Leadership and Academic lessons for life

This list is a compilation of all the leadership lessons, courses, concepts learned, quotes and other highlights I’d like to remember.

1. Leadership for Impact
   • Always know your why
   • Have your pitch ready and sharpen it from time to time 
   • Value proposition
   • Who do you have in your tribe?
   • Learning agility, inspiring influence, leading with inclusion
   • EQ Report – Work on agreeableness, impulse control, stress tolerance
   • Flight plan for the future, reframing, decision quality
   • Leadership presence
   • There’s a difference between mentorship and sponsorship, have both
   • Pause before you speak
   • You are the sum total of your life and your uniqueness is your superpower
   • Prioritizing and understanding what to let go is the biggest gift you can give yourself
   • Storytelling is everything. How you make people feel brings them back! 
   • Empathy in leadership is key 
   • Free write
2. Accounting 
   • Lucia Pacioli, Syntax, rules and regulations GAAP, SEC, FASB, 10K, 10Q
   • Assets = Liabilities + Shareholder’s equity
   • Debits first credits second
   • Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement
   • Accrual accounting, Revenue Recognition Depreciation, Ammortization
   • Revenue, COGS, Expenses, Profits, Net Income, shares outstanding, PP&E, Ratios
   • Starbucks, Apple, Peloton, 
3. Finance
   • Capitalism by itself is not evil, if you are not abusing and creating for the greater good
   • It depends!
   • Not so fast
   • Sunk cost fallacy
   • Financial way of thinking, corporate, managerial and business finance, firm and its forms, 
   • Time value of money, PV, FV, opportunity cost, capital budgeting debt equity, ROI, ROE, ROA, NPV, IRR, Operating and Financial Leverage DOL, DFL, DCL, EAC, Risk, Return, CAPM, Agency costs, Investment Payback, Cash flows, stocks and bonds, capital markets, assets, taxes, hurdle rates
   • Break Even analysis, variable operating costs, TOC = F+ TVC; TVC = V*Q
   • Types of companies, Capitalism, 
   • Wealth management 
   • Debt is not a bad word
4. Statistics
   • Management of Uncertainty, Normal distros, three populations, central limit theorem, heuristics, stochastic
   • Ceteris paribus, R square, correlation coefficient, Linear Regression model – LHIN Homoscedasticity, R square, residuals, least square
   • Bayes’ theorem
5. Org Behavior
   • Culture eats strategy for breakfast
   • Design trumps management 
   • Get the monkey off your back!
   • There are different leadership styles and all are useful in the right amounts
   • Leadership as architect, Paul Levy case
   • Heidi Roizen, Monique Leroux Desjardines
   • Southwest, Zappos, Home Depot, 
   • Seven enduring skills for experienced and aspiring leaders
   • Reinvent or perish, change management (freeze/defreeze), change wheel 
   • Power and influence
   • Networking – loose ties
   • Never burn a bridge (Heidi Roizen)
   • Careful who your inner circle is
   • Feedback is a gift but careful whom you ask it from. Don’t ask for feedback from those who don’t know you at all or understand their limitations and/or prejudices before you take it to mean gospel.
6. Strategy
   • If you ask the right question, then the answers will follow;
   • Don’t look at what’s obvious 
   • Strategy is looking ten steps ahead 
   • Porter’s Five Forces
   • Understanding the problems before they become problems
   • Ask why, why, why again and again till you’ve reached the core of the matter
   • Ask why not! 
   • Integrations horizontal, vertical, diversification, value creation frontier, 
   • Gucci case, Aston Martins, Sandlands Vineyards, Disney, Uber
   • John P. Kotter, Porter, Zoom, 
8. Operations
   • GOAL Goldratt – Herbie! Jonah
   • Reaching Flow and the danger of silos
   • Goldilocks, the right amount is important
   • Operational efficiency and reaching the point of Productivity or Efficiency Frontier
   • Inventory Buildup, Push and Pull systems, process analysis, cost structure
   • Beer game
9. Valuation
   • When valuing a company look at what it does
   • EV, Valuation methodologies, CAPEX, WACC, LBOs, M&As, Comps, Multipliers, DCF, Options, FCF, Financial modeling, NWC, Beta, Risk free rate, Levered and unlevered beta, Terminal value, forecasting, EVs
   • Cases – Dupont, Midland, Molton and Coors case 
10. Business Analytics
    • DADM, Monte Carlo simulation, Sensitivity analysis, Tornado model
    • Forecasting, Alaska oil case, 
11. Human Capital 
    • Google sold its Engineers on Management article, Hidden workers, Ron Ventura Medical case, keeping top talent
    • People Analytics
12. Legal and risk management in Corporate structures – Timothy Werner
    • Firms are not just economical but also social and political actors
    • Non-market environment, relationship of firm’s non-market environment to its market environment
    • Legal and ethical reasoning to define the constraints on and resolve dilemmas involved in designing and implementing a non-market strategy
    • Efficient markets, externalities, principal agent problems
    • Public policy, non-market political strategy, distributive justice, procedural fairness
    • Market failure types – Monopolies and Monopsonies
    • Money laundering, 4I’s analysis – Issue, Information, Institutions, Interests
    • Behavioral ethics – Conflict of interest, conformity bias, framing, fundamental attribution error, incrementalism, loss aversion, moral equilibrium, obedience to authority, overconfidence bias, role morality, self-serving bias, tangible and abstract
    • Corporate political strategy formulation: transactional, relational; individual, collective; informational, financial, constituency building
    • crisis management, ethics
13. Advocacy – Professor John Daly
    • Cialdini’s 6 principles of Influence
      • Reciprocity
      • Social Proof
      • Liking
      • Commitment
      • Authority
      • Scarcity
    • Twelve Angry Men! And Machiavelli
    • Understand their wants and align your needs to those
    • Networking and connections are the core of human nature, community is powerful 
    • Practice and rehearse but let it also flow organically and authentically
    • WIITF – what’s in it for them
    • Connect with who you are talking to then
14. Marketing Analysis
    • 5 C’s – Customer, Company, Competition, Context, and Collaborators
    • STP – Segmenting, targeting, positioning
    • 4 P’s – Product, Place, Promotion and Pricing
    • Acquisition, Retention, Development
    • MarkStrat Simulation – pick a strategy and stick with it, invest in data
15. Strategic Marketing
    • CLV – Customer Lifetime Value; good customer – retention rate, buys over time, easy to work with, margin, acquisition cost, focus on retaining profitable customers, second on attracting high value customers
    • Marketing mix for competitive advantage, Fermi estimates, Evaluating opportunities, Principles of pricing, Going to Market
16. Negotiation
    • Longhorns always ask!
    • BATNA
    • Anchor high, Agreement bias, ZOPA – zone of possible agreements, chilling effect
    • Myths – born with it, only negotiate where its allowed, negotiate tough always – Not true!
    • There’s always other things besides salary you can negotiate
    • Framing – offers are compelling but I would prefer this instead
    • Understand that different people have different norms and cultures, know them
17. Economics
    • There is no such thing as a free lunch 
    • There are always tradeoffs!
    • Prisoner’s Dilemma, Game theory
18. Reading Financial Statements
    • EBITDA EBITDA EBITDA 
    • Operating margins,
    • Look at the Rails (transportation to telecommunication to information and digital, used to be the rails and now it’s the information/data age)
    • Read good, math good (also listen good, write good)
19. Private Equity 
    • Know your mission, everyone from the lowest to the highest in the hierarchy of a company should have the same mission else there is a misalignment there 
    • Feature or a Product?
    • When you are 6 to 12 months before an inflection point, ask someone to come and do a due diligence as if they are buying us, that report will help you fix things
    • Firm structures, VCs, Seed money, startups, Investment rounds, Covenants, Term sheets, Pre money and post money valuation
20. Corporate Strategy
    • 9 box SWOT analysis, Goal matrix
    • 6 elements of a global strategy, motivations
    • Value innovation article
    • Turnarounds and Restructuring
21. Capstone Project
    • Lofty, grandiose ideas are great but implementing small, quick wins are often times what a lot of non-profits can benefit from and form the building blocks towards that path.
    • Non-profits need the help but often times don’t have the resources to work with those who want to help either