2024 is more than halfway gone.

To position you and your team for a better second half to the year, here are three sources of insight:

In the late 90s, I was obsessive in my pursuit to record all 180 episodes of Seinfeld on VHS.

I cross-checked TV Guide before scheduling my college courses. I cancelled a first date once because I had to ensure the recording of an elusive episode from Season 2 titled, The Chinese Restaurant. (I stand by that decision.)

However! You don’t need to be a super fan to enjoy the insights in this interview. Jerry Seinfeld’s thoughts on craft and the pursuit of mastery are instructive.

Remnick: It is possible that you've probably made a dollar or two from Seinfeld, and yet you still work so hard. Why?

Seinfeld: Because the only thing in life that's really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession. The things that money buys are fine. They're good. I like them. But having a skill is the most important thing. I learned this from reading Esquire magazine. They did an issue on mastery—a very zen Buddhist concept. Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life. You will feel good. I know a lot of rich people and they don't feel good as you think they would. They don't. They're miserable. So I work because if you don't in standup comedy—if you don't do it a lot—you stink.

There’s also a bonus recommendation when it comes to negotiation.
Enjoy. 

Frank Blake is an attorney, educated at the knee of Jack Welch at General Electric, and became chairman and CEO of Home Depot.

Early in this episode, Blake shares the following insight about the fallacy of “cascading” communication in an organization.

I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

What I do know is that Frank Blake is right: When it comes to messaging from any leader, water, gravity, and any related metaphor inferencing the travel through the path of least resistance is entirely wrong. 

We can—and will!—find a more apt substitute for "cascading communication." The field of physics offers significantly more appropriate principles.

Frank Blake: Everything is uphill. I'm always amused when I hear leaders talk about messages cascading down through an organization as if gravity were your friend. And gravity is not your friend. Your team, for the most part through the organization, they're not waiting with bated breath to hear from you. They actually, for the most part, really don't care what you have to say. You have to work up through us most.

I mean, it's a reverse effort to get your message through an organization. And my joke would be, this is easier in the retail context to get it. But if I walk to a store -- and this conceptually is true for every organization, I walk to a store and I go up to a store manager and I say, "How's everything going?" There is only one right answer to that in any organization. The answer is, "Everything is going great. You are wonderful. Please leave."

Leaders need to understand this fundamental fact: They have to work hard to get their message—and get their direction—through an organization. That in turn leads to how you think about the people who report to you about your leadership team and an understanding that you need them to radiate out through the organization with the same aligned message that you have.

I stumbled across this little gem researching Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and Antifragile.

This book by Carlo Cipolla gives the topic of stupidity some of the intellectual attention it deserves, given all the havoc it wreaks on humanity every single day.

Cipolla begins by defining stupid: a stupid person is one who causes losses for others (person or group) without benefitting themselves—and may even suffer losses themselves.

Without the blatant sarcasm I was expecting, this book identifies four broad categories of humans based on the gain and/or loss of value:

It can be read in thirty minutes.
I highly recommend you do.

Thanks for reading.

If you have any articles, podcasts, or books to recommend, feel free to email us at info@bradleyhartmannandco.com.