TKS Session 12: The Mind of a CEO + Velocity Session 3

When I had just gotten accepted into TKS and I was looking through the schedule for the year, this session really stood out to me and I’ve been looking forward to it since we started! I’ve always wanted to be the CEO of my own company and know about the business side of things, so I was really excited for what this session had in store.

For velocity, we talked about the person of the week, Epictetus. He was a slave and philosopher who fully developed the philosophy of Stoicism. We learned about his beliefs and what a Stoic person practices and exercises in their daily life. One thing that stood out to me from his learnings is how there is one practice that acts as the “foundation” for all the other Stoic values or practices. That “foundational” practice is: identifying what is and isn’t in your control. If something is in your control, act upon it. If it isn’t in your control, ignore it because you can’t change it.

As humans, we can stay hung up on the negative outcomes we face, and most of the time all we do is sulk, and we can’t actually make a difference or fix it. What’s the point of staying hung up on something when you can’t do anything to change it? Of course, it’s ok to have feelings and feel sad or disappointed with a negative outcome, but don’t feel the need to obsess and regret when there is nothing you can do to alter it. His other exercises like “setting goals that you actually have control over”, “remembering change is inevitable”, “controlling your impressions and reactions”, and others can only be done if we are able to identify what is and isn’t within our control. I do find myself getting hung up on the things I can’t change, and practicing this will help me improve my outlook and mood for different situations.

The mindset of the week was a recap of the done>perfect mindset, which we had looked at previously in other sessions. This mindset was very important to keep revisiting because it can be a deciding factor on how much you will actually get done, how much progress you will be able to make in your work, and in the things you are passionate about. We are always trying to maximize our productivity, but if we don’t develop this mindset, the amount of things we actually end up getting done in a period of time will be limited because we have an obsession with making everything perfect and making it the best final product it can be. When we start to embrace that it’s better to have something done correctly rather than perfectly, it’ll be easier to get more work done and manage time, along with identifying what tasks need more time and energy from you, and which tasks you can always go back to when you want to make it better. The important thing you need to realize about the done>perfect mindset is that it’s not a one-and-done thing, you can always go back to something you’re working on and fix it later. The idea with this mindset is to finish a project (like an article), make sure it’s correct, and get it out there into the world so people can start seeing it and so you can start opening yourself up for opportunities.

The director’s requirements included a podcast on fear, an article on being intentional, and a video about uncertainty. All of these tie into the mindset and person of the week. Out of all these, the thing that stood out most to me was the podcast on fear, specifically how fear stops people from doing cool things and living out their dreams, and how it can cause regret. The idea was that fear restricts us and holds us back, and it feeds off of hesitation and being ignored. When we face fear, then we see that there isn’t much to be scared of. When you are doing something that scares you, you’ve overcome the barrier, fear, that was stopping you from doing it. When in the action of doing something that brought you fear, that feeling is eliminated. It might be replaced with something like nervousness, but when you’re doing it, you can’t be stopped by fear.

For the actual session today, we were told we were going to be using our critical thinking skills. So, my intention was to put my critical thinking skills to the test in this session so I could leave knowing what I needed to work on.

To start, we did a recap of the hackathon that happened last weekend. Our director used to work in venture capital, and his skills are in pitches and presentations. So, using his background in venture capital, he gave us what he likes to call:

The Azar Formula:

Good Pitch = Strong Solution + Ability to Sell It (why + duh)

The components of this formula are:

1. Strong Solution

   1. Need to have a technically sound solution that solves an actual problem

   2. Need to identify the core of the tech involved, how it works, and how it will solve the problem when pitching it

2. Ability to Sell It (why + duh)

   1. Make the audience realize, using data, why this thing is so important to have (why)

   2. Present it so it all makes sense (duh)

   3. Need to be persuasive and effectively communicate your solution so it’s clear to the audience

   4. Have impactful supporting slides

After going into the required components for an effective pitch, we got into the actual session focus. We started by looking at MECE, the framework business consultants use when analyzing a client’s problems they have by organizing the data they’ve collected into categories with specific rules.

MECE stands for:

Mutually

Exclusive

Collectively

Exhaustive

This ensures that all the available data is covered but none of it overlaps. It makes the data easier to locate and better organized when looking for solutions to problems.

You can use the MECE framework to create a “tree” visual to organize your data in front of you. Here is an example of a data tree using the MECE framework:

For most of the session, we were given a couple business cases to review using the MECE framework.

The first case we reviewed was a fictional one for a taxi company called LA Taxi. The prompt was:

Imagine you are a New York City taxi driver. You have just dropped off a passenger at Laguardia, 12 miles from downtown. You are now faced with a choice of returning downtown with an empty cab or waiting in a two-hour line to pick up a passenger at the airport. If your goal is to make the most money in 2.5 hours, what do you do?

From this prompt, we were able to ask more questions to collect data, organize it, and then draw a conclusion for the best decision.

In order to determine the best decision, we needed to make sure we collected all of this information:

• Conditions in downtown

  • Distance to get a fare

  • Time to get a fare

  • Average fare distance

• Revenue

  • Fares

  • Tips

• Cost

  • Gas

  • Tolls

  • Operating costs

For this first business case, our group didn’t collect all the information we needed, so we came up with a misguided answer. The correct answer was to stay at the airport because you would make more money, $7 profit, rather than going downtown because the time to get a fare and the fare distances would add up to give you a profit of only $4.

We then looked at a real business case for a company called Nabisco. The prompt was:

The salted food division at Nabisco has been steadily losing market share over the past two years, from a high of 20% to the current level of 18%. Profits as a percentage of sales, however, have been growing. What could be causing this?

For this case, we walked through it together as a group. We looked at data for the years 2004 and 2006 in regard to the company’s market share, the profits they were making, and the allocation of budget to different divisions within their company. It turned out that Nabisco was cutting all their marketing and distribution sectors, but were improving the product and getting more sales from existing customers. The market was growing, but the company refused to go with it and instead made those cuts, which caused them to lose market share. However, making this decision has allowed them to earn more money in the short term, but, they may have lost money in the long term.

After looking at the business cases, we reviewed a few of the “buckets” of consulting. Here they are summarized: Profit (price, volume), Product (innovation, portfolio), Company ($, marketing, management, ops.), Competitors (market share, trends, comp. advantage), and Customers (segments, value).

These “buckets” are the types of data that usually need to be collected when evaluating a problem or doing consulting for a client in order to make informed decisions or solutions. These data types and the way they are organized help logically order them into groups and make them readily identifiable and easy to use to help promote more effective and organized problem-solving.

For the rest of the session, it was free time to work on whatever you wanted. I reviewed the math that was done for these business cases to make sure I understood it. Later, I reviewed more business cases on my own to better develop my skills and identify the type of data I needed to collect and how to organize it based on the scenario.

I really enjoyed this session and I feel like I learned a lot about a new skill that I’ve never worked with before. In a couple of weeks, we have our first challenge in TKS, where we get to work with an actual company and look at a problem they are actually facing. It doesn’t mean that we will need to use MECE or any of the stuff we learned in this session, but it’s great to know it just in case. I’m really excited for some of the sessions coming up and some of the valuable stuff I’ll keep learning!