Notes on the Book The Confidence Code

For both men and women, confidence helps determine success. Competence alone isn't always enough.

Fear of failure can hold women back from taking action and trying something new. To gain mastery and build confidence, you have to step out of your comfort zone and act.

Your quest for perfection can become a major obstacle to fully realizing your potential.

Fight the urge to stay invisible. Ask for what you want. You'll never know what difference you can make unless you voice your opinion.

Though there are confidence-determining chemicals in our body that affect our behavior, there is no specific confidence gene. Men and women are equally likely to grow up confident or competent.

Rewire your brain for greater confidence by reframing negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

Women can build confidence by daring to use their differences to their advantage.

While women typically tend to undervalue their competence, men overestimate theirs, showing what the authors call 'honest over-confidence'.

Confidence grows from practicing skills but since women don't want to risk being wrong, they don't participate. This feeds a vicious cycle of under-confidence.

While girls rock academics, boys outperform them in the real world. The reason is often the need for perfection in women.

(Emeritus insights book summary)

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Notes on Management 010222

 By VR Ferose

Innovations happen when different kinds of people come together and do fundamentally different things. We can get inspired by social entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of innovation and they do so under extreme conditions for a cause.

Surround yourself with people who are better than you in at least one aspect, create a team, not a coterie. A misfit in a certain role could be a perfect fit in a different role.

The best innovations always happen under constraints of resources, time, and money. Challenge people to find radically different solutions and speed up processes.

Sometimes the best decision you can make is to not make one, wait to get more clarity before deciding. Good leaders can look at data and analyze it in novel ways. The role of great advisors is vital.

Look at failure as feedback. If you want to improve, you will have to do things differently and also do different things. The ability to take risks without excessive worry about failures is important. Start-ups don’t always do well but people who do start-ups always do well.

The best learnings come from looking at completely different and unconventional sources. So keep challenging the traditional way of viewing things. The most innovative companies are going to be those which have people who are good at different things.

The future workplace will have more managers on contract, and employees will be able to decide what they work on and who they work for. People will play a key role in running organizations, so it would be a more top-down structure.

Notes on Management 130122

Maniacal focus on the customer ensures higher returns and an increase in business. This client-centricity can be seemingly self-harming but is a win-win in the end.

Activities lead to outcomes and building an efficient process is the measure of success of any organization. Optimize the process to produce desirable results.

Focus on developing skills and roles, continuously do new things to learn more. Pick inefficiencies in the system and work to solve them. Be mindful and focus on building deep relationships outside of work. Be aware of failures in the start-up journey.

Young leaders need to weigh in opinions gathered from different sources before reaching a decision. Build your skills without fearing the outcome to gain confidence.

Autonomous driving, connected vehicles, electric vehicles, and shared mobility or ACES are set to disrupt the automobile market. The nature of the consumer will change along with the car.

Adapt to the changing needs of customers. Nature of consumption changing with customers demanding higher quality at a better price. Look for digital solutions to problems without compromising on productivity, cost, quality, delivery, safety, and morale.

Total Quality Management is about improving trust levels with teams. Four steps to change management: 1. Role modelling, 2. Communication, 3. Formal systems to drive change, and 4. Developing talent for future change.

Be nimble in decision-making and quick. A layered structure should be avoided when growing. Keep a start-up approach.

Always keep in mind that a good team player is a necessary criterion for a new member to fulfil. Thus, criteria for selecting team members include collaborative attitude, optimism, and decision-making.

Career women need to: 1. Accept that they will feel guilty, 2. Adapt by asking for help from support system, 3. Achieve, grab opportunities, and take credit for success. (Apurva Purohit)

Organizational culture and value systems get eroded every time exceptions are made.

Taking responsibility for everything around your role defines personal accountability. It is a leadership trait and can be learned by reflecting on behaviors.

Plan for failure just as you plan for success. Have a Plan B ready.

Build an organizational culture with negotiables and non-negotiables. Processes and policies build fairness.

Women leaders tend to be calmer and more confident in a crisis than their male counterparts. They are consensus builders, less concerned about control, collaborate more often, and being in the minority makes them less turf conscious. Build an inclusive system that nurtures the excluded.
The main reason why women are not often seen in leadership roles is that they fail to speak up or negotiate hard enough. Men leaders have to be encouraged to mentor women as successors. Measures to incentivize return to work as they start families are key.
The main disadvantages of doing business in India include access to capital and dependency on imports. Affordable innovation is the result of enablers such as a good talent pool and resources at globally competitive costs, and immense market opportunity within the country.
Governance sets culture and integrity in business translates into sustainable prosperity. Both are non-negotiable.
(Kiran M Shaw)