinforced how important our Learning Flywheel work is.
The team is growing (we’re at 10 people now) and everyone really gets what we’re trying to achieve here (talk about shared visions). It makes me so happy. I’m going to write more about our culture in the coming weeks because we’re building something really special here.
I’ll be re-focusing on the Learning Flywheel Course in the coming weeks to help make access to what we’re doing more accessible to companies.
To that end, Jill created a handy info page on the program we’re building, which includes an interest form at the bottom if you want to stay in the loop.
Check out the Course Info Page
How Did You Learn That?
We reached 50 episodes!!
In ep 50, I soaked up the wisdom of one of the world’s top experts on Buddhism and insight meditation, Sharon Salzberg. This was an exploration into spirituality that I had been building up to since my early 20’s. It was an incredible privilege to explore with Sharon.
In ep 51, I was coached by communication expert Andrea Wojnicki on what it means to have a personal brand and how to go about cultivating it. I thought this was only relevant for entrepreneurs, but Andrea opened my eyes to how this applies to anyone, be it in their careers, and even in your personal life.
This email newsletter was originally shared with subscribers on October 31st, 2021. To receive the latest newsletters twice a month, sign up below!