Adapting to Endure, Think Time – the only way to really be strategic & Onboarding at Dropbox

12 June 2022 Newsletter

“Basically, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. This is a stark, inescapable principle that we all live with.” – Chris McChesney

Hope you’re Thriving!

What a great quote that is above. The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. I’m sure it translates to all facets of life, but in my world, I’m thinking about it through the lens of leadership teams trying to consistently execute the priorities that will create the highest impact.

And it’s hard.

I’ve had a couple of teams in the past week who’ve been challenged by changing circumstances in the market. They’ve focused less on executing the critical strategies that build momentum because they’ve been sucked into the urgent and important. But, as I remind every team, every time I meet them, the signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.

Adapting to Endure

Every week, I host a podcast where we start by saying, “ Everything we talk about is building enduring, great companies”. With the current volatility, from interest rates, inflation, staff shortages, stock market and valuation crashes, there’s a good chance that not every company will endure.

I came across an excellent presentation from Sequoia Capital about the current economic climate and how it is currently affecting businesses and might well into the future. It’s not all about growth anymore. Investors favour near-term certainty to potential growth, and focus is shifting to companies with profitability and positive cash flows, which translates into meaningful value appreciation.

Here’s a great takeaway from the presentation about strategies for uncertain times.

Strategies for Uncertain Times

• Simplicity scales, complexity doesn’t
• Speed – one of the greatest business strategy
• Double down on your top talent
• Seek alignment, not agreement
• Tighten up value proposition/solve real problems

Three reasons why people buy regardless of market conditions (enterprise POV):

• Drive growth
• Save money (real, hard ROI)
• Reduce risk
• Everything else is fluffy

Also, opportunities abound in downturns; I loved this quote from the presentation:

“You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather… but you can when it’s raining.” – Ayrton Senna.

Read the presentation here: Adapting to Endure

It’s All a Cycle

Knowing that you will endure is paramount. Confidence in your team, planning and executing process, and value proposition should enable this. Also, you should have confidence that this is all a cycle. When governments worldwide released enormous monetary stimulus, flooding economies with cash, what we’re seeing is the logical consequence.

Remember, the stock market crashed in:

2020 (-34%)

2008 (-56%)

2000 (-49%)

1990 (-20%)

1987 (-34%)

1980 (-27%)

1973 (-48%)

…and recovered to all-time highs each and every time!

Onboarding at Dropbox

This week I came across an interesting article about Onboarding at Dropbox. My book about onboarding is coming along well, and I’m hoping it will launch within the next 90 days… Hoping. Anyway, this article was interesting because it tracks two new hires through their onboarding process.

From the article:

“Before Dropbox, we both experienced in-person onboarding at other companies, but they were of opposite extremes. Adam had essentially no onboarding at his previous company. Brian was overloaded with classes but had little practical experience early on. But at Dropbox, we found a middle ground. New hires are called Droplets, and have 90 days to get up to speed on our culture, learn various teams’ processes, and ship their first small project. Engineers get all the resources they need to succeed without being overwhelmed by information—or immediate pressure to deliver results.”

Read the article here: A day in the life: Engineer onboarding at Dropbox

How mRNA Medicine Will Change the World

I thought you might enjoy this fascinating TED talk – 18 minutes. Of course, we’re all aware that many vaccines produced through the pandemic have used mRNA technology, but this video discusses the potential for mRNA technology to help fight other diseases.

Here’s the synopsis:

The secret behind medicine that uses messenger RNA (or mRNA) is that it “teaches” our bodies how to fight diseases on our own, leading to groundbreaking treatments for COVID-19 and, potentially one day, cancer, the flu and other ailments that have haunted humanity for millennia.
RNA researcher Melissa J. Moore — Moderna’s chief scientific officer and one of the many people responsible for the rapid creation and deployment of their COVID-19 vaccine — takes us down to the molecular level, unravelling how mRNA helps our bodies’ proteins maintain health, prevent disease and correct errors in our genetic code. “We have entered an entirely new era of medicine,” Moore says.

Watch the video here How mRNA Medicine Will Change the World

This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast

Think Time – the only way to really be strategic

In order to become more strategic and more effective, leaders should aim for more think time. But making it happen is hard. So we need to find more time for thinking, versus just tactically working.

Because if you don’t have enough thinking time, you end up with your head in the day to day problems, which leads to short term, urgent issues being resolved, but the longer-term important things not getting any attention.

We discuss six things you should consider to ensure you can optimise your think time.

Episode 113 – The Growth Whisperers

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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles