Week Notes 2024-06-07

Fantastic trip to Florence last week but brought back a nasty head cold. It got a lot easier when I accepted the fact that I don’t have much energy right now and I can just slow down and stop wishing that I was perfectly healthy.

My son had a tummy bug (probably related to mine) and stayed home from school for three days. It felt a bit Swiss Family Robinson (or Covid lock down flashback) but I enjoyed it. Mostly 😂

After a very quiet period I somehow have 3 major workshops coming up in the next two weeks!

One remote for a green energy company that I’m really excited about. One in London for a global beverage company. And one in Hong Kong for a global bank. It’s definitely one of those “pinch me, I must be dreaming” career moments.

For the one in HK, I’d forgotten the feeling of working collaboratively to create something unique, effective, and brief (only 75 min) with a gigantic corporate entity. Lots of aspirations, lots of cooks, lots of opinions, probably lots of politics that I’m not savvy enough to pick up, but I will say everyone’s been lovely and it is actually quite nice having a whole “crew” of smart, highly engaged folks who are working hard to make me look good! 😁

I’m recognising that I’d like to train an LLM on all my dozens of slide decks I’ve produced about OKRs over the years and then enable me to crank out a bespoke one with a simple prompt containing things like the client, the audience and the agenda. I’m sure someone has already built this somewhere.

I’m throwing in one of my favourite G. K. Chesterton quotes.

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
– G. K. Chesterton

I’m still reading My Ántonia and loving the rich descriptions of the American Midwest.

I spent some time yesterday improvising at the piano. I considered recording it and opted against it so I could feel completely free. It felt wonderful and my son even got in on the act for a bit.

After 6 months, the scaffolding around our house finally came down this week!

I enjoyed Lenny’s Podcast with the founder of Canva who seems like a legitimately cool dude focused on building a great company. Some highlights:

• no “managers” but everyone has a “coach” (to be fair, this sounds nice but I’m still not sure what it means in practice)
• His advice for new leadership to “just listen for the first couple of months”. It’s refreshing in a world where senior leaders are so focused on having an “impact” in the “first 100 days”.

I found some old business cards from my days of running a boutique design and development consultancy in Seattle, beautifully designed by Jay Dokken (photo above).

Ended the week with a School of the Possible Campfire Call. These are always fun and interesting.

See you next week!