lowermanagement

[lowermanagement]

Away Goals

The UEFA Champions League will no longer be using away goals as a tiebreaker.

When they are down to 16 teams remaining, they play what they call the knockout rounds, which is simply a 16-team tournament. Each round in the knockout stage is played in a two-legged format, meaning each team plays one game at home, one away.

On the face of it, this concept is weird to American sports fans who are probably thinking why wouldn’t they play an odd number of games like we do here, most famously the best-of-seven series used in baseball, basketball and hockey?

I guess one of the answers would be soccer has the potential for ties so you don’t necessarily need an odd number of games to decide a winner.

So the teams play the two games, if you win both, that’s easy, you advance. If you win one and tie the other, that’s also easy, you advance.

If each team wins one game, that’s not as easy, but it’s doable. Whichever team scored more on aggregate advances. For instance if you win one game 2-0 and lose the other 1-0, you advance.

Now, whenever the two teams are tied on aggregate--which could happen after teams each win a game or they tie both--that’s harder. They use a tiebreaker called away goals.

Whichever team scores more goals at the other team’s stadium advances. So if you win 1-0 at home and lose 2-1 on the road, you advance. The aggregate score is 2-2, but you had one away goal and the other team had zero.

I guess this is sort of arbitrary. If the tiebreaker was home goals, you wouldn’t have advanced, the other team would have. And I guess there is some thinking that scoring away is more difficult than scoring at home. But I am not really interested in that.

I am interested in the impact of the away goal tiebreaker because I think I am going to miss it. It brought something to the sport in fleeting moments that other sports get all the time: flipping a game from win to loss in a single moment, not just flipping from tie to win/loss.

There was magic in the away goal tiebreaker. Some of the most memorable moments in baseball, basketball or football come from this flip:

In baseball if you trail by a run with a man on base and you step up to the plate with two outs: strike out, you lose; hit a home run, you win

In basketball if you trail by two points and you attempt a three-pointer as time expires: miss it, you lose; make it, you win 

In football if you trail by four points and you throw a pass in the end zone as time expires: drop it, you lose; catch it, you win

Individual games of soccer don’t have these flips. If you trail by one goal and score, you tie. If you are tied and score, you win. If you are tied and the other team scores, you lose. Games can only flip from win/loss to tie or tie to win/loss on a single goal. They can’t flip from a win/loss to a loss/win without two goals.

But at the tournament level, games can flip on a single goal. If you lost the first game on the road 1-0 and are tied in the second game at home 1-1, you are in a losing position. But if you score one goal and take a 2-1 lead, you have flipped to winning position with a single goal because of the away goals rule.

It’s arbitrary but everyone knows it’s arbitrary before the game starts, so I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason to eliminate the rule. Because this arbitrary rule gives us large swaths of time in the second leg of knockout games where one team plays knowing if they don’t score, they’re out. And if they score, the other team is out. Those instances are so rare in soccer and are about to become even rarer.

Now the only way remaining for these flips to occur is the last game of a round robin competition. That is, the last game of a group stage in a tournament or the last game of the regular season. In these instances you need a particular result to advance or win the league, you can flip that result from a win/loss to a loss/win with a single goal.

For example, on the final day of the group stage in the 2010 World Cup, the USMNT needed to win to advance. They were tied in the waning moments, a tie effectively being a loss as that would have resulted in elimination. Landon Donovan’s goal in the final moments won the game, flipping the broader result from the game from failure to success.

Or on the final day of the 2011-12 English Premier League season, Manchester City needed to win to clinch the league. Tie and they finish 2nd. Sergio Aguero’s goal in the final moments flipped the game from a tie to a win, but the broader result flipped from failure to success.

So maybe to some, this is better. We will have drastically reduced the instances of these flips, but we’ve eliminated the arbitrary ones and kept the truly meaningful ones. We’ll see I guess.

#sports #soccer

[lowermanagement]

Cool kids never have the time

I bought more CDs in 1995 and 1996 than any other period of my life.

I was a junior in high school and working two jobs: after school as a file clerk at a car dealer and on weekends as a dishwasher at a banquet hall.

I was getting scheduled nearly every Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the banquet hall and working two to three hours after school every weekday.

But then my senior year of high school started and I wanted to do senior year of high school things.

Pretty quickly I asked the banquet hall to stop scheduling me on Fridays which they usually obliged, so I often had one night off a week to be a teenager.

But that wasn’t good enough. Friday night at my school revolved around going to the football game and doing whatever else afterward. I was still missing the rest of the weekend.

I remember explaining this to one of my friend’s moms, and she was like, that sucks, you should quit your weekend job.

That idea had honestly never occurred to me.

So I quit.

Then I figured out how to do my car dealer job more efficiently and reduced my time there to two afternoons per week. I was hourly so that meant I got paid less on top of not making my banquet hall job money anymore either.

Working less brought more free time, but I barely had any money to spend during it. Any money I had went toward hanging out with my friends, that is, fast food meals, convenience store snacks and movie tickets.

I had no money for CDs. I think I bought a few with Christmas money and a couple more with birthday money, and that’s it. But I had fun. And I thoroughly enjoyed my senior year of high school.

Looking back at 1996 and 1997, I never think to myself, I wish I had worked more so I could have bought more CDs.

#music #work #money #fun #time

[lowermanagement]

One of my direct reports wants to be promoted and I don’t think he is ready. He wants to take management class but spots are limited. So in lieu of a formal training, I bought him a copy of Extreme Ownership and recommended he read the first four chapters.

The essence of the book is in the first four chapters. I am revisiting my notes from that section of the book to prepare for my discussion with him.

Extreme Ownership - the leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything

Accountability - it’s not what you preach, but rather it’s what you tolerate

Believe - the leader must be a true believer in the mission

Check your ego - your subordinates’ mistakes aren’t their faults, but rather they’re your mistakes for not clarifying things the right way

I hope this book opens his eyes they way they opened mine. But I’m going to be honest, there’s probably and a greater chance this idea blows up in my face and he walks away not looking inward but rather focuses on my faults as a leader. And on many aspects, he wouldn’t be wrong.

Extreme Ownership

Accepting blame/responsibility for mistakes makes people trust you more.

When you make a mistake, run through this progression i) vow to let it never happen again, ii) analyze what happened, iii) implement lessons learned, iv) update planning and operating procedures to mitigate the risk of the mistake happening again.

The leader is responsible for everything. Not just your job. But everything that impacts your mission.

When you are sitting around, wondering what the problem is, what’s the reason things went wrong. You. You are. You are the reason. You are the reason things went wrong.

I can get behind this concept. I can even do extreme ownership theater in front of my team or boss. But then comes the next part.

Accountability

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

If there are two teams, one consistently over-performing, the other consistently underperforming, chances are if you swapped their leaders, the underperforming team would start to over-perform and the over-performing team would start to underperform.

It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. If a substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable--that is, there are no consequences--the poor performance becomes the standard.

Leaders should never be satisfied. And build this concept into the team. And realistically face facts via brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. And constantly look to improve, add capabilities, push the standard higher.

This dissatisfaction must start at the individual level with the leader, then spread to each of the team members until this becomes the culture, the new standard.

Accountability is hard. Maybe I need to embrace my dissatisfaction a little more.

Believe

The leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when everyone else is full of doubt, asking “is it worth it?”

If the leader is not a true believer, you will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable obstacles that emerge necessary to achieve the mission. And you won’t be able to convince others to do so either.

So you need to understand the why from above. And explain that why down below.

If you don’t understand the why from above, it is your obligation to keep asking questions until you understand why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the why prevents you from believing in the mission.

I get this concept from a big picture sense, but not at the level of every little thing I am supposed to do. But maybe that’s the problem.

Check your ego

You must be able to realistically assess your own performance. Ego prevents you from doing so.

When your subordinate screws up, go back to the principle of Extreme Ownership.

It’s not your subordinate’s fault, it’s your fault for not being clear enough in explaining why it needed done the right way. So you approach your subordinate saying it’s your fault, not theirs. You allow him or her to see the problem without being clouded by his or her ego.

This ties closely back the original concept of Extreme Ownership, and I think I got this. Does it just come down to accountability? Do I need to figure out how to do that better?

#work #leadership and management #extreme ownership #jocko willink #books

[lowermanagement]

This is not me having impostor syndrome. I was an impostor…I was good enough just hadn’t learned enough. And after about 5 years I realized I was undercooked, and I cooked myself. So I now know I am good enough. But in 1995 and 1996, all I was was slick, well-spoken, funny–when I talk I tend to sound like I know what I’m talking about, but the smarter graduate students could tell that I didn’t.

That’s John McWhorter describing himself early in his academic career, but he might as well be describing me at this point in my career doing what I’m currently doing.

Which is...what exactly?

I have to think in terms of the next ten to fifteen years for my career. The world is going to leave me behind if I don’t cook myself. It is past time for me to cook myself.

I mean, the world is not literally going to leave me behind if I don’t develop more technical skills at work. I’ll live. But the ability to continue to make the amount of money I am making will go away at some point if I don’t grow.

And I want to do interesting things to make money, not boring accounting-adjacent things that I have somehow lucked myself into not doing by getting into my current role.

I have backed my way into a role that is interesting-adjacent. I shouldn’t squander this opportunity. Being in an interesting-adjacent role allows me the space and creates the justification for me to spend some time training on the interesting because it’s relevant to my role.

And hopefully my interesting-adjacent role plus the right training leads to interesting roles.

Hopefully.

Hopefully is a weak word in corporate communication. I still use it from time to time. But whenever I write it in an email like, “hopefully when we do this thing, this other thing will happen,” I hear a conglomeration of past bosses’ voices responding with, “let’s not hope, let’s know for sure or at least be reasonably confident that other thing will happen if we do this thing.”

But I can’t know for sure. All I can do is try. Fight against my natural inclination for patience and start embracing a little bit more of that bias to action.

There are plenty of recipes out there. Time to experiment with a few of them. Come up with a few of my own. Time to cook myself. 

#work #expertise

[lowermanagement]

A Busy Day

There is an unexpected thing happening at work. Something has gone wrong. I have to deal with it.

The event is not my fault per se. But that won’t stop me--even while I am busy fixing what’s gone wrong--from obsessing over whether I could have done something differently to notice it earlier or prevent it from happening in the first place.

Fixing it wouldn’t be that hard if I actually knew what was causing the problem. It’s the diagnosing the problem that’s the hard part.

And I don’t like doing this diagnostic work. It’s taking me away from the more important, big picture, strategic things I should be working on. In the near future, I will use this unexpected thing as an excuse for not making enough progress on those important things.

But what I don’t want to admit to myself is this: those days with no unexpected things and plenty of blocks of time for meaningful work, those days are worse. What is my excuse for not accomplishing what I should be accomplishing on those days?

#work