YouSaid · the spoken record

Vaughn Tan

lines on the record: 101
first: 2019-12-03
most recent: 2019-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The most recent kindest thing that anyone's done for me was a really big one. It was to read an entire manuscript of something and tell me what was really, really fundamentally wrong with it. And I can't say who that person is, but it was very important. I think it was especially kind because of the way they were able to explain what was wrong with it. It was probably very hard for them to do that.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when things are changing in ways that you cannot really predict, the best way to do that is to keep an open mind, right? It sounds so simple, but keeping an open mind simply means being willing to like, if there is evidence to support doing this, to tear away the foundations of everything you've built up cognitively, to build a new thing. If you are able to keep on doing that, then over time it gets easier and easier to do it and you are much more adaptive as things change around you than people who have spent their entire lives building very, very, very strong foundations that kind of hold up against minor changes in the environment until the change becomes really, really big and then they're fucked.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. That is probably the single most important thing that you could take away from this as a way of thinking about how you take action generally about anything. And if there's one thing I would add to that, it would be that.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The business itself. They're the ones who have either accidentally or intentionally done this thinking and it's taken them a long time. Like they may have failed at businesses before because they didn't understand what they wanted out of the business. And then after failing a long time or working in a lot of companies that felt like they might be the right thing but aren't, they eventually get to the point where, okay, you know what? Now I think I sort of know. And when they try it out, it sort of is right.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the fact that lots of people who run businesses and start them and invest in them say that the most important thing in business is to figure out what the business is about. And yet at the same time, we train people to think that there are only one or two or three things that businesses should be about. There is so much cognitive dissonance going on in there. I don't understand it. But you literally cannot tell someone who has not done it yet that it doesn't really matter what other people tell you your business should be about. It just matters what you think it should be about, right? And it takes a really long time to figure that out in the first place. And then once you figure that out, it takes a long time to figure out what that thing that matters is. And I think to come back to something we started this whole conversation talking about the businesses that seem to do the best things and make the stuff that I like, maybe you like, and also where the people who run the businesses, they're not just making money from it, but they're satisfied with.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even now, if you teach an undergraduate business strategy class, some of the textbooks that you'll use, like the textbook that I'm forced to use, will say things like, the goal of a business is to maximize profit for its shareholders. And so immediately you've got this assumption that somehow profit is like the only outcome that you should optimize for. And then all this other justify the means. Yeah, for sure. And then all this other stuff gets fucked up as a result”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Applies across everything that you consume and do for yourself and do to yourself. It would be quite interesting to figure out a way to help people systematically figure that out. How do you force yourself to rethink what you're trying to achieve in everything that you do without going into processing overload? I don't know how to do that, but it would be quite cool.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the EU, for as long as it lasts, there's a possibility. Within the US, there's definitely a possibility to do two things, but they might end up being something like how China's internet market is so weirdly different from everywhere else in the world because there's just like, it's like a little ecosystem that's very protected from everything else by regulation. That's one thing which is interesting. I think that metaphor that you made at the beginning about thinking about the chain, inputs, process, and outputs, we always start, it seems, by caring a lot about single sets of outputs. We're very like focused on particular things that we're optimizing for. And as we go backwards down into process and into inputs, we realize that the outputs that we cared about are not necessarily the right ones. We add more outputs that we care about. We change what we think those outputs should be. We change the levels that we think they should be. And that process of learning, I think.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, if you're a large company growing a lot of hemp to produce CBD, for example, you benefit from economies of scale with production, with processing, with marketing, with sales, with regulatory, like what can you do as a service layer so that you can replicate some of those advantages of scale without having to grow this stuff and process this stuff at scale, maybe that's a possibility. And it could be quite interesting. I'm not quite sure where that goes. I think part of the problem with that is from a regulatory perspective, every jurisdiction so far is slightly different, making it very hard to scale out.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the cannabinoid equivalent of the kind of food that you like to eat and that I like to eat. And that will initially start with the processing phase, which is what we also started with with food, and they'll move backwards into the growing phase. Like we'll also start to see, I think, a desire to consume whole plants, not extracts, and whole plants that are from old varieties, not new bread ones. And that, I think, is very cool. But I think possibly also fundamentally unscalable. And I'm not sure what's in the future personally for me, but I suspect it won't be massive scale. I think it would be nice to figure out a way to enable highly distributed but massive, unscalable stuff. Lots and lots and lots of people who are doing things that individually will not scale, but are able to do them more efficiently and better because they've got technology infrastructures that support them.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was it grown on? What was used to grow it? How was it processed? You extract all these oil-based things out of a plant. Are you using to extract it? Sometimes it's carbon dioxide, sometimes it's other solvents. What do you do with the solvent once you've extracted it? Most people that sell you the products will have no idea. Most people who work at the companies that make the products that are sold to you also have no idea. You have to usually talk to someone who's like the chief production officer, the chief science officer before they'll start to tell you what solvents are used, how they remove them from the final product. So I think there will be at some point among a rarefied probably quite wealthy fraction of the consumers of these products there will be a desire for”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a tailwind effect, so that's interesting. Just the same as I am slightly interested in cryptocurrencies because there's so much interest in it. Mostly that one I'm mostly skeptical about for other reasons. So what to me is very interesting about the whole cannabinoid industry and the endocannabinoid system that that industry is intended to try and stimulate is that in so many ways all that discourse until very, very recently has been exactly the same as with food. Let's just care about the processing and these two things that we care about, right? We care about CBD, we care about THC, and now we care more about all these other complex cannabinoids that come out of the plant. I think my gut says that if I were ever to consume this stuff systematically, which I don't at the moment because I don't see the need for it personally, I would not want to consume most of what was being produced because where is it ground?”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One reason why I'm interested in it is I think people are realizing that there is something interesting going on there. And so there's a lot of money, attention, time being poured inside. So that just makes it interesting. Tailwind.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an abstract defied way. That's basically what I want now, right? Like if I go somewhere, I want someone who's cooking with a lot of complex knowledge, who's trying very hard actually to make it as simple as possible. And part of that is there's a lot of complexity involved in sourcing the right ingredients. Ultimately, when you actually get them It's very classically like a California cuisine thing where they say you just buy the good ingredients and the cooking takes care of itself. In a way, it's true.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've eaten a perfect French on that, right? So it's like completely blonde on the outside. There's no color in the outside. I like the ones that are perfectly custardy all the way through, not wet on the inside. So in order to do that, it's super simple, not simplistic. It's also not complicated, but it's actually really complex. There's a lot of knowledge that you need to have to be able to do that. Like so much embodied knowledge of knowing based on how things smell, look, sound, the motions of your hand as you flip the pan, when to flip the pan. Produce that perfect outcome that is very simple, that's complex, but it's not complicated. But I could not put it.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas simple is reducing all the unnecessary information away, leaving only the essential behind. And then complexity is different from complicated in the sense that this part I'm having much more trouble. I know that they're different. I'm not quite sure how they are yet, how it manifests itself in the realm of food is. For example, cooking a perfect French omelette. Have you ever cooked a perfect French omelette?”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really glad you asked that because I've also been thinking about this for a bit and trying to figure out how to explain it. I think there is a difference between simplicity and being simplistic and also a difference between being complex and being complicated. So I would say that now the things that I try and eat as much as possible, especially the things I cook myself or the things I go out to eat, they're all things that are very simple but not simplistic, very complex and not complicated. And I think the difference between all that is simplistic simply means Reducing something which is more complex than what you reduced it to by getting rid of information. So you're dataizing it.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, no SOP about what you do to make this customer happy if they ask for it. But if it's below this amount, yeah, just go ahead and do it. So supposedly works really well. I've been meaning to follow up. This is sort of like an apocryphal story that I think is true. Or someone does it. Maybe it's not Ritz Carlton. But I suspect that it actually gets used. Usually the things that make you really happy as a customer are things that are really, really cheap to do. And as long as the employee who is interacting with you at that moment in time knows that there are no repercussions from doing it, often they'll just do it because it's not hard for them to do either, right? And so giving them that freedom simply by setting, and that financial limit is, I think it's more cognitive than functional. It's just so that they know, yeah, go ahead and do it. Because most of the time the thing that prevents people from doing something in a large organization is the often fictitious idea that someone above them is going to give them a hard time for doing that thing.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What organizations should be doing. You need to codify them so that you can communicate them to everyone who has to use them. And what that does is it prevents people who are genuinely, most people are very creative. You give them some thing that they have to do. You give them some resources and some constraints. And let them go. Especially if you hired carefully and you created an environment in which you can trust and people feel trusted to do the right thing. It's often, I think you could create a situation where it's better to not have an SOP so that they just use their discretion to do something that works better than what the SOP would have done. And often produces a result that is better for the organization and sometimes also better for the customer. I forget which hotel chain it is, but I think maybe it's like Ritz Carlton that does it. They give every customer facing employee a level below which I think it's a financial level below which authorization does not need to be given for them.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When there are many ways of doing a thing, having a standard operating procedure can sometimes be counterproductive because most of the time the person on the ground who actually has to do the thing understands the constraints and the resources that are available to him or her much better than the person who wrote the SOP. So there's an idea in complexity theory called equifinality, where in any sufficiently complex system there are multiple possible routes to get from point A to point B that each one of those routes represents something which is optimal for a different set of ideas of what optimality means. Some of them will obviously not be optimal at all, but the fact that you can have so many different ways of getting from point A to point B means that if you understand clearly what you're trying to trade off and what you're not trying to trade off, you can choose the right path as long as you have the freedom to do it. So one of the things that as an organization, especially a large one, I think there is an idea that best practices”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one of the things which I really want to do is I want to talk about quality to people in so many different domains, including things like investment. And I think of investment as different from venture investment. So at some point, you'll be on the other side of this thing. To come back to that question which you asked, I think...”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are some of the most interesting discussions, the ones where people's assumptions about how to evaluate a potential investment are forced to come into the open and be debated against each other.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a few things which I'm sort of still. Tangling with, I think one of the things about Organizations, especially as they get large, is that they tend to have, whether they're a book in sort of an explicit written out form or it's implicit, like the culture of the standard operating procedure for doing a thing. I think that sometimes can be very helpful. If you're trying to make a particular widget and there's only one way to do it, then there should be a standard operating procedure to do that. But for a lot of human businesses, let's say you're in asset management, there's not one way to evaluate a potential investment. There's lots of different ways. And I won't put words in your mouth, but I'll ask you.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mess with it is something that you see again and again in improvisational art forms and things. The people who can really play, literally, like music or basketball or something, all of the instincts for doing normal things have to become totally instinctual so that you can leave a lot of cognitive energy for. For spinning just nearly out of control, but not quite. And that's something which I think there is actually quite a lot of research on flow states. You don't get into a flow state until you've rehearsed things a lot so that you can go on autopilot for a lot of things that are just not that much fun and spend a lot of time on the stuff that is fun but exhausting. It's like terrifying, exhausting, and fun at the same time. Can be really fun”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for adults, for children, a lot of playfulness is about exploration. And that actually is probably a useful distinction to make between adults being playful and children. So, I think the idea that you need to understand the game you're playing so that you can start to”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he's someone that. I really like how he plays with ideas. Don't know him very well either, but when he comes to London or when I'm in Seattle, we tend to hang out and we talk for a really long time. I think part of playfulness is being willing to be wrong and not just in a, oh, I'm willing to be wrong, but very profoundly, you've got some assumptions that underlie how you build your system of how you think the world works. Most people are willing to be wrong at the top, where imagine you've got like a piece of land, you build foundations, you build level one, level two, level three, and there's this house. Most people are willing to have assumptions changed at the level of changing the color of the paint or like putting new tiles on the roof, the people who are truly playful are the ones who are willing to totally reconstruct the house from the foundations up or possibly excavate. And that's really neat.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our friend Jerry Newman is one for sure, and he's been on this show before, right? Someone else that you might really like to talk to, you may have already talked to him. There's a guy called Venkates Rau.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get to decide that's awesome to me, terrifying, but awesome. And also along the way, the nice thing about this is his job keeps on changing, you know, like they launched this business, no longer needs him to run it, does something else. So in a way, it's not like you are consigning yourself to 25 or 30 years in a company doing the same thing and gradually moving further and further up the ladder and making the same decisions but bigger and bigger things, you actually get to change your life along the way. And in a way, I guess that's terrifying for people who want their life to always be the same. But for a different kind of person, I think it's, it can be a very liberating idea that this can be a life. This can be a career.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What that business model would be. He had project management responsibilities because each one of their projects was a real project. You have to manage, I think, something like Six developers of recipes and testers of things with photographer, graphic designer, production person, editor, copy editor. So you have to manage all those things. So he had that part of the job as a clearly laid out set of roles. And then the other part was, okay, once we're done with this book, what's our next business? And that was very uncertain. And he's still there. Now what he does is he does a lot of weird stuff. He builds equipment to photograph things that are not normally photographable. He's helped them set up two independent businesses that are derivatives based on IP that was generated from the original projects that they got famous from I've asked him before and he says it's great. I would think this is much more fun as a job than one that you look at the job before you join it. It says these following 20 things you do them and you do those 20 things for the rest of your life. To me that sounds like hell. The alternative is you join and this job not only do we not know what most of it is.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was a guy who I also cannot name, but he was a program manager, a very large software company. And he worked at one of these labs that was in the same city as this very large software company. And he initially joined them sort of as a friend. He was super interested in what they were doing because they were blogging about their work a lot. So this R&D team is quite unusual in the sense that it doesn't prepare dishes for a restaurant. What it does is it does basic research on the science of cooking and it publishes books like multi-volume books that explain to people what is actually going on when you fry an egg, right? So that you can fry an egg in a different way to achieve a different outcome. So they used to write a lot of blog posts about stuff and they had a local community of people who are super interested in what they were doing and this guy was one of them. And so he started hanging out with them a little bit more and then eventually joined to do a job, but it wasn't clear what that job was. The idea was he would join and try and like create a new business model for them, but it was not clear to them at all.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are all very, very good things that conventional hiring processes, in fact, select against. So I'm not sure you need to market it. I think what you need to do is you need to communicate it very aggressively. As opposed to trying to find”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Job, and if you do the following 10 things well to this definition of well, then you get hired. It's really clearly, you come to this job and there are these few things that we need you to do well and this is how we'll know whether you're doing them well but the rest of it you need to convince us so it's not even like we have a pre-existing set of definitions of what good performances for this unknown zone it's that you need to both do the thing well and then convince us that that means it's being done well I think that's a challenge that will appeal to a particular kind of person who also tends to be entrepreneurial, tends to be willing to go into unknown situations, probably is also willing to take the initiative and take responsibility for things when they go wrong. To me these are all things that for a certain kind of job in a certain kind of environment”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, and I don't know how this will play, but my suspicion is the best thing to be is completely transparent about. So not trying to sugarcoat it. It's not going to be a thing where you come into this.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in a way, although this is cheating, I don't think you asked the right question. Yeah, because if you're using this very, very expensive and time-consuming way of hiring people for really well understood jobs, that also is like, I mean, why are you doing that? It's like a really stupid decision”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Negotiated joining really only makes sense when the job itself is uncertain in terms of what you have to do to achieve a known outcome or when both of those things are uncertain. You don't know what you need to do and you don't know what you need to achieve, then you need something like this. And in that situation, do you really want someone who's a high performer who wants certainty? You don't. What you want is you want that adverse selection. You want people who say, okay, this is a challenge I'm up for because the way you join is actually, in a sense, it's like a microcosmic version of the problem that you're going to solve if you join.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure you could solve the problem, but maybe you could reframe it so that the adverse selection appears good. I'll preface that by saying that this way of doing this provisional negotiated joining. That's what I've called it. It's a horrible name. But negotiated joining where the joining process involves this period of provisionality where you negotiate what your role is. Negotiated joining doesn't make any sense if you know what the role is supposed to be already. The job is highly certain you know exactly what needs to be done, you know what outcomes need to be, what levels those outcomes need to be, just hire for that.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impolitic is it will be very hard to do this with a conventional HR organization. Their incentives are tied towards getting people on board and staying around for a full year usually, right? So their incentives in recruitment and hiring, I think are in many cases not exactly diametrically opposed to what the organization should want and what the person being hired should want, but they're pretty close.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have hired. At the same time, if you accidentally hire someone that you really shouldn't have hired, both of them are super expensive. And the trial period gets rid of both of them. It doesn't get rid of them, but it significantly reduces the false positive problem. And it gives you the ability to take a flyer on someone who might be If you were hiring straight off the bat might be an instant no, but if you only have to get them for three months and you pay them a paraded annual salary for three months and then they turn out to be amazing rock stars for completely unexpected reasons because the environment changed or they found something that they needed to do in the company, that's like a false negative, completely averted, which is also a major asset. I think the one thing which I also might say at the risk of being”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A long term payoff, but I think another way to think about it is if you hire someone who's wrong, It's also much harder to directly quantify the cost of that person to your organization for being the wrong fit, right? Especially someone senior who's wrong can be absolutely disastrous. Another way of thinking about it that maybe makes it more palatable is not, let's spend all this time because it's a sunk cost that you need to have. It's a way of avoiding an even larger cost from bringing someone into a position and like setting their expectation both from incumbents as well as this new person that they will be full-time permanent when it will take them about the same amount of time that you would have them temporary to figure out that they're really the wrong person. And then there are all sorts of social pressures that prevent someone from leaving after six months. So they end up staying for a year, a year and a half by which time they're bedded in and then there are all sorts of problems with that. This is the false positive and the false negative of hiring. Both of them are really expensive. You don't want to have a false negative and not hire someone you should.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sounds right for everyone. The one caveat is obviously this can be disruptive, but not if you set expectations up and down. So you can tell the very junior person who is the intern that this is what they are expected to do, but you also have to make sure that everyone along the line understands that don't let this person claim like an entire week of your life if you are the employee who's being approached by this intern. But definitely you must give them some amount of time and use your judgment. A little bit of discretion, I think, on both ends of the equation is essential, but there are definitely things you can do to retrofit an existing way of getting people into an organization or hiring people so that you can learn what they can do and give them a setting in which they can figure out what you need that they can provide.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be like 10% of your role. Take like an afternoon every week. That's what it would be. Like an afternoon every week is 10% of your role. And go out and talk to people about what things we are trying to do that we can't do yet and figure out whether you can do them. That could be kind of fun”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how you learn whether or not that person is not only correct for you in the ways that you expected, but also correct for you in ways that you didn't expect that are going to bring your company an interesting new direction. So you could do that for senior people, but you could definitely also do that for junior people. And maybe this would be a way that you would find really interesting things that you didn't expect junior people to be able to do for you if you already have something like an internship program where you bring people in for three months and pay them basically a full-time salary anyway, but you fully program what their job scope is, you're completely wasting this opportunity. So law firms, consulting companies, investment banks that do summer internships that don't do part of that interns role being unknown and explicitly for the intern to go out and find something to do, they're missing an opportunity, I think. I don't think it would even need to be super profound. Like 50% of your role is unknown or previous.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before we sit down and talk about whether we should mutually progress, we want you to spend the next 10 months really digging into this company and talking to people and figuring out what it is that we need that we don't even know we need, that you uniquely can provide. Because I think a large part of why people don't do this is because there is an expectation that you want to hire as fast as possible. And the way most hiring is done is a very intense but very short filtering period where you screen CVs and then you bring successful CV screen people in for an interview and then you convert them to full time, especially for the most important jobs that's usually what you do. Most people who come into important highly uncertain jobs like running the innovation team or being senior management, they don't come in on like temporary arrangements. But I think maybe they should because”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your organization does. And in that time, say something like, here are some things that we know are definitely going to have to be part of your job scope. And here is an amount of your job scope that we just don't know about yet, but we want you to spend the next n months.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, these are things which I would love for someone to try them out. I'd love to help them figure out how to try it out. I think that there are ways of doing this that aren't as extreme as what these restaurants do. These restaurants, they're lucky in the sense that there is an expectation in the industry that if you want to join one of these really high-end, very cutting-edge restaurants, you normally go there and you spend some time there, partly so that you can figure out whether you want to work there, and also partly so that they can figure out whether they want you to work there, right? So you already have this idea that everyone thinks it's normal to go somewhere and try your best to fit in in a way that is additive and good for everyone. So in a way, as a baseline, they already have that expectation. But if you were a more conventional company, one way you can do it is don't hire straight off the bat. Say we'll pay you at a pro raided full-time salary for some period of time. I would suggest a period of time that is longer than one project cycle for the kind of work that”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only is that uncomfortable, it can be productively uncomfortable for both the team and for this potential new member, and that productive discomfort forces that person to try and find new things to do that also work. And that's very, very productive because it creates these teams that you could not have expected before they turn into these teams that in some ways they feel almost like dream teams. You go there and people all know what everyone's good at because the process of learning whether or not you're good at something involves you actually proving that you're good at it rather than simply going through an interview. There are a lot of very counterintuitive benefits to doing it this way that you only see when you see people who are actually doing it that way because nobody is there to tell them that it's the wrong way to do it.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could do that they were good at, that their team that they were trying to join also wanted, right? Because that's the obvious way to become the new employee. You show up and they're like, okay, you got to do these things, but about half of your time, we don't really know what we need you to do. You figure it out. And at the end of six months, if you just say, oh, I don't know, I just kind of ditzed around, then they'll be like, yeah, see you later. But if instead what you did was you spent six months learning what pain points they had, what things that they wanted to do, but they couldn't do, and you realized that you could solve some of them, then you become someone that when you ask, mind if I join, they're like, yeah, of course, it makes complete sense, right? And so that uncertainty of coming into the organization as a potential member, not knowing what you're”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like cell phones and consumer hardware, but the reality of it is hardware cycles are long cycles. Software cycles are short cycles, but the shortest cycle of all is something like food. So you can develop a dish in a matter of a few days and implement it straight away. So if you want to look at an example of an industry where you can really understand the dynamics of innovation because you see so many cycles and where the cost of failing is very low, they're almost like a perfect industry. This is my retrospective justification for why I'm in it. But nonetheless, it's true. It's a true justification. So these R&D teams basically created hiring processes that forced new potential members to be in a situation for often a prolonged period of time where they would have no clear or confirmed idea of what their role was. And so they'd be forced to spend all this time doing what I was suggesting before, trying to figure out what they”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something which I found very counterintuitive from a conventional perspective, I was trained as a conventional management academic or whatever. And most of that is about how. One of the big, often very implicit, it's a subtext for a lot of management strategy, management best practice, is get rid of as much of the uncertainty as possible. De risk, de risk, de risk, or take risk very seriously. So if you're an investor, you look for risk that you have asymmetry on, right? And what these R&D teams were doing more or less because they didn't have some MBAs to advise them to do it the other way. What they were doing was they were systematically doing things to themselves that seemed to make no sense because it would create uncertainty for them internally. And what was really counterintuitive and took a long time to get my head around was when they created uncertainty internally, it made them more able to deal with this rapidly changing environment that they were operating in. So I like to tell people these days that if you are trying to look for a consumer industry that is changing super fast, you can always look at things.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what the project is spending somewhere around five or six years with five restaurant R&D teams around the world to try and understand How it is that they design themselves so that they keep on being able to come up with new things, right? So that's sort of where I got to in the end. Why I started doing it was because I was doing a PhD. I was supposed to study innovation and I like food. So I went, I did it. It's like not a good reason, but this is an honest reason. Like most of the time you just go study something which you let's hope actually really are interested in. And then once you get there, you realize, holy shit, this is much more interesting than you could have expected without knowing anything about it. So you go there and then you realize why you're there, which is what happened to me. I think what I've learned from it is actually...”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source