Eleven meetings in one day, and that is after I had cancelled two.
Thinking about what is the right amount of meetings for my role and the maturity of the team and the wider firm.
I am late to Love, Death, and Robots on Netflix. Uneven but overall very enjoyable. Love the short-story format. Generally love the aesthetics. Stories are mostly well done and thought provoking. 4.5/5 stars from me.
Trying to apply Ted Sorensen’s “Four words and five lines” to an upcoming video.
- Four words: Clarity. Brevity. Levity. Charity.
- Five lines: Outline. Headline. Front line. Bottom line. Sidelines.
- For the outline for business writing, try Excite-Disturb-Assure as a classic structure.
- Aim for no more than ten words for the headline.
- For the front line, you can safely go with the ancient, “Tell them what you are going to tell them”, approach.
- The bottom line should cause the change in the audience that you want to cause; it should be what the ancients called kairos. (And if you don’t want to change the audience: please don’t speak.)
- The sidelines should build the emotional connection.
See Jeremy Connell-Waite’s take on “Four words and five lines” here: https://vimeo.com/880896227
For the front line, I am reminded of the prologue of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which gives away the entire story:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.That’s it. Just a few minutes into the play and you can go home now. Except, of course, that we are looking for the story and for the emotional connection, not just the facts, when we go to the theatre.
Thought for the week: How can you be more theatrical in your job?
Reading
Interesting business reading this week:
Still enjoying Tell Better Stories by Jeremy Connell-Waite | Business Storytelling. The gift that keeps on giving. 🐇
Thinking about becoming a multilingual leader, not so much in terms of spoken language, but the language of leadership. Watch Rosita Najmi on TED What’s your leadership language?.
I became convinced that there’s no best type of leadership. So many of us just default to one style or another, similar to how we’re born with our native tongue. But this default style doesn’t work in every situation. Many leaders obesess over leadership style when really they just need to get over themselves.
Interesting tech reading this week:
Categorical Features in XGBoost Without Manual Encoding - I’m a year late to the party, but I need to try this out.
Observable looks nice; try Oil and gas breakeven prices from The Economist as a starting point for exploration.
What I am reading now:
Scaling People - Tactics for management and company building by Claire Hughes Johnson. Stripe Press
Until next week: Travel well, whichever road you are on 👋.
