The Chomp #046
Grey Thinking, Daniel Ek, and More...
Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best strategic thinking content and top emerging business trends from the internet and beyond. If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on the blue button below. With that, let’s dive into it.
Quick Bite
The Value of Grey Thinking: It’s only once you can begin divorcing yourself from good-and-bad, black-and-white, category X&Y type thinking that your understanding of reality starts to fit together properly. Putting things on a continuum, assessing the scale of their importance and quantifying their effects, understanding both the good and the bad, is the way to do it. Understanding the other side of the argument better than your own, a theme we hammer on ad nauseum, is the way to do it. Because truth always lies somewhere in between, and the discomfort of being uncertain is preferable to the certainty of being wrong.
As people get older, especially those who grow up and go to school in the United States, they tend to get more rigid in their thinking. Humans like to see answers and come to conclusions that are yes-or-no, black-or-white, and good-or-bad. Our brains like easily digestible answers, so we naturally seek them out.
The problem with this though, is that the world we live in is grey. The reality is that there are very few black and white answers. Even when something appears to be black or white, there are second order consequences that are likely to be grey.
While this notion of a world full of grey is easy to understand in theory, it’s much more difficult to use in practice. As this excellent article in FS points out, it takes a substantial deproggraming of our minds to realize that life is all grey, and that all reality lies on a continuum. To better solve problems, we need to shift our thinking to a quantitative and scale-based style.
In simpler terms, this type of thinking centers on the idea that the dose makes the poison. Most things are OK in some dose, but are bad in another dose. We can use social media as an example. Rather than classifying it simply as good or bad, we can view it as a useful tool that has shortcomings. The article points out Capitalism as another good example. It’s a divisive topic that people tend to be black and white with their thinking on. Yet, the reality is that it’s grey. It can be enormously productive, but it has many limitations.
When we start to pull away from good-or-bad and black-or-white thinking, it becomes much easier to piece together our understanding of complex situations. The map of reality becomes much clearer and easier to navigate. When we put things on a continuum and think through them with scale in mind, we can reourient our thinking to match the grey world that we live in.
Deeper Dive
Daniel Ek Interview - The Observer Effect: Now, you sit on this platform that attracts hundreds of millions of people. You also have millions of creators, some of the most influential people in the world. They want to tell their stories, they want to exchange ideas. This is how we've always told stories throughout culture. So you have an enormous responsibility. I feel like this is part of the reason why I dedicate time to learning; I feel like I have to learn in order to be more empathetic, to understand, to be able to help those stories be told, to make better decisions, because Spotify has a lot of influence. It's about trying to do our very, very best by as many of our stakeholders as we can to create a better journey for all of us.
Despite my staunch support of Apple Music, and refusal to use Spotify, Daniel Ek is one of my favorite CEOs to follow. He’s a fascinating leader that’s had remarkable success through forging his own path. Daniel has a unique leadership style and decision-making process that’s far from textbook.
Every time I listen to Daniel Ek speak on a podcast—or read an interview with him—I come away with new insights and ideas to implement into my own thinking. So, as you can imagine, I was quite excited to dive into Sriram Krishnan’s new interview with Daniel that released earlier this week. It certainly didn’t disappoint.
In what might be the most in-depth interview I’ve seen with Daniel Ek to date, Sriram digs deep into Daniel’s daily routine, leadership style, time management process, Spotify’s algorithm & its impact on the world, and much more. It’s a tour de force of strategic thinking and decision-making processes.
While you should absolutely go read the full interview, below are a few key takeaways as well as my favorite parts of the interview.
On Routine
Daniel doesn’t start his “workday” until around 10:30 am. Before then, he spends time with his family, works out, goes for a walk, and reads for up to an hour. Quite a different morning routine compared to most public company CEOs.
On Meetings & Time Management
“I find it crucial to be upfront about everyone’s role in different meetings, I think this is super, super important. Often that's my number one thing: to make sure I know what role I'm playing.”
“A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time.”
“I don’t think most executives dedicate enough time to thinking. They spend too much time in meetings…But, in general, I would say the largest mistake is that they conflate meetings with productivity. Often fewer meetings and better decisions drive the business forward.”
On Delegating & Working in Flow
He spends the majority of his time on long-term planning and decision making, yet devotes most of his dedicated free time to be available on an ad-hoc basis. This stems from his deep care about working in flow. If someone is in flow and has an idea, he wants them to call them at that moment.
“I call people when I'm inspired by something and throw out lots of different ideas. Again, nine times out of ten what I say is completely worth shit. But every now and then, I come up with something that's super relevant for someone; something that changes how they look at an issue. This can lead to super interesting breakthroughs.”
On Learning
“Today, I don't think so much about the process of learning. What I do think about is spending time thinking about what is important for me to try to learn in the first place: What are things that could be helpful skills for myself to understand better, to be more empathetic? What are things that could be just tangential, interesting areas that have no bearing on what I'm doing today, but, over time, [will] make me a more interesting person, make me a better husband, make me a better father?”
On Leadership Style
“My job is to try to be a value-add. If you think about a pyramid, there's a fellow Swede who ran SAS, Scandinavian Airlines, who said the right way to think about leadership is you're not at the top of the pyramid. You should invert the pyramid and envision yourself as the guy at the bottom. You are there to enable all the work being done. That's my mental image of what I'm here to do at Spotify.”
On Spotify’s Culture
Spotify is quite unique in that it attempts to marry both Swedish and American culture. It usually takes the average American about a year to be productive within Spotify’s culture
On Algorithms
Spotify relies just as heavily on editorial work as algorithms.
“We typically come up with human-driven, culturally-driven hypotheses of things we think may fit in the world even if the algorithm might say otherwise. This is the beauty of editorial and algorithms working together; we as a company want to always ensure that we are not only shaping culture, but also reflecting it. We view our creators the same way. We curate some of these content hypotheses, but a lot of our creators come up with innovative hypotheses, and then it's our job to try to test them, and have our algorithms optimize them.”
On His Maturation
“When I was 22/23 it was all about, “Hey, this is a cool thing to do. I love music. That's pretty cool. Wouldn’t it be cool if this worked to benefit artists?” It was way simpler…Now you're here with more than six million artists on the platform. Some of them are struggling, some of them are doing incredibly well; it’s both ends of the spectrum. Being empathetic is critical.”
Chum Bucket
Anti-monopoly vs. Antitrust (Stratechery)
Infighting, ‘Busywork,’ Missed Warnings: How Uber Wasted $2.5 Billion on Self-Driving Cars (The Information)
QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive (Bloomberg)
Erik Torenberg: Hustle and Flow (The Generalist)
How Travis Scott Defied the Rules of Celebrity to Become King of the Youth (GQ)
Tweet of the Week
Song of the Week
Apple Music Link
Books
Currently Reading
![Grant by [Ron Chernow]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb6221ed-8853-4848-8251-b88c5f52c599_324x500.jpeg "Grant by [Ron Chernow]")
Recently Read
![The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by [Morgan Housel]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c09c29-7431-4b22-9bfa-30528d0c83e6_319x500.jpeg "The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by [Morgan Housel]")
When Morgan Housel released his new book, The Psychology of Money, I couldn’t wait to get started. Despite generally avoiding the hype of new releases to focus on books that have stood some test of time, I figured diving into Housel’s new work would be worth it. And it certainly was. Housel has the unique ability to take dry and complex topics and turn them into thoughtful and digestible stories. The Psychology of Money is filled with practical takeaways and is worth a read for anyone interested in being better with their money. My guess is that’s most of us. (4/5)
Parting Thoughts
This Week in History
On October 6, 2010, Instagram launched. Instagram was quickly acquired by Facebook less than two years later for $1B. (Source)
“Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows."
— Montaigne
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-CM
This newsletter is created and authored by Cody McCauley and is published and provided for informational purposes only. The information in the newsletter solely constitutes Cody’s own opinions. None of the information contained in the newsletter constitutes—or should be construed as—investment advice.