Two Kinds of Projection

Your weekly 5 things from the mind of Miles Lasater

Happy Saturday! Here are your 5 things from the mind of Miles for this week.

1. Start-up to Grown-up. I recently finished the book From Start-up to Grown-Up. Written by coach to startup CEOs Alisa Cohn, it is a practical guide for how to evolve from founder to manager and leader. With a no nonsense tone that acknowledges the hard parts and offers solutions, the book goes from personal to interpersonal and from strategic to detailed scripts for tough conversations. I recommend it.

2. Nonviolent Communication. Have you learned about or used NVC? It is the based on the idea that “all humans share the same, basic needs, and that each of our actions is a strategy to meet one or more of these needs” and that by “listening to, understanding, and thus connecting with the other person's needs, you are more likely to be heard yourself, and more likely to create connection, and out of that connection, create collaboration that results in mutually satisfying outcomes”. Marshall Rosenberg’s classic book Nonviolent Communication is still the starting point. If you’re interested in how it applies in the workplace, check out my father’s book or one of his podcast interviews on Ventures Stories.

3. Ruined for Spreadsheets. I learned a lot from How to Measure Anything in Business and my Kauffman Fellows’ mentor Clint Korver. But they ruined me for normal spreadsheets. Now I expect spreadsheets to accept ranges rather than point estimates. If you want to use your spreadsheet as a database, then consider Airtable or Smartsheet. If you want to do project management, use a task app ? If you want to do projections, then Guesstimate or Causal allow you to use ranges and Monte Carlo simulations without a plug in.

4. Two Weeks Off. I’ll be taking two weeks off of the newsletter. Take a break yourself or catch up on previous editions like three of the most popular ones:

   1. Started a Venture Studio, Kelly Criterion and the Future of Democracy

   2. The Checklist Man, End of Year Giving and Fun with a Continuous Glucose Monitor

   3. Productivity and Physics Paradoxes

5. Three Things? My siblings tell me I should shorten to three things rather than five each week. What do you think?

Until next time,

Miles