Leadership, book review, hackathons, student societies and other stuff

15 January 2020

I've been reading a lot lately and testing out suggested ideas in my activities at Hackathons, in student societies and elsewhere. This is meant to connect the lessons from the various books and provide my experiences and views to complement them, not give review or summary, and certainly doesn't serve as a replacement to reading them (as I explain at the end).

Eye-opening books and their principles

Start with Why (Simon Sinek): "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." - If the only thing you're offering is slightly better technology than your competitors, you don't have a very bright future - without a clear vision for your company, you will just do the same as everyone else, won't be consistently on top and therefore won't always have great results.To achieve great results, you need to present a consistent vision - e.g. apple will always make technological products for the individual who's not satisfied with the status quo, southwest airlines will always do cheap reliable short haul flights… An alternative to a vision tends to be manipulation (sales, bonuses and other marketing tricks) but these often tend to just hurt you in the future more than they help you now. This book is quite good at explaining why "why" is so important, but for more concrete management principles, many of which directly come out of "start with why," you should turn your attention to the writing of Jim Collins.

Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall and Great by Choice are a series of large studies of many great companies and companies in similar situations, that didn't do so great. I read most of the series before "Start with Why" and was fascinated by the findings, yet when I read "start with why," it was an eye opener, since it provides an intuition behind a lot of the principles made in this series, where Jim Collins fails to do so. Main groups of the principles here are:

Maintain consistency in the company: have a purpose, an inspiring vision 30+ years into the future (a BHAG - big hairy audacious goal), a set of values, a specific recipe for doing things - and out of these, make maybe one small change in each decade, not more, even if your environment is very chaotic - and also be consistent in your growth: going for big leaps forward will more likely choke your company and see you fall (overreaching is the main reason why great companies tend to fall)
Leaders: the focus of the leader should mainly be building a great team that satisfies the (level 5 (from Good to Great))/(10x (from Great by Choice)) leader traits. What specifically depends on the situation - for a company in a chaotic environment, a rather charismatic leader seems to do best, but big charisma is very problematic in the case of succession. E.g. if the company is a startup trying to persuade investors, big charisma always makes a big impression. But when the leader goes away, nobody can do anything because they wait to be told what to do. So a great leader needs to have enough humility to let his team make decisions for their own (the company has a purpose and other principles to guide them so if they are clear enough, this should suffice, the company vision mustn't be only in the leader's mind). Other values for a great leader are productive paranoia (always preparing for anything that could go wrong) and empirical creativity (focus on gathering data and judging from that).

My experiences with pitching

One event that made me understand the importance of why, was Techfest Munich 2019, a hackathon in Germany I went to. Unlike the MLH hackathons I've been to, here the companies set rather tight challenges and worked hard to help us succeed (they presented tried solutions to the problems, ideas they had, gave us practice pitching halfway through…). In my team 3 of us worked on the technology and 2 worked on the business model and pitch. I believe the product we made (an app that uses computer vision to help unskilled workers mix advanced (and sustainable) mortars) was quite good, but the pitch my colleague delivered was amazing - the best I've seen at any hackathon. The reason was that she started with why. Why presented as a personal story.

She spoke about her experiences working as a civil engineers at construction sites in Pakistan, where they would mix the mortar with a stick, some workers couldn't read, but still everyone had a smartphone. And with the advanced mixtures, you can use a quarter of the mortar otherwise necessary, so this story of unskilled workers directly turns into a story of waste. Therefore you have personal experiences, unprivileged people and a lack of sustainability and that just builds a compelling story of why our product is needed. Followed by a short demonstration of it working, we managed to persuade the judges and won first place.

At the next hackathon - NASA SpaceApps - we applied what I learnt and doing a wildfire mitigation challenge, started with a story of a most of a greek island, where my colleague has a house, burning down. We even put it into our 30s video pitch for internationals. Even though our product there wasn't that revolutionary, we won London and even made it to global finalists (36 out of 2067 teams), now waiting for the final decision.

Our NASA SpaceApps pitch

My pitching suggestions

So how do you make the perfect hackathon pitch in my opinion? Start with why. Find a personal story that shows the problem you are trying to solve and thereby show you are dead serious about wanting to solve it. If you don't have a personal story, use someone else's. But use a personal story. One person is relatable, 100k people are just a statistic. Once you persuade them to care about your one person, bring in the context. This way you're not talking about 100k nameless people, you are talking about 100k times the person we care about. Now everyone is interested in how you have solved this problem they care about so much, so show them the product - some slides, a demo - at the end you can finally tell them who you are (your names, team name - this isn't very important for the pitch so if you put it here it won't disturb and at this point everyone is paying attention and will remember you). Your business model should also be mentioned in most cases; usually if your business model works, it is already used by a company in a similar situation - show that and how successful they are.

Then there's the question who should present and how to prepare it. I would say a good team is a mix of techies and business people. The techies should purely focus on their product, the business people should come up with a business model but focus most of their effort on the pitch. A good rule of thumb seems for them to give a complete pitch (except the demo) to the team halfway through the hackathon, later just keep improving it. And the pitch should be presented by just one person - even if there are multiple non-techies. The cliche "everyone should take part in the presentation" we have all been taught in school always just makes the pitch awkward and not flowing and even parts get missed. For the demo, a video is often fine, if it's hard to demo on the stage (e.g. involves spraying paint) or if you have trouble with stuff not working, alternatively just get stuff to seem like it's working for the controlled pitch you're doing. Showing demo and answering questions is the most anyone except the main presenter should be allowed to do.

Long term projects

Now how to apply these points to projects that last more than 2 days. Take these notes more skeptically since I haven’t actually had much great achievement with longer projects.

Longer projects with a deadline are always difficult, there never is enough time and you end up working harder and harder towards the end (once did a week of 16 hours work a day, but our creation still broke down). I would say set yourself hard deadlines (similar as in previous part I suggested having a pitch done halfway through) and actually sticking to them.

Here your product at the end is probably actually quite decent, so would give it more visibility in the pitch. But the important thing is your why. Since you are working on this for a while, it’s not important only for people outside to see your why, but you should also be aware of it to keep yourself motivated.

Roles in longer projects can also be more fluid. During a hackathon you can’t have time to do multiple roles but during a longer project you could. But I would always make sure that someone is keeping a perspective on the business at all times. And if you are planning to pitch at some point, set a deadline for the pitch way earlier, even if the product is unfinished at this point.

Student societies leadership

Having senior management (the committee) rotate every 2 years seems as an extremely chaotic environment even though it's at a university where any change happens very slowly. For that reason I would advocate for following the advice mainly from Great by Choice, especially the points about consistency. A way to do it could be to set up a vision (explained in Built to Last), and a SMaC recipe (specific, methodical and consistent - explained in Great by Choice). This might help create enough consistency (if implemented in a way that every committee disciplinedly follows it) for each committee's work to count towards the same goal and add up and up towards a great result (in good to great analogy - spinning a flywheel always in the same direction so the machine can work at a high speed).

Because of the high importance of a shared vision, selecting new members should also follow this. An approach to do this we have been practicing at Hackbridge is that when somebody wants to join the committee we interview them and then have a trial period. In both the interview and the trial period, you don’t just watch their performance but also how their align to your vision. Especially in the interview, it’s harder to judge their commitment than what they value - later you just need to check that they actually follow their values. But I am somewhat skeptical about the trial period - so don’t accept this as the perfect model, find what works for you. Problem is that at that point you don’t know if you’ve been accepted, so you work in a culture of fear and uncertainty. I don’t know how to solve this yet, but it needs to be kept in mind. I elaborate on the idea in the next part.

Culture of safety

Leaders Eat Last [not finished reading] - another Simon Sinek’s book, deriving from anthropology what work culture you should strive for and showing many examples of how that helped many leaders achieve success. A large point is creating a culture of trust - e.g. where you aren’t afraid of being kicked out just because market is down this year. I see a similar thing happening at universities - it’s not just companies.

Many Czech universities adopt the approach of admitting three times as many students as they want to allow to graduate and kick out most of them in first year. Cambridge on the other hand makes all the cuts before they give you the offer. At Czech universities, that leads some professors to position themselves as enemies of the students, rather than trying to help them learn. The students in turn if they are struggling think they will be thrown out soon and how is that supposed to motivate them to try harder if they expect it will be for nothing in the end. Instead a culture where you can trust everyone since they are here to see you through to the end leads you to work hard to make them proud.

The trial period mentioned in student societies above can have a similar effect. Until you’ve been fully accepted, you might feel like the other committee members are your enemies. When I was going through it at Hackbridge, I hated it. I felt like they didn’t want me there but I had just enough drive (coming from the alignment of vision) to push through and get to the position where I can help change the culture. So with a trial period it’s a delicate balance of checking alignment of vision against damaging the culture of safety, and I can’t say where the ideal point is, you’ll have to figure that out for your specific case.

And Finally... How I manage to read so much

A few people have asked me how I have time for reading so many books (this is a third of my reading in the last 4 months) and I don't. I listen to audiobooks whenever I'm doing something that doesn't require my full concentration (making food, dressing, taking a shower, driving, doing exercise…) which is usually over an hour a day, making most books take about a week to get through. Many of these non-fiction audiobooks are narrated by the author, sometimes with bits of added commentary, which I find a nice touch.

Another benefit of audiobooks is that these books often get quite repetitive. But I believe it needs to be. Hearing one example of the idea doesn't make you believe it and hearing out the full argument gives you the opportunity to see how it aligns with your experiences and make your own view of the idea that you deeply believe. If you read the book, you are not only spending a lot of time just reading but also risk getting bored by the necessary repetivity and skipping parts.

by Jakub Suchánek, with thanks to Keefe W. Teo for review and his ideas