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.
To Change Company Culture, Focus on Systems—Not Communication.
Most companies want to change their culture, and they embark on a massive transformation program. However, recent research indicates that 72% of them, or about three-fourths, failed to move the needle.
This article from Harvard Business Review highlights the challenges and why it does not work. There are some brilliant insights from this research, which may sound more like common sense, but most companies miss them.
Here are some lovely insights from the article:
Culture change cannot be treated as a mere communication strategy; it requires more than posters, town halls, and events.
It is crucial for leaders to ‘demonstrate’ the culture change. As they say, you have to live the culture you espouse. You cannot expect others to behave according to the values that are laid out, but people don’t see a visible change in the way leaders act in accordance with these new values.
Linking intent to action and paying a cost for it, if it is not done or demonstrated, is vital. Ask yourself one question: “ What do I lose if I don’t do it?”
Behaving according to the culture and values when it matters is essential.
Culture shift depends on three levers - Power, Risk and Modeling.
You can read the entire article here.
Why 50 Is The Half-Time Of Your Professional Career.
In this thought-provoking conversation, Neeraj Sagar, founder and CEO of Wisdom Circle and Stanford Centre on Longevity Global Ambassador, challenges everything we think we know about career planning and retirement in the age of longevity.
Here are some key highlights from the conversation:
India has one of the world's youngest median ages, yet 150 million people are over 60 (that'll be 300 million by 2050). We're unprepared for what people will actually do with extended lifespans.
With lifespans extending and retirement ages shifting, your 50s mark the midpoint, not the wind-down, of your professional journey.
Successful post-50 professionals must structure their weeks around multiple pillars: 2 days monetizing expertise, 1 day teaching, 1 day social impact, and 3 days for learning, family, and personal growth.
While everyone chases general management roles, the real value lies in deep specialization. Companies desperately seek true experts.
Adaptability requires dual curiosity - understanding yourself and staying current with the changing world. The ability to continuously learn, unlearn, and relearn becomes your career insurance policy.
You can listen to the entire episode on:
Spotify | Amazon Music | Contraminds.com
2-hour School Days, AI tutors, And An Education Revolution | Joe Liemandt Interview.
In this episode of Invest Like The Best, Joe Liemandt, founder of Trilogy and principal of Alpha School, shares a revolutionary approach to education that enables kids to learn 10 times faster in just two hours a day. He is in conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who is the CEO of Positive Sum.
Joe makes a highly provocative statement in this conversation: “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because GenAI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you.”
The discussion touches on various significant challenges facing education:
What makes a great school? Why do most kids hate school?
The industrialised model of education is broken. It’s a 200-year-old model that no longer works.
Children need to excel academically and develop essential life skills. But no school focuses on this.
Schools lack a method of motivating kids to learn, and there are no personalised lessons that make education and learning fun because each kid is different.
You can click on the above link and watch this video.
True Learning Happens When You Go Forward And Backwards.
The Alpa school model threw up some interesting perspectives about the fundamentals of Learning Science. One of the most profound points made by Joe Liemandt is that when you move up from one grade to a higher one in school, you don’t need to have had a good grasp of the fundamentals. However, it begins to show up and affect performance in higher grades when the basic concepts are not well understood. The willingness to go back and learn them a couple of grades down requires a different mental make-up and acceptance. Those who possess this ability can become real experts and excel in their fields.
Reflecting on our experiences with people and workplaces, we often lack the ability and mental attitude to start anew. When you look at career growth, it is always assumed you have to move up every couple of years. There may be gaps in your skills and abilities, yet you may have moved up in your company. Just because you have become a senior leader, it does not mean those gaps in skills and capabilities will not matter. It is a harsh truth that it will matter more and more, and it will be evident in your handling of situations, knowledge, decisions, and people management, among other things. However, many of us find it challenging to revisit and relearn them bottom up. The reason is more about how people around us perceive us, the inability to handle the perception of not knowing something, and the mental acceptance of wanting to go back and learn the basics, etc.
Joe gave some great analogies from sports. One thought that bubbled up, which we can learn from, is that great champions in sports do this, moving forward and backwards very easily. Their ability to mentally accept this is something leaders can learn from. For example, in tennis, these champions may have won many grand slams, but in every tournament, they again begin from Round 1. They may be seeded No.1, however, they still have to go through Round 1. Through some research, we found that even a great tennis legend like Roger Federer has lost four times in his career in the first round. When we looked at Grand Slam champions over the last 50 years, we found the chances of losing in the first round were about 4%! A cross-check of studies on seed upsets in Grand Slams (a broader group than “champions”) shows upset rates of around 21–25% across all rounds. Therefore, these champions have the ability to return to basics, learn from these upsets, and improve the next time. Another way to look at it is that, because they have to start all over from Round 1 again in every tournament, they strive to get their basics right. And they work on them all the time.
Applying the same principle to leaders or individuals striving for growth in their careers, going back to Round 1 should not be viewed as a setback in their careers. In fact, it allows them to revisit some of the gaps they have missed in perfecting or improving, and also gives them a chance to hone their skills further and achieve better results. It is also vital for each one of us to remember that roles, positions, and designations are only placeholders. Is there a systematic approach to do this?
Some organisations encourage ‘reverse mentoring’, which is a good way to legitimise this approach and make it comfortable for senior leaders to opt for reverse mentoring. If you are a leader or a senior professional with considerable work experience, it may be worthwhile to opt for ‘reverse mentoring,’ as it inverts the traditional hierarchical knowledge transfer. Junior employees mentor senior executives on emerging trends, technology, and cultural shifts. It’s another way of going backwards to move forward in your career. The learnings can be immense, making you mentally agile and forcing you to go back to basics. It also allows you to gain a deeper understanding of newer concepts, refresh some old concepts that you may have developed blind spots for, and prepare you to be a better senior leader in the years to come.
Real learning happens when you break traditional and accepted models of hierarchy.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Don’t treat culture change like a campaign.
Your professional journey in the future will extend beyond your 50s and 60s. Preparing for it early is vital.
Education and learning need a rejig, and we must be willing to adopt newer ways to learn.