Mental exercise: think of an area in which you've made enough mistakes to be a teacher. Someone asks you to put together a single folder of introductory info as a "101" guide. (Mine might be: "Starting a Business 101", "Learning to Code 101") What would you put in the folder?
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(Reps from Baltimore City and Maryland came to visit our office the other day and asked how they could help. I said the biggest thing I'd wanted was a clear intro to simple but critical basics, particularly the day I walked home with fresh LLC papers.)
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The final Corner Office column in the NYT calls out "curiosity" as a trait of CEOs. I don't know beans about Big Companies but it rings true at the small end: a hunger to understand *everything*, not just to invent (fun!) but as self-defense (scary!) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html …
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The dark side of this observation is how vulnerable this makes us to our own biases, culture, and blind spots. Sort of an entire second level or sub-basement to the concept of "unknown unknowns".
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Related: I was recently asked for advice on hiring/managing a new hire. A small software company had hired outside their social network for the first time & didn't know what to do when (unstated) social expectations weren't being met by the new employee.
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The idea they came up with to solve this was: take the employee bar-hopping. Now, obviously, clearly communicating expectations and providing periodic feedback on those expectations is a common organizational challenge which should not involve beer.
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And look, I've made my share of really basic errors about really basic things. ("Gosh, it seems like I probably should be paying some kind of taxes other than just sales taxes?") So I'm not being righteous when I say: that's a huge & *totally avoidable* mistake.
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I say with love: when faced with problem of "a new employee outside our social circle isn't meeting unstated expectations" the immediate and obvious answer should be "state expectations directly & clearly". Not "require them to get drunk with us to bring them in to social circle"
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And my question is: where can we store more of this basic knowledge in an easily accessible, usable form? Does this stuff go in business incubators? Books? A website? How do we help teach basics across a population, instead of leaving everyone to stumble along alone?
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Writing these is a major portion of my job: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides ; hoping to eventually cover most of what a business needs in year 1.
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