Non Fiction Sample Audiobook
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
can you develop a simple plan for your strategy? Simplifying complexity is a leaders superpower. What's the big idea? And so what a ceo of Amgen kevin. One of the authors would often start meetings typically one on ones with the senior leaders with those bracing questions. He wasn't being snarky or rude and he would often ask it with a smile with others whom he didn't know so well like a consultant coming into his office to pitch an idea. He would be more explicit about what he wanted, asking them for their big idea and then adding what do we do about it and what will success look like In each case he was laying down a challenge. Can you get to the point quickly by crystallizing the essence of your idea and why it's important. He had used other tactics over the years for the same effect, including invoking a metaphor, to signal his expectations to his team. It's your job to have a hypothesis of what the picture is. You would tell them, don't come into my office and dump jigsaw puzzles at my feet and start inventorying the pieces together. I want you to tell me what your hunch is about the picture truth is a mosaic facts are the tiles and we never have all the tiles. He would ask anybody who wanted to show him a 40 slide deck to set it aside and summarized what they were about to say he was relentless about pushing responsibility back on others to connect the dots and to explain their ideas in simple but not simplistic terms like the time his CFO walked into his office and suggested moving all their manufacturing to Puerto rico, he explained, capturing his big idea and the so what in just a few sentences that the tax incentives alone would have as much impact on the financials as a new blockbuster drug. And the move would eliminate risk to its to California plants which sat on top of the san Andreas fault. After years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, Amgen's major manufacturing operations are now based there. Kevin developed this habit of relentlessly pushing for simplicity in his mid twenties when he was the engineer officer of a fast attack nuclear submarine. He had to be able to disassemble and reassemble the sub in his head knowing every part and how they worked and how various catastrophic scenarios could unfold and how to fix them. That's when he started the practice of drawing what he jokingly called an idiot diagram for himself to explain how things work. His goal was to create the simplest high level framework for describing something that's breathtakingly complicated from which he could progressively go deeper in terms of detail and be able to keep that three D. Model in his head. Later in his career. When he joined Amgen he had to quickly learn the science of biotechnology, something he had never studied. But kevin was well versed in mechanical and electrical automatic control systems that were based on networks and multiple feedback loops and he realized that the human body at least systematically worked a lot like a nuclear submarine. That insight created a framework for conversations with Amgen scientists about how different drugs would affect the body. He would never know as much as the scientists, of course, but he kept the discussion at an altitude that enabled him to understand both the science and the implication of potential new drugs for Amgen. Reaching all the way back to my submarine days, I knew about automatic control systems, Kevin says. So I could use that as a metaphor to understand biology. Then I could figure out the best five questions to ask.