Catharine P. Taylor moderates a panel discussing the future of Facebook were they to launch an online ad network.
Vacation for the Central Executive
It’s hard to vacation. Yes, I realize that this is a ‘first-world problem’ (laughably so), but I was struck on a recent vacation myself how it can be difficult to truly disconnect from work in a real way.
While we’re having fun with family, friends, and maybe even the occasional exotic locale, there can be a creeping sense of guilt for missing work. Emails are piling up. Clients are calling. Colleagues need me.
The overwhelmed brain can take a while to wind down.
Here’s the terrible truth about our minds: they’re limited. When it comes to attention, there are two ‘networks’ at play. The task-positive network (referred to as the Central Executive by neuroscientists) is your active engagement with a task. The task-negative network takes over when your mind wanders or is creative. When one of these two networks is active, the other is not.
Both the task-positive and the task-negative networks are very important to us humans. While we need that focused attention to accomplish tasks, the inspiration and ideas come from the daydreaming. It’s a two-part attention system, and it’s easy to abuse at work. Sometimes we force the employment of the task-positive network in order to be extra productive. Sometimes we vacillate back and forth too quickly, like when we allow social media to interrupt work.
Vacations can be enormously restorative, but not if we use our minds in the same way as we do when we’re working. Checking email, thinking about work, or using your Central Executive while on vacation means your mind doesn’t get that break.
So as you manage to eke out a couple days for yourself and your family this month, make sure you do your brain a favor and let it wander. Let your creative mind flow. When you need to concentrate on something, take your time.
Don’t worry, the Central Executive has gotten enough exercise, and will still be healthy when you return.
Don Mathis on VC Friends and Frenemies
From time to time I check in on the latest from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, an extremely insightful blog that features articles, research and commentary from the school’s faculty. If you haven’t yet visited the blog, I strongly recommend doing so. Whether you’re a newly-minted MBA or longtime executive, you can take more than a few worthwhile lessons from its generally fresh approach to market, policy, and management analysis.
Most recently, I read Carmen Nobel’s piece (“In Venture Capital, Birds of a Feather Lose Money Together”) on the disadvantages of friendship in venture capital investing and what can happen when otherwise affine VC investors fail in their joint endeavors. Based on the research and subsequent paper by HBS colleagues Paul Gompers, Yuhai Xuan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov, the article explores the perhaps-unexpected pitfalls of investing with others of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and vocational trajectories, especially when it concerns VCs who have known each other for many years.
To measure the performance of these investors, the team looked at a broad database of 3,510 VCs, along with the 12,000-plus investments conducted by these investors over a 30-year period, defining success by whether or not an investment in a private company led to an IPO down the road. Looking at the employment histories, educational backgrounds, ethnicities, and other fundamental criteria of these investors, the researchers found that success rates dropped by significant numbers when two VCs of similar backgrounds co-invested in companies. If co-investors previously worked at the same company, success rates dropped by 17 percent; alumni from the same undergraduate school, 19 percent; and those of the same ethnic minority, 20 percent.
The thrust of the article, more or less, seems to indicate that investors who bring different perspectives to a private business are more likely to challenge each other on key decisions, particularly in the early stages of the company’s development. Those challenges play crucial roles in everything from strategic management to the selection of board members and executive personnel. Food for thought!
Leaders Losing Their Way
Recently, numerous high profile leaders have gotten in trouble with the law. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading French politician, was arrested on charges of sexual assault. Before that, David Sokol, thought to be Warren Buffett’s soon successor, was forced to resign for trading in Lubrizol stock prior to recommending that Berkshire Hathaway purchase the company.
All of these incredibly talented leaders were successful and at the peak of their careers. So why destroy everything they have built by confusing acts and antics? The media has painted portraits of these leaders as evil, terrible people. However the question is raised what makes these thought to be “good” people lose their way?
These leaders did not necessarily become bad people, they rather lost sight of their morals and values. Few people find their way into positions of leadership by cheating or being evil, yet we all have the ability to lose sight of what’s important.
The important message is that people have a hard time staying grounded without some help. Leaders rely on people close to them to help them remain centered. Their spouse or partner can be a great person who knows them best and aren’t impressed by the wealth, prestige and titles.
As Senator Ensign told his fellow senators in a farewell speech in May, “When one takes a position of leadership, there is a very real danger of getting caught up in the hype surrounding that status … Surround yourselves with people who will be honest with you about how you really are and what you are becoming, and then make them promise to not hold back… from telling you the truth.”
Why I Serve
On this rainy July 4th, I was thinking about my Navy service in the context of Independence Day and thought I’d reblog this story on why I serve…
Don Mathis, CEO of Kinetic Social & Navy Officer. With Petty Officer at Evening Colors aboard USS John F. Kennedy in NYC.
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
Like most reservists I know, I lead a busy life. Kids and a working spouse, the constant juggle of obligations, the feeling that at some level you don’t have enough time, ever, to do all that needs to be done.
On the civilian-side, I have the fortune of being the CEO of a growing social media-related technology company. It is a stimulating and challenging environment, and I work with a truly outstanding team. It isn’t easy to find the caliber of commitment or intensity in the civilian world that is common in the service, but I believe that at my company, Kinetic Social, I have.
But the work is challenging. We are a small young company, not yet profitable and constantly scrambling to fund-raise. Issues must be resolved decisively and immediately; we don’t have the luxury of excess capital to offset poor decisions…
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Not chest-thumping, strutting egotism…
SECDEF Robert Gates & Don Mathis, CEO of Kinetic Social and Navy Officer
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
Self-confident leadership: “Not the chest-thumping, strutting egotism we see and read about all the time. Rather, the quiet self-assurance that allows a leader to give others both real responsibility and real credit for success.” So said Robert M. Gates at the U.S. Naval Academy on Friday, May 27, 2011, not long before he left office as America’s 22nd Secretary of Defense (SECDEF).
This sentiment speaks to what really matters for effectively running an organization: confident leadership that puts the team first and empowers them to accomplish the mission. It is also a telling comment on the character of one of the nation’s very best SECDEFs.
Robert Gates’ style of managing organizations has lessons for anyone in a leadership position or aspiring to hold one. While Secretary Gates was in the news earlier this year due to some of criticism of his memoirs, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, that isn’t what this post is about. The criticism focused on the perceived tell-all nature of a book that was critical of much of official Washington. But this shouldn’t obscure his brilliant career culminating as Secretary of Defense – the first to serve under two presidents of opposing parties. Whether you like his book or not, there is no disputing that his tenure as Secretary of Defense was historic, and that he has been a deeply committed public servant.
And let’s face it, much of the book was spot-on in its observations.
What I do what to focus on is the extraordinary leadership Gates has demonstrated. His style – especially, his empowerment of his teams – has resonance not just for public service, but for leadership of any sort of organization. For me, that includes my civilian work as the CEO of Kinetic Social, a start-up in the social media and technology world. It has also been influential for me as a leader in uniform, during my service as a Naval Officer (both on active duty and in the reserve).
In that same speech at Annapolis, Gates said:
“(Leadership includes) the ability to stand in the shadow and let others receive attention and accolades. A leader is able to make decisions but then delegate and trust others to make things happen. This doesn’t mean turning your back after making a decision and hoping for the best. It does mean trusting in people at the same time you hold them accountable. The bottom line: a self-confident leader doesn’t cast such a large shadow that no one else can grow.”
I met a senior Pentagon officer who worked for Secretary Gates for part of his tenure, and he spoke about this quality of having a constructive relationship with a boss who empowered and trusted his subordinates. And he emphasized that this was perfectly consistent with discipline and accountability. “Gates understood that you don’t need to be dick to be an effective and decisive leader,” he said. “This is what so many managers – especially the toxic sort – get wrong.”
Gates’ style, alas, is the exception rather than the rule.
Serving under Secretary Gates as an officer in the Navy, I watched his leadership style closely. While I did not serve in the Pentagon or directly for him, I became a Commanding Officer during his tenure. And I learned a great deal from his tone of management, from the way he motivated by empowering, and from the way he genuinely cared for his subordinates – especially the troops in the field.
I came to summarize and distill Robert Gates’ core approach into a four point guide for running my Navy unit, a guide that I have also used in my civilian career at Kinetic:
- Set a vision: one that inspires and stretches the team towards an important achievement, a disruptive innovation, a major strategic objective;
- Hire / retain / train a great team that can operate together. Not just a group of “A players” (who often struggle with operating together as a team). A group of strong players where you learn their strengths and weaknesses, and you help them focus and contribute the former in a collaborative setting while controlling for the latter;
- Empower that team: get out of their way and let them execute (i.e., don’t micromanage);
- Hold them accountable: for the results you expect, around the vision you set. A good subordinate manager will welcome the accountability; it will help them reach their potential and grow as leaders in their own right.
Few will have the honor of serving their country in the same way that Secretary Robert Gates did. But we all can learn from his leadership example, and implement the lessons learned of how he successfully ran the Department of Defense in a period of enormous and tumultuous challenge for the country.
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM /// Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a social data and technology company focused on making sense of the world’s social signal. He also serves in the US Navy on reserve duty, where he is an Expeditionary Combat Logistics & Anti-Terrorism Officer.
The Vision Thing … from our company blog
I recently wrote a piece for Kinetic Social’s company blog, “Kinetic Conversations.” I thought it was worth highlighting here, especially after having just returned from a conference at the Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship (the “Rock 100” conference). Two intense days at the Rock conference, where we focused on issues of starting and growing companies, certainly underscored this key take away for me:
The Mission Matters. In any setting – military, non-profit, business or otherwise – a group of people forming as a team needs a guiding principle around which they can organize. As Robert S. Kaplan, a professor at Harvard Business School, puts it: “you need a reason to get out of bed and go to work each day.” Something substantial, something that guides you, something you can believe in. Incidentally, making money is a side-effect of building something meaningful in business, but it cannot be the mission … and in those cases where it is, it often doesn’t last long.
At Kinetic Social, we completed our Series A fundraising in May, and we took the summer to take both a deep breath and a step back from our run-like-hell sprint out of the starting gates. Now, we are wrapping up a process of clarifying and codifying our mission. Really, it is more of a vision than a mission (the differences between the two are a subject for another time, but for our purposes here, I will treat them as the same). We are focused at Kinetic on making sense of the world’s social signal. The vision we are developing is larger than that, but that is the essence.
* * *
You can read the full piece here. Oh and, by the way, we’ve had the good fortune to raise a Series B subsequent to writing this piece!
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM
Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a social data and technology company focused on making sense of the world’s social signal. He also serves in the US Navy on reserve duty, where he is an Expeditionary Combat Logistics & Anti-Terrorism Officer.
“How do YOU define leadership?” (In A Tweet)
Harvard Business School managed a Twitter conversation with alumni recently, asking the question “How Do YOU Define Leadership?” There are a lot of smart responses in the Storify version of the dialog. It isn’t easy to say something thoughtful about such a broad subject in 140 characters, but many folks did!
Here are my own responses from the Storify / Twitter conversation:
Should Brands Be Tweeting About 9/11?
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
This post is based on an article in DIGIDAY today, 9/11/2013, on the question of Brands tweeting about 9/11. The article was well done, written by Saya Weissman. The following is my comment, published with the article.
Should brands be tweeting about 9/11? From my perspective, it depends, but the default answer should be to avoid comment. And my perspective is informed, in part, by having worked downtown at the time of the attacks, being there when the buildings came down, and then spending three more months at Ground Zero mobilized with the military.So the experience is pretty close, and pretty raw still, for me.
For companies – not brands – that were affected, e.g.companies in Manhattan and/or companies that suffered losses, it seems to me that a respectful remembrance can be appropriate. But for those brands trying to use the moment to improve awareness, even if the message is benign, I think that’s in poor taste.
9/11 may morph into a national holiday eventually like Memorial Day, though it isn’t really the same thing (we may celebrate Veteran’s Day, but we don’t celebrate Pearl Harbor Day or Oklahoma City Bombing Day). And in any case, it certainly isn’t there yet, especially for those of us personally affected. By the way, as a veteran, I’m not that fond of brands tweeting on Memorial Day either…
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM /// Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a social data and technology company focused on making sense of the world’s social signal. He also serves in the US Navy on reserve duty, where he is an Expeditionary Combat Logistics & Anti-Terrorism Officer.
Beyond the Big Three Social Networks
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
The accelerating monetization initiatives of the social media “Big Three” – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – have received a fair share of headlines recently. But what does the rest of the pack of social media players have up their sleeves? Keep reading…
This post has been moved to my industry-focused blog, “Silicon Alley Considered: Observations from the grittier tech space.” You can click on the link to keep reading.
Don Mathis 