Newsletter #104 : Loneliness, Confessions and Tribal Leadership

CTO Academy deliver tailored leadership skills training and career development services for global tech leaders. 96

CTO ACADEMY  Nice to finally meet you …CTO Academy launched in 2019 but it’s only in the last 12 months that we’ve really started building out our team and of course due to the pandemic, it’s been a totally remote experience. So this week finally, we were able to get some of the team together in London and it made us appreciate that for all the talk of remote-first and remote permanent … it’s just nice to sit in front of someone and chat. It’s fantastic how some simple pleasures have taken on new meanings and significance as a result of these extraordinary times. If I can offer any advice at this juncture, do your best to get together again asap with those you’ve not seen for a while – friends, family and colleagues! Within the newsletter itself – lots of insight, articles and don’t forget our forthcoming Live Masterclass with Zoe Fragou looking at The Art of Negotiation, and How to Always Win: Win. Have a safe passage through your weekend, stay safe and if you can, go meet someone and share the pleasure of great company …

 *|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|*<!–LEADERSHIP ARTICLENo-one ever told me…It’s lonely at the topOur co-founder Jason Noble never misses a chance to impress us with his knowledge of Tech Leadership skills. This influential article highlights the significance of understanding that Tech leaders and entrepreneurs can feel isolated at the top. What is your perception of a  business leader and entrepreneur?Confident. Knowledgeable. Charismatic. Good orator. Natural Leaders. Ready Made. Few may be expert at all, but they probably have elements of most. Is this all that leadership training attends to? How about lonely or isolated? You don’t tend to see those descriptions emerge within a leadership training manual and/or CTO job description. And yet, it’s a major issue for all senior executives and in particular the CTO. Read the full article here. 

NEWS & VIEWS  Articles That Caught Our Eye This Week12 Leadership Lessons from Mailchimp Co-Founder and CEO Ben Chestnut…Jason Nazar‘s ongoing series focuses on learning lessons from high-profile leaders. In this edition he asked what inspired Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut to become an entrepreneur, Chestnut recalls the story of his mother running a hair salon out of the kitchen and brainstorming business ideas on car trips with his father. “My mom gave me this entrepreneurial model,” Chestnut says. “She didn’t call herself an entrepreneur or a small business; she called it ‘making ends meet“. It was his mother’s talent. He saw entrepreneurship as just breathing, a thing you do in life. “It was a service business; clients came into our kitchen. I learned about customer service this way. My father was in the military and dreamed about starting a business, but he could never make that break, because he had to support the family. I have memories of brainstorming businesses to start one day with him on car trips when I was growing up. It inspired me to finish what we started. In 2000, we all got laid off at this dot com, and I remembered all of those stories I brainstormed with my Dad. I knew that if I didn’t try to be an entrepreneur, I would never be one. I might get a great cushy job, but I might regret it. I thought, let me try this.” 9 Confessions From a Failed Start CEO …Rachel Greenberg knew something was wrong when she couldn’t get out of bed until 9, then 10, then 11 am. Rachel had spent the prior years working 80 to 100-hour weeks in high-pressure investment banking jobs pitching and selling $100M companies, so running on minimal sleep should have been a habit by now. She should have been a pro. Rachel also should have been a pro at understanding and building financial models, pitch decks, and successful businesses, with the added help of an entrepreneurship and finance degree from a top ten business school. Yet here she was, wiring out her life savings in $20,000 increments to developers for a product she was losing faith in day by day. She didn’t have one customer and was nowhere near soliciting them. Her unwillingness to wake up and face the day was merely a symptom — an indicator of something much more concerning than a sleeping disorder. 6 elements to create a high-performing culture…What often separates the highest-performing organizations from the rest is culture. We view culture as the cumulative effect of what people do and how they do it – and it determines an organization’s performance. If culture is so vital, then how do you make an organization’s culture as high-performing as possible? No one-size-fits-all formula exists, however, Carolyn Dewar and Reed Doucette‘s research and experience point to six elements that help organizations do just that. 1. Define behaviour changes that unlock business performance: Communicate these behaviours clearly so everyone understands what they look like in practice. This delivers a shared vocabulary to mobilize for change and provides a way to monitor progress in shifting the culture. These behaviours should be tailored to your business needs and context since no two organizations are the same. How to Build an Event-Driven ASP.NET Core Microservice Architecture…

Decoupled Microservices — A Real-World Example With Cod: The application uses a real-world example with users that can write posts. The user microservice allows creating and editing users. In the user domain, the user entity has several properties like name, mail, etc. In the post domain, there is also a user so the post microservice can load posts and display the writers without accessing the user microservice. The user entity in the post domain is much simpler. Christian Zink suggests that the microservices are decoupled and the asynchronous communication leads to eventual consistency. This kind of architecture is the basis for loosely coupled services and supports high scalability. The microservices access their example Sqlite databases via Entity Framework and exchange messages via RabbitMQ(e.g. on Docker Desktop).

  BOOK OF THE WEEK  Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving OrganizationTribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups To Build a Thriving Organization is a fundamental and effective guide for every Technological leader because it gives an insightful perspective on how people in an organization interact and succeed. Within each corporation are anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes. The authors; Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright demonstrate how tribes develop—and show how to assess and lead tribes to maximize productivity and growth. This is a business management book like no other, Tribal Leadership is an essential tool to help managers and business leaders take better control of their organizations by utilizing the unique characteristics of the tribes that exist within.“One of the best books on the market, very inspirational. It has provided a lot of clear ideas concerning how to motivate the team and how we as a collective can achieve great things. A definite must-read for leaders who respect, trust, motive their teams. Autonomy is the name of the game”.

 VIDEO OF THE WEEK Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba…The Brave Ones

 MASTERCLASS SERIES CTO Academy Live Masterclass – Next class Weds 16th June Places are selling for the second in our live masterclass series. this time looking at The Art of Negotiation and How to Always Win: Win – which will take place on 16th June 2021. Seats are limited to just 20 tech leaders so that everyone gets the opportunity to learn, engage and share with the host and cohort. We also have some fantastic speakers and topics being lined for the rest of the year so watch this space. For more information about the June masterclass – click on the image below or the link above. 

 CTO ACADEMY TRIBES The Power of Group Coaching … CTO Academy Tribes is our group coaching and peer-2-peer support programme. It’s a powerful way to learn and share knowledge alongside like minded peers, facing and negotiating similar challenges to you. We have different tribes for established, early-stage and aspiring CTOs with tech leaders joining us from Australia to Spain, Canada to South Africa.  Come and find your tribe …