The Fine Art Of Balancing Scalability And Stability.

Edition #172

May 28, 2025

Introduction

Welcome to The ContraMind Code.

The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.

The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.

The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best. It also enables you to draw a blueprint for what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You can share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation here.

Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.

In Uncertain Times, Get Curious.

We live in a time of high uncertainty. It could be about how AI will transform or is already transforming what you are doing, tariffs that may affect how goods and services flow across different countries, which can affect the industry or company you are working for, etc. So, how can we manage and overcome these uncertain times? This article in Behavioural Scientist has some powerful thoughts for you to consider, which are excerpts taken from a book, ‘How to fall in love with questions?’ by Elizabeth Weingarten.

Here are some thoughts from the article on what it means to get curious during uncertain times:

“Curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act. And curiosity is always more than a single move or a single question.”
“Curiosity works by linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together.”
“Asking questions opens up different possibilities. If someone can be curious, they are less likely to narrow in on one idea that could be generating that feeling of stuckness, or apprehension about the future.”
Practice ‘Temporal Distancing’ - “Imagining how a past or future version of ourselves would handle a particular challenge, we can gain more perspective on our big questions today.”

Read the entire article here.

A Lesson On Balancing Scalability With Stability.

This HBR on Strategy podcast presents a refreshing perspective on why it is vital to balance a business's scalability with stability. A Bain & Co. analysis reveals some interesting facts “Under 1% of unicorns are profiting at scale with true business success despite $1 billion-plus valuations.”

There is always a lot of discussion about how a business must be scalable, and there is a lot of chatter around scalability today. There are relatively few discussions around stability and why stability is as important, both in the short term and long term, for a business.

When decisions about stability are to be made, there may be a need to compromise on near-term revenue growth over significant investments that may be needed, as this may only yield results over the long term.

Hence, business leaders' ability to make these tough decisions differentiates how great businesses are built and valued over the long term. Business leaders need the skills to influence their board despite pressure from them, yet they must stay focused to avoid the unwanted noise that can be created when decisions on stability prevail over scalability.

You can also listen to this episode on:

Spotify | Overcast

Jony Ive And Sam Altman - Reimagining The Use Of Computers In The Age Of AI.

OpenAI announced the acquisition of Jony Ive’s start-up firm io. Jony is world-famous for his contributions to the design of the original iPhone and other flagship Apple products. Jony founded LoveFrom, a creative collective that includes architects, industrial designers, motion designers, musicians, writers, etc. This acquisition marks the much-awaited entry of OpenAI into hardware devices.

In their own words, both of them are asking, “What is the future of AI and new kinds of computers going to look like?”

Their mission is “figuring out how to create a family of devices that would let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things.”

They are reimagining what these devices can look like, unlike what we see around us today, and they are saying, “Surely there's something beyond these legacy products.”

Let’s wait to see what the future of computers/mobiles will look like!

You can click on the above video and watch it.

The Fine Art Of Balancing Scalability And Stability.

What’s more important for a business - scalability or stability? This is always the million-dollar question in the minds of business leaders, startup founders, and entrepreneurs because there is no correct answer to this question.

Many factors act as a bottleneck or challenge in scaling a business. One of the most critical factors is the quality of the operational process. Scaling often fails when there is too much focus on ‘operational efficiency’ before developing ‘operational depth’. Operational efficiency usually focuses on cost reduction, margin improvement, streamlining processes and workflows, focusing on productivity and performance metrics, automation, etc. However, achieving operational efficiency can be superficial if businesses don’t build operational depth. Operational depth includes domain expertise, institutional knowledge, having diverse capabilities to handle complex and unpredictable operations, well-developed SOPs(Standard Operating Procedures), etc. Operational depth is all about the robustness of capabilities, processes and expertise. It includes the foundations of knowledge, expertise and systems that can handle scale. In the excitement to scale, many businesses compromise ‘operational depth’ over ‘operational efficiency’ as building operational depth seems ‘slow on the outside’. It also leaves leaders, entrepreneurs and startup founders with a feeling that things are not moving fast enough. Hence, they quickly switch to focus on ‘operational efficiency’, which gives them an adrenaline rush and a feeling that things are moving fast, while the fundamental foundations are weak. They need to recognize that ‘operational depth’ takes time to set in, and they need to possess a relentless focus and patience to get this right.

Conversely, ‘too much stability’ is also not good for any business. A stability-driven approach makes a company or a business or a startup ‘less adaptable’ to changing market conditions, and it loses sight of opportunities that come its way. Business leaders in such companies build an ‘illusion of stability’ while, in reality, the market conditions and trends will be changing underneath their noses. It also tends to discourage innovation, leading to a status quo or stagnation in their business. In reality, no market opportunity is insulated, and market access is not guaranteed for life. Also, the boundaries between industries are disappearing fast. Therefore, the need to push at the frontend is vital. The hard truth is that no business or people running it can be perfectly ready for an aggressive push for growth. However, rapid, mindless expansion is also detrimental to a business. The best analogy to explain this is ‘If you try to eat more than you can digest, it often leads to a disaster in your health or unforeseen diseases and complications.’ So, too is the case with businesses. You need to prepare businesses to ‘digest’ growth effectively. In parallel, you will need to prepare enterprises continuously for innovation, growth, and expansion.

When scalability is fused intelligently with a sense of substantial ‘operational depth’ in a company, the long-tail effects of value and market leadership for a business tend to be more sustainable rather than being a ‘few years’ wonder.

Great businesses are built in a continuous cycle of ‘stability’ with ‘operational depth’, followed by ‘scalability’ with ‘operational efficiency’. Enduring companies or businesses have cracked the fine art of balancing scalability with stability. Leaders who lead these companies at different phases of these cycles need to understand and absorb this in their management style and methods. They must learn to balance ‘moments of calm rigour’ and ‘moments of adrenaline rush’.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

Learn to ask questions to open a myriad of possibilities.
It is vital to balance a business's scalability with stability.
The computers and mobile devices of the future will cease to look like those of the past. So, what’s the new form factor going to be?

Start Small-Scale Experiments With ‘Pretotyping’.

Edition #171

ContraMinds Labs

May 21, 2025

Introduction

Welcome to The ContraMind Code.

The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.

The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.

The Reading Obsession.

On Saturday, May 3, 2025, Warren Buffett announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year. This article by Frederik Gieschen has a lovely but contrarian perspective on the man and his achievements that all of us can learn from. He starts with a provocative thought: ‘You should probably learn about how Buffett got to the top, not how he rules his empire now.’

Here are some thoughts/quotes from his article that can make you think of this:

“Buffett’s huge network of knowledgeable and influential friends also has been a help along the way.”
“He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money.”
“Buffett was incredibly proactive and understood that solving the puzzle required, or could be vastly accelerated, by having an experienced teacher. Going out into the world to find one turned out to be an incredible shortcut.”
“Increasingly, he began to work on large-scale, lucrative projects that required time and planning to execute.”- The Snowball.
“Buffett found a way to socialize that worked for his personality.”
Warren Buffett’s reply to the Dean of Columbia University- Ability to put a fence around yourself - “I appreciate the invitation to the Annual Dinner, but will have to decline. My extended trip to New York always occurs in May - and even then I like to skip formal dinners as I find I can do a lot more catching up with friends in four- and six-people lunches and dinners.”
Warren Buffett always sought to learn and find answers from his friends and group for questions like these - “Why didn’t the successful companies keep winning? What was a truly durable competitive advantage?”
Frederik ends his article with this brilliant final line: “But always remember that his wealth was built on the balance of compounding wisdom and relationships. In fact, the two reinforced each other. Go and do likewise.”

Read the entire article here.

Doing Deep Work In A Distracted World.

In this conversation on the ContraMinds Podcast, Steven Puri shares his unique experience from being a former Hollywood studio executive to a tech entrepreneur. He talks about his fascinating journey from being an IBM software engineer to film industry innovator and founder of Sukha, a productivity platform designed to recreate the “coffee shop effect” for remote workers.

Here are some key insights from the conversation:

“Productivity often increases in coffee shops, not despite the presence of others, but because of it.”
“Consistent success comes not from superior talent but from unwavering tenacity.”
“The writers and directors who maintained careers weren’t necessarily the most gifted, but those who could withstand rejection and continue refining their craft daily through disciplined practice.”
“Context-switching between tasks doesn’t just waste time—it destroys flow state, requiring 15-22 minutes to regain focus after each interruption.”

You can also listen to this episode on:

Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas: From Academic to $9B AI Pioneer.

At the recent HBS Entrepreneurship Summit 2025, Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, an AI-powered conversational engine, is in conversation with Patrick Chung, Managing General Partner at Xfund, as he explores Srinivas’ unique path through academia to entrepreneurship.

Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:

The importance of knowledge over wealth: “Cultural roots for me were to always seek knowledge even more than wealth.”
The best bosses/leaders/managers give their feedback as is. The real question for you is, do you have the mental resilience to process and live with it? - “ Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist there, literally told me all the ideas suck. He told it to my face exactly like this. Nobody usually tells it this way”
Ideas alone are not good enough in a startup. Doing is more critical than just having ideas: “The most important realization is that in a startup, when you have an initial group of people, the number one thing to do is just iterate and do something.”
The competition in the future will be between a search engine and an answer engine—“Google's already doing a good job. But what they are not good at is answering questions.”
What did the transformation from an academic to CEO teach him? “I mean, as an academic, I really thought that it's important to spend a lot of time thinking about the idea. And now I believe more in action produces information.”
Embrace the value and power of small experiments - “Most people don't have the discipline to try small-scale experiments. What actually works in practice is several small-scale experiments iteratively done.”
Where will the next breakthrough in AI come from? “I think the real breakthrough could potentially come from figuring out extremely long context.”

You can click the above link and watch the video.

Start Small-Scale Experiments With ‘Pretotyping’.

Most of us are enamoured and taken by Big, Hairy, Audacious goals, often termed BHAG. There is a reason for this, too. It excites each one of us, or if you are a leader, it positions you as a go-getter or visionary amongst your team members, and then there is a rush of adrenaline to get it going. However, the discipline and sheer effort required to achieve them every day can overwhelm us and the team. Soon, it becomes a mental burden, and we stop attempting to reach the goal we set for ourselves.

Also, if you have a big idea that you want to develop or work on, you may not know where or how to start. A lot of time is lost thinking or ideating about it. Resource constraints and the nature of risk stop you from taking the first step. Here’s where the power of small-scale experiments can help.

The challenge of small-scale experiments is their lack of ‘big company’ thinking. It’s boring, and you will often be ridiculed for thinking small. You will be told you need to be more ambitious and think big. But, in reality, you just don’t begin as the enormity of the task, the fear of failure, and the risk it entails stop you from taking any action.

However, small-scale experiments allow you to rapidly iterate, mitigate risk, adapt, and learn continuously. They also give you early signals whether your assumptions are valid and build confidence quickly as things begin to happen.

So, the question is, how do you begin to do small experiments? Is there a method to this way of doing things? You can start doing small experiments with a framework or concept called ‘Pretotyping’.

Alberto Savoia, Google’s first engineering director, calls this ‘Pretotyping.’ Pretotyping comes well before prototyping, and as Alberto writes, “Pretotyping helps you fail fast, recover fast and leaves you plenty of time, money, energy and enthusiasm to explore new tweaks or ideas.”

The most interesting thing about ‘pretotyping’ is that it can be applied to anything you want to do. For example:

Imagine your goal is to write a book. The timeline between putting your thoughts and content together to finally publishing it is pretty long. If you ‘pretotype’ it, you can quickly release small e-books, newsletters, blogs, gauge the response, tweak it continuously, and develop enough content before publishing the final book. There are so many interim short-term success milestones that you can set and achieve, which will keep you motivated to achieve this goal.
Say you want to do a startup and have a preliminary idea. However, you are not sure if it will work, you are unsure if you should quit your job, you are worried about the scale of risk, etc. Just ‘Pretotype’ - Draw it on a piece of paper, or quickly bunch and assemble together a set of pre-existing assets and show it to people, just take one part of the idea that you believe is awesome and execute it - this is how you can begin your small experiments and bring your idea to life.
Maybe you want to develop a new product or try a new process for a new customer segment or a market at work. Your company is not convinced, and they don’t give you a budget. How do you begin? ‘Pretotype’ it. Say, you are working for a CPG firm, relabel an existing product packaging locally and see if there are takers on the shelf! Create a ‘taste challenge’ and see the response and feedback. The hard truth is that this may not be enough, but you have started to test your hypothesis to take it to management rather than keeping it in your mind and thinking about it.

The challenge of small experiments is your ability to not get swayed by criticisms or constraints. You must break down the end goal into interim success milestones and not lose focus on the final end state. And also having the willingness to do boring things every day, as they may not seem significant in the short term to others. It will also require your deep conviction, which will all add up to something big and lead to a breakthrough over time.

Small-scale experiments with ‘pretotyping’, done consistently, can help you test and iterate your ideas or thoughts quickly.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

Understand and know how to socialize based on your personality.
Avoid context-switching frequently as it affects your thinking and flow state.
More than thinking about the idea, action produces valuable information.

How Can You ‘Sense Care’ In Products, Technology And Software?

Edition #170

ContraMinds Labs

May 14, 2025

Introduction

Welcome to The ContraMind Code.

The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.

The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.

A Full Spectrum Of AI-Enabled Experiences.

David Armano has developed a powerful concept called ‘IX’, which he explains as Intelligent Experiences. This is a shorthand way to demonstrate how AI will enhance digital experiences.

The definition of ‘Intelligent Experiences’ is quite evocative and can generate many ideas and innovations that can create imaginative experiences for products and services.

David defines ‘Intelligent Experiences’ as:

- Intelligent: Simulates or achieves the ability to “think.”
- Intuitive: Interacts with human counterparts in a natural, emotionally aware manner.
- Anticipatory: Learns from and can anticipate human collaborators' needs and emotional state.
- Autonomous: Takes actions, performs tasks, and makes decisions independently.

David writes ‘Somewhere between artificial and intelligent lies the new rules for how humans will interact with technology, overwritten by advancements in AI.’

This illustration by David makes the point beautifully:

Read the entire article here.

Banishing Burnout, With Arianna Huffington.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a month dedicated to raising awareness about mental health, well-being and reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness. This episode from Masters of Scale provides a great perspective on the reasons that lead to burnout and the simple and easy rituals that help you protect yourself from this problem.

Any profession or job, not just entrepreneurship, involves stress and a chance of burnout. The intensity and frequency of these may be different. Hence, finding ways to overcome them is vital for each of us.

Here are some thoughts for you to reflect on from the conversation between Reid Hoffman and Arianna Huffington in this episode:

“75% of health care costs and health care problems are stress-related and preventable.”
“Right now, we still talk about work-life balance, which I think is just not the right way to address this problem, because it's not like work and life are at opposing ends, that in fact, rise or fall in tandem. So we need to get away from this idea of the trade-off.”
“It's a marathon for myself, and part of what I need to do is I need to have some mental flexibility and agility, and I need to not be dragged down by the obsession.”
“The most important 20 minutes of my day are always the same. I set my timer for 20 minutes, then lie down for a nap. I would argue that it's mostly about societal norms. Daytime nappers are malingerers.” - Chris Yeh
“I can trace back all my hiring mistakes to being tired, which has the impact not just of impairing your cognitive abilities to make the right decisions, but also subconsciously of making you want to say yes.” - Arianna Huffington
“Your subjective assessment of how well you're doing with insufficient sleep is a miserable predictor of objectively how well you're doing.” - Dr. Matt Walker
“Focusing on wellness does not mean trading efficiency or ambition.”
“If you don't, context switch too much, you can generally run longer between rest periods as well.” - Reid Hoffman
“Small microscopic changes that can have a huge impact”

You can also listen to this episode on:

Spotify | Amazon Music

A Conversation With Jony Ive.

Iconic designer Sir Jony Ive is in conversation with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison for a fireside chat at the recent conference, Stripe Sessions.

This is a beautiful session with so many thoughtful ideas and discussions around the philosophy of work, design, society, culture, products, values, human concern, care and how all of these are intertwined in ways we never imagined.

Here are thoughts and ideas shared by Sir Jony Ive that can make you think deeply about why you must spend time reflecting on what you are doing daily:

“What we make stands as a testament to who we are.”
“What we make describes our values.”
“Design is something that genuinely attempts to move species.”
“People confuse innovation with being different or breaking stuff.”
“Our goal collectively has been to bring order to chaos.”
‘Design fails to recognise that the user on the other side is a person who is using a software and has an effect on that person.”
“Contributions of designers and other creatives you can’t measure easily with a number.”
“Who here wants to spend time in a conference room? I can’t think of a more soulless and depressing place.”
“You can easily sense care in a service, but it is far more complex to sense care in software. You might understand it more if I said, if you sense carelessness in it.”

You can click the above link and watch the video.

How Can You ‘Sense Care’ In Products, Technology And Software?

Sir Jony Ive’s conversation with Patrick Collison was inspiring, authentic, and humane.

Some of his answers about his ‘Philosophy Of Design’ will surely touch a ‘raw nerve’ if you are building products, which may include hardware or software, writing a piece of code or software or designing user interfaces for platforms, applications or software products. You may also be leading or running a business where customers interact with you daily across different channels and technologies.

Sir Jony Ive makes a compelling point when he says, ‘You can sense care in service, but it is far more complex to sense care in software.. design has an effect on that person’. This is an incredible thought and insight.

Ask yourself these questions to understand and appreciate the concept of ‘Sensing Care’ that Sir Jony Ive talks about:

How often have you felt this way when you saw a product and developed a ‘lust’ for it? Take a piece of paper and write down the products that created that feeling in you - ‘a deep desire to own’. It may be a handful only, but imagine the number of products that might have lost this opportunity, which we use daily. We live in a world where we have made even brands into commodities!
Did some products, the way they were designed, displayed, and packaged, make you feel they were premium or expensive? How did they evoke this ‘sense of feeling’, ‘ premium’, or ‘expensive’ without you seeing the price tag? Think about it for a minute.
Think about the number of times you felt ‘lost’ when you opened the user interface of a software application. You really had no clue what some of the buttons were, left you confused about how to navigate around the application, and it genuinely created a ‘sense of fear’ and ‘sense of doubt’ in yourself, and hence, initially refrained from using it yourself without help. Or in some cases, stopped using them after initial interest. The ones who conceptualised and developed them, did they even care about this effect on you as a person?
When was the last time any software or mobile app interface intuitively ‘read your mind’ to suggest alternative pathways or navigation to achieve the ‘usage need’ you had in mind? If you find a few, spend time asking what made them do it.
Think of the number of times you abandoned a cart or stopped using a sales or service channel, as it was too complicated and time-consuming. Did they even care how you would have felt let down by the experience?
What feelings does product usage or a warranty leaflet leave you with? Was it too overwhelming, or did you feel it was just done to protect the company and not help you use the product or make it easy to claim the warranty? The question is, did the company even care about this?
Think of the recent communication about changes in terms and conditions from banks, credit card companies or products that you have subscribed to and are paying monthly or annual subscription fees, etc. Could the experience of sharing this change in T&C have been designed better? How did you feel, or did you even care about this change? What do you think - The companies cared about you or about themselves?
How did you feel when you received a cryptic message from the company stating that your ‘loyalty points’ were lapsing? Did you think they even cared about it? For them, it was a ‘transaction’, for you, it was an ‘emotion’.
If you are debugging software issues, how easy is it to ‘sense’ how code has been designed and written with interest? Do you see a structured thinking pattern and a clear explanation of logic in how coding was done? When writing code, do you sense this care in how the coding is done for others to understand, decipher and debug?
Do you see care in the way a product is packaged and shipped? Do you find it hard to trash the packaging for the sheer sense of detail in its design? Think about ones that you didn’t throw away. Ask yourself - Why?

Only customer obsession, passion, ownership and pride can create a ‘sense of care’ in products, technology and software applications. The best of these products, software, or technologies have a ‘quiet but unspoken design language’ that shows in their every detail how much they care for customers or users. The rest really don’t just care.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

AI will enhance future digital experiences, and there will be new rules for how humans interact with technology.
Focusing on wellness does not mean trading efficiency or ambition.
What we make stands as a testament to who we are.

How to Balance Patience With Impatience.

Edition #169

ContraMinds Labs

May 07, 2025

Introduction

Welcome to The ContraMind Code.

The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.

The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.

Empathy Is A Non-Negotiable Leadership Skill.

Here’s How to Practice It.

All of us know empathy is an important skill. The most interesting aspect is that we overestimate ourselves in this skill. According to this article, “55% of CEOS think they lead with empathy at work, but only 28% of employees and 22% of HR share that view.”

We believe we are highly empathetic towards others, but we always feel that the other people we interact with every day - our peers, colleagues, boss, etc.- need to learn a lesson or two on how to be empathetic!

This article from Harvard Business Review has some interesting tips on how we can be better at being empathic:

Developing an ‘empathy protocol’ is a powerful idea and concept: We recently encountered this in an IT Services organization, where we found that many associates who came to present their work for the meeting expressed ‘gratitude’ first before they even started presenting their work. The most interesting one was that this was done by most of the people with whom we interacted, which meant this was a protocol they had imbibed for themselves.
Be Other-Focused: Avoid anchoring conversations with others using your own experience. The article suggests some interesting methods for doing this - be a container, listener, and questioner.
Balance individual and group needs - The following sentence has so much more meaning when you read it as to how best to understand the idea of balancing both - ‘Perspective-taking is about gathering information to understand what is true for someone without feeling their feelings.’
Facilitate support rather than taking over - Don’t jump in and try to solve the problem. Find what support is needed for the individual and make it available or accessible. That can make a big difference.
Model boundary settings - When leaders are excessively empathetic, it can lead to a syndrome called empathic distress - “the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.” Know your limits and protect your energy. Model healthy behaviours like work-life balance, self-care, taking breaks, vacations, digital detoxes, emotion regulation and stress management.
Update your language to connect. Try to validate and explore when people express their feelings. It is essential to be open and interested in discovering what someone’s truth looks and sounds like. Avoid using dismissive phrases and use well-intentioned phrases.

You can read the entire article here.

Can You Recession-Proof Your Job?

Economic cycles have an upward and downward impact on demand for goods or services. To top it all, disruptions happen where new competitive forces emerge, pushing businesses into making hard decisions around people, pulling back investments, etc. So, can you really recession-proof your job? What does it take to do it? Some of the skills mentioned make it vital for you to build, irrespective of the economic headwinds.

This podcast, Per My Last Email, discusses this topic threadbare on what you can do that is under your locus of control. Here are some key takeaways.

“Demonstrate how your job ties directly to revenue and communicate that frequently.”
If you work in a cost centre function, convert your qualitative work into a quantitative one.
During hard times, people with T-Skills tend to get valued and retained. What do people with T-based skills have? ‘Have better communication skills, demonstrate a lot of flexibility, have developed hard and soft skills, broadly know what's happening at the company because of that horizontal expertise, have developed hard and soft skills, which make them quite versatile.’
The power of weak ties is an interesting concept that is discussed here. Build, build and build your network.
An HBR research study has identified job functions that tend to be recession-proof as those that have:
- Have close prioximity ot revenue
- Measurable ROI
- Operational necessity
- Regulatory compliance
Upskill yourself and stay abreast of new tools and technologies. MIT did interesting research on this, looking at the impact of automation on manufacturing. The people who held the job were the people who asked themselves this question: “How do I understand what the robot can do and can't do, and how do I complement what it can do?”

You can listen to the entire podcast on:

Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music

Three Essential Skills For Today’s World.

Robert Greene is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, and most recently, The Daily Laws.

In this video, Robert discusses the Three Essential Skills that are vital irrespective of the disruptions that technology and business models can create. These are foundational skills that stand like a rock, regardless of the changes happening around you.

Learn to cooperate with people
Love of Learning
Need for Patience

Just click on the above link and watch this video.

How to Balance Patience With Impatience.

Robert Greene’s three essential skills offer many perspectives on why they are vital for an individual’s success.

Let’s look at patience, for instance. We live in a fast-paced world, and we get accustomed to getting things at the click of a button and crave for instant gratification. However, professional expertise and success take their own time. You need to work on your skills diligently over many years to be recognised as an expert and successful. In an interesting article, Aditya Gaur writes that patience is a superpower for personal growth.

We will have to endure many ups and downs in a career spanning many decades. It happens to even the best of people. Therefore, having the resilience to stay focused is an essential skill we must develop in ourselves. Also, at the workplace or if you are pursuing a professional career as an individual consultant, lawyer, doctor, architect, etc., you will have to deal with people or situations with different benchmarks of work ethic, professional excellence and success.

Many people don’t set their own compass, blueprint and roadmap for the above. A company’s appraisal serves as their personal appraisal of professional growth and success. But is that good enough? Not at all.

When you build a personal professional compass or blueprint for yourself, which you can keep refining as you go along in life, it serves as an anchor for dealing with events in your life with a lot of patience. Take, for example, you work under a boss who does not have a very high benchmark for excellence at work. The first question to ask yourself is, ‘How do I know if this is a high or a low benchmark, if you don’t have one?’ The company you work for may be amongst the best in your industry, but the boss may not be or vice versa. Then, patiently working your way around it for a few years becomes important, without diluting your benchmarks. This will become vital to your professional growth and success.

You have to learn the art of being ‘Patiently Impatient’ - which means being patient on the outside but being impatient on the inside with respect to sharpening your tool kit for excellence, irrespective of external benchmarks, and recognition. You develop the patience to handle external contradictions and build the resilience inside you, so as not to be influenced by them.

The next important aspect of patience is that you develop a ‘true reality’ of your inventory of skills. You seek to keep improving on the ones you are good at and learning new ones. Patience also sets a different ‘time clock’ in your head because you develop a ‘Long-term View’ of what it takes to achieve true expertise, success and achievement. Patience helps to observe and view things more deeply than look at them from the periphery.

For example, when you build a strong patience DNA, you will realise that any company’s reward and recognition are only relative to the goals and quality of people they have with them. Your personal growth blueprint is independent of those rewards and recognition, and these will come your way in your journey, but you are not swayed by them in any way. It’s like a station or a stop that comes during a journey to a destination. You must learn to cherish those moments, but they should not stop you from moving to the next milestone in your journey - milestones don’t just mean promotions, designations, but also learning new skills and capabilities to build a new version of yourself every few years. That’s the impatience you will need to build within yourself.

What patience leads you to develop is finding a way of working with people with different benchmarks. Some are intense, where you will need to fuel their ambition further, some you may need to inspire, with some you need to up your own skills and benchmarks by not becoming insecure, with a few others you have to learn to let them be, etc. Hence, patience helps you manage people better.

Finally, patience is a great elixir for learning. Patience serves as a powerful engine for learning all the time. It helps you develop a keen awareness of what is needed to take your act to the next level. Let’s take an example - If you are not recognised at the workplace, patience helps you assess what is right or wrong with you. You don’t make knee-jerk career jumps. Because you are recognised every year, it must not stop you from pursuing your learning and personal growth agenda. That’s your impatience at play. The reason is that you see a destination or a journey that is not seen by others.

Therefore, having patience alone is not enough. Having a high degree of impatience within you is vital, too. Having both of them in the right balance is key to personal growth and success.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

Leaders overestimate their empathy scores, while people underestimate their leaders’ empathy scores. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Know and find ways to improve your T-skills.
Patience, cooperating with people, and learning are three essential skills for personal growth and success.

How To Make Automation More Creative?

Edition #168

ContraMinds Labs

Apr 30, 2025

Introduction

Welcome to The ContraMind Code.

The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.

The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.

The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You share your valuable thoughts and comments, and start a conversation here.

The Checklist Trap: How We Turned Leadership Into A Lifestyle Product.

Here’s a thoughtful and provocative article about leadership in Founding Fuel by Kavi Arasu. He raises some pertinent questions about how, more recently, leadership has sometimes been packaged as if there is some kind of quick 2-minute formula or 7 easy steps to becoming one. He deep-dives into the probable root causes and the reasons it has led to where it is in this state today.

Here are some powerful thought starters about leadership for you to think about from this article:

‘Many of the most powerful shifts in leadership show up quietly—in the quality of questions asked, in a pause before reacting, in how a leader makes space for someone else.’
‘Leadership development has a long arc. It isn’t linear. It moves two steps forward, one back. Sometimes, the insight comes long after the conversation is over. Sometimes, the change is invisible—but profound.’
‘Real leadership development resists that clock. It shows up in how people deal with ambiguity, how they step into new roles, how they recover from failure.’
‘The best leaders do this beautifully—without needing any tech tools. They start with people, not platforms. They walk the floor, tune into conversations, and observe carefully. They notice who’s thriving and who’s stuck—not just based on reports, but on real, everyday interactions.’
‘Culture isn’t what’s written on the walls, but what unfolds in conversations when status is set aside and curiosity is genuine.’
‘The best leaders don’t wait for ideal conditions. They get to work—with what they have, where they are.’
‘Redesigning work means giving people room to think, space to speak, and permission to stretch. It means creating feedback loops. It means asking better questions.’

Read the entire article here.

Right Kind Of Wrong: A Conversation With Amy Edmondson.

Amy Edmondson is a Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. She has also written widely acclaimed books, including Right Kind of Wrong and The Fearless Organization.

She starts her conversation with her early doctoral research work, which had two interesting questions that were being studied and investigated, then :

Do differences in teamwork lead to differences in error rates?
Do better teams make fewer errors?

The contrary findings made her curious to study this further, leading to the concept of ‘psychological safety’, which is defined as ‘belief that you can candidly speak up about work-related content, ideas, dissenting views, questions and even about errors!’

‘Learning happens when you are able to take risks even when you are not 100% sure or even 50% sure.’
Psychological safety does not mean any quality is acceptable, but you are setting an environment of high standards, which means you are setting up a platform to aspire for excellence.
Being ready to accept missteps is ok. When you have missteps, stop, challenge and choose.
Failures can be categorized as basic failures, complex failures and intelligent failures. ‘Failing well or even living well is about, yes, preventing the basic failures, averting and mitigating the complex failures, and yes, welcoming and maybe even upping the frequency of intelligent failures.’
The most successful among us have not failed less often than the rest of us.

You can also listen to this episode on:

Spotify | Libsyn

How AI Could Change The Advertising Business | Quantum Marketing.

Stephan Pretorius, WPP's Chief Technology Officer, is in conversation with Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, about how AI is being used at WPP to transform the marketing industry.

Here are some thought-provoking quotes that Stephan makes during the conversation about how AI can impact the advertising industry and why it is imperative for marketers and agencies to adapt to this change:

“Every time you bring technology to knowledge work that automates mundane tasks, it pushes people to become more intelligent.”
“People are not meant to be assembly workers.”
“I don’t believe AI destroys jobs, but I think AI shifts tasks.”
“If you are a marketer, start doing things right now. Start learning by doing.”
“AI is a very interesting technology that is obscure and may be a little intimidating at first, but as you start working, it changes the way you think.”
“You don’t become an AI-driven company by having an AI department.”

You can click the above link and watch the entire video.

How To Make Automation More Creative?

One of the quotes from Stephan’s conversation opened up a lot of ideas and thoughts, which was the one where he mentions, ‘People are not meant to be assembly workers.’ That statement has a fundamental and raw truth because industrial-era production thinking and processes have percolated into knowledge work. That’s why you see indifference, attrition, lack of involvement and excitement in how people work in many industries. The hard truth is that most companies and processes, as they scale, treat people as assembly workers. We need an ‘Unfactory Thinking’ movement in every industry, company and profession. AI may be driving this transformation faster and quicker than expected.

The most important question to answer is, ‘How can you make boring production systems, thinking, and processes more creative?’ Therefore, we must ask ourselves, ‘ Can we learn how to do this from companies, countries, work cultures, and industries that practice this approach?'

The Toyota Production System(TPS)

One thing that can amaze and help you learn about this is how Toyota has mastered its production systems by ‘adding creativity to a relatively mundane process like manufacturing.’

When you look at TPS's vision, it says ‘making work easier for workers.’ That’s a phenomenal vision in a world where we often hear robots replacing assembly lines. There are two pillars in this philosophy:

The first pillar is jidoka, which can be loosely translated as "automation with a human touch"
The second pillar is Just-in-Time, based on the concept of synchronizing production processes

While Just-In-Time manufacturing has received considerable attention, Jidoka can help us teach many things about how not to treat people like assembly workers. Its principles have a potential direct application and relevance to industries, companies, and people who feel threatened by AI and automation.

‘Jidoka applies ‘human wisdom’ to automation. Human wisdom is the ability to detect the abnormality and stop automatically. Automation does not mean ‘mindless’ automation.
‘To do this, rather than starting from machines, you must first try doing it thoroughly by hand… It doesn't matter how much machines, robots, or IT excel, they can't evolve any further on their own.’
‘Craftsmanship is achieved by discovering the basic principles of manufacturing through manual work and then applying them on the production line to steadily implement kaizen.’
‘Human wisdom and ingenuity are indispensable to delivering ever-better cars to customers.’

What can be learnt from Jidoka?

As much as we need AI, we need to embed human ingenuity in the automation process of knowledge work.
Blindly applying AI models without a deeper understanding of how they work is a recipe for disaster.
You must follow the ‘Start doing by hand first’ principle. Whether you are an accountant, lawyer, or creative designer, your craft is as important, if not more, in the age of AI. Work towards continuously mastering your craft. This will become true and essential for the AI-first generation of the future.
Then, incrementally replace the mundane tasks that take up a lot of your time, which are a hindrance to investing time in mastering your craft. This is where AI models and systems can help you automate and save time for more ‘problem-solving’, ‘creative’ and ‘intuitive thinking’ time.
Ask yourself one question: What is the ratio of ‘learn or build or develop time’ versus ‘Follow-up or Ops time’ in your day? See how this ratio can be improved every day. That’s Kaizen at work for you.

Unassemble your thinking and ideas. However, automate and assemble your mundane and repetitive tasks.

Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:

The best leaders don’t wait for ideal conditions.
Avoid making people into assembly workers.
Your craft is as important, if not more, in the age of AI.

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