Credit Or Blame - Great Leaders Know How To Manage The Flow.
Edition #179
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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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.
McKinsey Doesn't Understand AI
An avid reader of ours, Chirag, referred to this article in his blog, and it is truly valuable, especially as every company boardroom and management team is going into overdrive about AI investments. Most of them are doing it out of fear that they will be left behind without thinking of the real impact it will have on their business. This is true of corporations when there is a hype, they get hyper!
This article is written by Dave Friedman, and here are some key thoughts that he has shared in the article for you to think about:
‘For the past 18 months, enterprises have been duct-taping chatbots to workflows and calling it digital transformation. The results speak for themselves: 80% adoption, 0% impact on EBITDA.’
‘McKinsey correctly identifies the next phase: agents, not assistants. These are not UX accessories, but workflow primitives: systems that perceive, decide, and act with partial autonomy.’
‘The report also offers a useful architectural motif: the “agentic mesh”. Think of it as an enterprise nervous system - memory modules, tool interfaces, security layers, and guardrails all stitched into a layer that lives between the LLM and the application surface. If you’re serious about deploying agents at scale, this mesh becomes your control plane and your blast radius.’
‘Ask anyone who’s run a serious agent pilot, and you’ll hear the same refrain: dirty systems, unknown edge cases, costly tool-chaining, and reliability cliffs.’
‘Multi-step reasoning increases error rates nonlinearly.’
‘Most of today’s hyperscale data centers are GPU-optimized sweatboxes. Post-GPU substrates are coming, and they may be incompatible with today’s infra.’
‘The moat is your data, your integration layer, and your control over the mesh.’
‘McKinsey’s prescriptions, including “transformation squads,” “prompt engineering guilds,” and “governance boards,” sound great in a workshop. But they underestimate the sheer gravitational pull of organizational inertia.’
Read the entire article here.
Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR.
In this podcast, Patrick O’Shaughnessy chats with Caryn Seidman, Chairman and CEO of CLEAR. What’s different about this conversation is the perspective you can get about how an investor-turned-founder looks at a business differently. It also showcases how she has carried forward her passion and love for the business over the last 15 years, despite personal challenges and adversity. It also brings out the relentless focus, energy, and authenticity in her way of working and the acceptance of her shortcomings, the unwavering commitment and a deep sense of responsibility she has for her colleagues and business.
Here are some powerful statements that she has shared, which can act as an inspiration in the way you work and think:
“Unconventional leaders delight consumers, innovate, do really smart acquisitions and capital allocation.”
What is the definition of a platform? “The old Bill Gates line definition of platform was this idea that more economic value was created on top of the platform than was captured by it.”
“I'm a voracious reader. I think my team knows I send them articles now from somewhere between 3 a.m. to midnight. I am enormously curious.”
“One of my sayings is that every week is 2% of a year. So when someone's like, let's meet on that in three weeks, I'm like, we're going to wait 6% of the year to have that conversation.”
“Many investors are trying to analyze things when ultimately the creation of net new value can't be analyzed ahead of time other than in very broad strokes.”
“I don't think there's a cookie-cutter way to be a leader, but I think it's authenticity and humility and big thinking and discipline and the 5 a.m. thing.”
“Nothing gets me more energized than someone who cares and loves the thing they're building so deeply.”
You can also listen to this episode on:
Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music
Former Pepsi CEO: The Hidden Cost Of Rising To The Top | Indra Nooyi
This is a conversation on the Knowledge Project Podcast between Shane Parrish and Indra Nooyi, former PepsiCo CEO. This conversation is laced with practical insights on purpose, value systems, work ethic, and balancing career and family in an intense but engaging manner.
What can you learn from this conversation? Here are some of the things to think about from this conversation:
Find a job that can give you the work experience of 10-15 years in just a few years - ‘There's so much I had to learn in my six and a half years at BCG, I think I grew 10 or 15 years.’
‘Zoom in before you Zoom out - I always went deep into what the business was, and the company.. to understand the things from the ground level, and zoom out and say what is missing here.’
‘Money is not made in the hundreds of millions of dollars, can you take a penny out.. It’s the little micro-penny that adds up to the whole business.’
People don't like to deal with issues directly, they like to beat around the bush and then leave, saying I think I gave the person the message.’
‘You may be the president of PepsiCo or whatever, but you come home, you're a wife, a mother and a daughter, nobody can take your place, so leave that crown in the garage.’
What is strategy? - ‘Crafting a path forward for an entity that allows it to execute on that path forward with superior results.’
“People have got to know what you're really passionate about, when you're really passionate about something, don't sit here going, ‘God, I don't want to send them back three times. It's okay to send them back three times, get it to a point where you're really comfortable, this is going to be good for the company, show your passion, push people back.’
Remember, as a leader, ‘Blame should flow upwards and credit should flow downwards.’
You can click on the above link and watch the video.
Credit Or Blame - Great Leaders Know How To Manage The Flow.
Indra Nooyi’s description of a great leader’s behaviour, when it comes to credit and blame, is just phenomenal and extremely powerful. It cannot be articulated better and more succinctly.
It is essential to clarify that a leader here does not necessarily mean only the senior leadership team of a company, it can also refer to a team leader, manager, or even the youngest person in the team leading a specific job or responsibility.
When you are leading an initiative, there are bound to be decisions taken without full information, half-baked information, sometimes purely by instinct or gut feel or by data that throws up some hypotheses and findings which you use to take calculated decisions. These decisions have every chance to have outcomes or results that can go both ways - right or wrong.
Great leadership is not just having the ability and resilience to face those outcomes and handle them. It's more to do with how you handle the situation and the people you work with when these outcomes occur. Managing this flow separates the great leaders from the average. If your decision goes wrong, can you take the blame and protect the people who worked with you, especially the ones who did all the work? It’s about shielding them from brickbats, criticisms, not finding scapegoats amongst them and entirely shouldering the blame yourself. However, when there is success, do you have the ability to take a backseat and transfer the flow of credit to the team? Abdul Kalam talks about this ‘flow of blame and credit’ in this video about his leader, Prof. Satish Dhawan.
Honestly, this is easier said than done. It takes moral courage and deep conviction to do this. The reason is that it has implications on your career growth, and a failure tag that gets stuck for life with the individual. When you work for a leader, keenly observe how he or she handles meetings and outcomes. If a project or initiative gets done on time and is successful, or delayed or if there are errors in execution, closely observe how the individual handles the flow of this discussion. Do they take the blame themselves, in case there is a problem or if it is a success, do they put the team in front that made it happen, rather than themselves? These are defining moments in great leadership. Take a moment and step back to think how you would have handled the situation and what your instinctive response would be to the situation in question. By comparing and benchmarking behaviours like these vis-à-vis yours, you grow as a leader over time. And when such a moment comes in your life, you ‘control the flow’ and act by doing what is right for the team, or the company, rather than what is right for you. This does not happen overnight, but it comes out of sheer practice, building grit and developing incredible self-awareness about how you take ownership, accountability that will ultimately lead you to the way you think, behave, speak and act.
Anybody can be made or promoted to become a leader, but how they ‘Control the Flow’ in tough situations is a true test of great leadership. The best leaders demand incredible outcomes, set really high benchmarks for results and push people hard. However, when the act is done or complete, they know how to respond maturely to outcomes irrespective of the results, keeping people’s contribution and the effort they put in at the core. It is important not to confuse a tough ‘In-the-moment work ethic’ as a difficult leader to work for, but it is vital to observe keenly the ‘post-work result ethic’ in a leader.
Great leaders are deeply aware of the way the blame or credit must flow.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
In any initiative or technology adoption, never underestimate the sheer gravitational pull of organisational inertia.
Understanding the critical difference between micro-managing and micro-understanding is vital for a leader and also for the people who lead them.
Blame should flow upwards, and credit should flow downwards.
Thank you for the shout out! Great work, as always!