In pursuit of Excellence
I am confident to say that I am one of the best AI strategists in the global startup ecosystems.
I can naturally have a deep insight into the AI-related technologies, and I can foresee the evolution in AI technologies. I have been surveying quite many startups globally, and I can easily imagine those impacts on the world. I like formulating the sustainability strategies such as network effects and have several hypothetical patterns on business modeling which can be practically applicable to startup businesses. I regularly have many conversations with various very-early AI startup founders and strategize businesses almost from zero, so I am confident that it’s practically impossible for most of the others to run through the same process to accumulate the same level of knowledge as mine. Consequently, I believe it’s challenging for others to be more insightful than I.
I think this excellence is the minimum requirement to achieve my personal goal.
I have strategized my time spending to gain my excellence and would love to publish how I thought, as a hint for my members to build up their career plans.
Unique Value
During the job interview, one candidate asked me “what’s the most critical factor to choose the team member?” I have no consistent responses to this kind of questions because it is a bit different between junior and senior. As for junior, we’re looking at his/her potential skill, such as a level of grit, communicability, and so on. In senior candidates, I am interested in his/her unique value.
https://medium.com/@hajime_hotta/my-thought-behind-hr-evaluation-ce2c7d76bca2
Excellence
Core members or startup founders have to elevate their unique values to excellence. Excellence stands for the quality of being outstanding or extremely good, which many top-tier talents must aspire. I believe pursuing excellence is one of the ultimate purposes among executives.
The critical question is: how to build excellence? My favorite book “in pursuit of excellence” wrote about the practical frameworks, but it doesn’t show the process of how to define the direction to go.
https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Excellence-Terry-Ph-D-Orlick/dp/1450496504
Step 1: Find Strength
https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/home/en-us/strengthsfinder
First, I took a test called StrengthFinder to gain insights into my strength and weakness. Here’s my top 5. There could be other ways to know your strengths and weakness, but I so far feel that having scientific data would be an easy way.
1. Maximizer
Seek to transform something strong into something superb.
2. Individualization
Figure out how different people can work together productively.
3. Strategic
Quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues, faced with any given scenario.
4. Self-Assurance
Have an inner compass that gives them certainty in their decisions.
5. Futuristic
Energize others with their visions of the future.
Step 2: Adjust my actions to fit my strengths
While Step 1 is more about my general tendency, this step is to connect those strengths with my real life in my own domain.
The top 5 strengths are not enough to be really unique. The working domain (e.g. HR) also has a lot of competitors in the world. To be really uniquely excellent, the combination of my working domain (engineering? HR? etc) and my general strength (ideation? discipline?) would finally work.
I have then interpreted my strengths to each action. There’re five areas I decided to focus on.
1) Mentorship
I am naturally good at individualizing my messages delivered to each mentee, then creatively advise how to maximize their performance considering their assets and abilities. Hence I decided to have many small “one-on-one” meetings rather than group meetings. Interestingly, one-on-one sessions with company members are quite similar to those with startup founders.
2) Talent Allocation
I recently found that allocating right people to right places are something I am very good at, while it consumes much energy. As a part of my management role, I decided to take more responsibilities in allocations.
3) Risk-taking decisions
Those having self-assurance strength tend to be more entrepreneurial, which has high risks at a glance. It’s not about optimism, but I am rather good at rationalizing more risk-taking options. I am willing to take risks to maximize the outcome. It connects to my startup investment activities too.
4) Delivery of vision and inspiration
Several people can deliver pure inspirational future vision much better than I can, but the uniqueness of my vision/inspiration delivery is rather strategic breakdowns of how to survive the next era and what to prepare.
5) AI Strategy
I believe I am one of the rare people who can have deep insights into both business and AI technology. With my strengths in strategic thinking, I am good at seeing the right strategies backed by deep domain insights and verbalize them.
Step 3: Decide my focused area
Here, the change in “mindset" is pointless.
(Ref: Kenichi Omae, 時間とムダの科学, PRESIDENT BOOKS, 2005)
In order to change a life, there’re three effective ways.
- Change the friends/colleagues to be with
- Change the place to live
- Change the allocation of time
It’s usually difficult to change the company or the place to live, and I can’t officially recommend my colleagues. Hence the target here would be to change time allocation.
Back to my case;
1) Mentorship
2) Talent Allocation
3) Risk-taking decisions
4) Delivery of vision and inspiration
5) AI Strategy
Those five items are mutually related, and my top issue is how to sharpen my (4) and (5) at the world top level. Therefore I designed my working time into the following picture.
The big chunk of my time usage is for “THINK,” which eventually connects to my vision, inspiration and AI strategies. Many people ask me “what are you usually doing?” and my honest answer would be “I am thinking.”
Of course, as a professional worker, I always ensure the outcome of the thinking process. The breakdown is like follows.
I spend a big chunk of time for input collection. I read books, articles, academic papers and I watch many youtube videos of speeches. I then regularly spend time summarizing my thoughts or hypotheses. Of course, I never launch my theories officially before validating the idea. I have several people who’re interested in my view, then test the concepts and modify them.
Step 4: Find weaknesses and get others; supports.
The Strength Finder also find my weakness. I have analyzed my weakness as follows:
I am not good at:
1) Facilitation
I often tend to prioritize what I am convinced rather than harmony and inclusion.
2) Operation
I cannot consistently track many matters and give retrospective feedbacks.
3) Feedback to others
I cannot be consistently detail-oriented enough to review someone’s document carefully.
I feel like I am disqualified as a business person when seeing the list above and feel depressed, indeed… However, it’s always a bad strategy for us to spend time for something we’re weak at. Instead, it’s important to admit our weakness and let others support me while I focus on pursuing excellence on my own.
Step 5: Define the excellence to pursue
It is the most crucial step.
Thinking about what I focus on, and what I don’t focus on, I have defined the values I continuously convey to people.
- Target — Executives and founders in startups
- The problem — Difficulty of management of startup strategy in AI-related field.
- How — Design and Execute solid strategy along with my future predictions in both technical and business point of view as well as hypothetical patterns of success.
For the sake of simplicity, I decided to focus on AI strategist because all of my other skills (mentoring, risk-taking) finally connects to the design and execution of strategy.
DON’T TARGET COMPANY MEMBERS ONLY. If you want to contribute to AI researchers, the scope must be AI researchers all over the world. Then of course specifically you can contribute internally, but as a career building, you should ensure that your excellence can be applied to the external world.
Step 6: Systemize the evolution
Coming back to the strength, which is happier than thinking about weakness, it’s essential to build the loops to push up the excellence sustainably.
The picture above is the cycle for my thinking process, which I call as a knowledge evolution cycle. Note that it’s mine because I decided to spend most of my time to “THINK” and construct my excellence around my thought.
The framework has been originally designed for my academic procedures, but it’s also utilized for any of my thinking processes.
1) Input — Input as much information as possible.
In addition to public information such as books, articles, videos, academic papers, I regularly get in-depth, fresh information from founders and company members, especially about the problems they face.
2) Distillation — Find several underlying fundamental rules as hypotheses
When getting multiple information, we can often find some similarity with several cases. In the distillation process, I try to verbalize those similarities as patterns of success.
3) Experiment — Test the hypotheses
I have several trusted buddies who gave me good feedback in the initial assumptions. Also, I have many one-on-one sessions to test them and see reactions.
4) Articulation — Gain feedbacks, and articulate the message
I regularly make presentations and articles, typically shared internally with my coworkers, startup founders, and engineers.
It’s interesting that the articulation process makes the quality of Input and Distillation better. For example, even reading the same books, after iterating several thought loops, I can understand the meaning of the books much more vividly.
The most important thing is that, based on the quality of my knowledge sharing, I can get more chances to get quality feedback repeatedly from those whom I think are top tier. Also backed by the quality of my knowledge, I am thankfully allowed to spend a significant amount of time for the knowledge evolution cycle.
WRAP UP in pursuit of excellence
Step 1: Find Strength
- Use some tool to see you objectively. I would recommend Strength Finder. Later, you need to analyze your weakness, too.
- Otherwise, you rate yourself (Pick up top 1–5) & get your coworkers’ help to find the strength.
- Categorization of the strengths are here
https://students.sunyocc.edu/index.aspx?menu=596&id=15464
Step 2: Adjust your actions to fit your strengths
- List up the works you usually do, or you’re confident at. Better NOT to generalize.
- Examples; Meetings with technical people, Facilitation of research meetings, Coding in server-side, Coaching Junior HR people, Read math-heavy papers, summarizing the latest trends of NLP, creating a new idea from specific business goal, writing some specs for developers to easily understand, quality sensitivity fo the software, set rules of HR, disciplines for the code reviews, etc.
- Map those activities with your own strength.
Step 3: Decide your focused area
- Assess which activities you want to spend more time
- Try to list up the time allocation, and try to change by systemizing other parts (typically by delegating those to others)
Step 4: Find weaknesses and get others’ supports.
- First, admit the fact that you’re much worse than even entry-level members at your weakness.
- Find your weakness. If you have a strength finder result, it’s done.
- Then decide three NEVER-to-do actions you’re poor at.
- Try to systemize how to avoid doing the above NEVER-to-dos
(delegation, change of role, etc.)
Step 5: Define the excellence to pursue
- After considering Step 1 to Step 4, create your one-sentence description about you.
- The description must be always “contribution” oriented
- Set the target people concretely. Never say “company” kind of abstract entity. It must be people. Then set the problem of the target and solution.
Step 6: Systemize the evolution
- Find what’re the key drivers to evolution.
- e.g. trusted top-tier peers to brainstorm the new ideas. Join conferences to speak out your ideas. Implement operational flows and gain feedback.
- Invest your time getting your peers.
- Iterate Step 1–6 again to make all more and more sophisticated.
Lastly, do not compromise yourself just as a unique value holder. You have to pursue excellence in the world on your battlefield.
