Lone Warrior – Tribal Leadership

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I have been reading “Tribal Leadership” that talks about the five stages of workplace culture. This is from an interview with Dave Logan (one of the authors):

  1. At Stage One people believe “Life sucks” and they cluster together, expressing hostility, such as in a gang.
  2. At Stage Two people believe “My life” sucks. They feel they are surrounded by people who have power, but they themselves do not.
  3. Stage Three is “I’m great,” which implies “You’re not.” It’s a culture of lone warriors.
  4. At Stage Four the “I” turns to “We” as those lone warriors group into value-based relationships.
  5. Stage Five is “Life is Great” where there is no “they.” These are the history-making groups that have excelled beyond competition.

I was reading the more in-depth version in the book that lists the characteristics of each stage. I think I am in Stage Three, but thankfully didn’t display most of the symptoms except one very surprising one! It was that people at this stage obsessively manage their time and track their time. Oh goodness me! I have been logging and tracking stuff since I was born. When I was in college (in India), I had to hitchhike from one end of Delhi to the other (buses were no good as they took 5 hours and you were just groped and mauled all the way over). So I kept track of every hitchhike I took over two years. I also tracked what I ate, how much I spent, how much I studied, how much I ran, which books I read and in how much time – in short, everything that could be tracked. And the data came in useful. My mom used my hitchhiking log to make a case to the Principal of the college to open the residence for girls.
Anyway! very interesting point that Stage Three leaders also track stuff – but mostly to show off. Oh dear. I dug deep into my soul and I think its partially true. I just love logging the numbers and seeing my graphs rise (I have one from Iridescent from way back when), but its also to show off 🙁 Oh well. will be more mature from now on!
P.S. This is the girl’s residence hall that was opened up thanks to my tracking.

Where does the time go?

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Weekly report # 4 and I am increasingly puzzled as to where all the time is going.


I started keeping the Toggl reports a month ago and logged a respectable 80 hours/week the first two weeks. And then it slid to 60 or so. At least my learning hours are increasing. I still work all the time (there are so many cool things to do and try!), but where is the time going?

Here are some conjectures:

  1. Transitions: I remember reading somewhere that a lot of time gets wasted transitioning from one activity to another. The past two weeks I have had more meetings and maybe that is where the leak is.
  2. Tennis: I also started playing tennis twice a week. This week I will try to throw in a few runs as well. I am in this for the long haul, so might as well stay healthy!
  3. Cooking: I am finally tired of frozen dinners (3 months of FFF or focused frozen-food eating). So we made a salad this week and one rice and beans.

On a related note, I would LOVE to know how intense CEOs like Howard Schultz, Wendy Kopp and the like manage their time. I know they run (or did when they wrote their memoirs) and have families and they must eat. So how do they manage?

How hard do I work?

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I came across this online program called Toggl and was hooked. I am addicted to logging stuff and this makes it pretty easy. Plus I have always wanted to know how I spend my time and how to be more efficient.

Here is the first report from the week!

I had an 80 hour week, battling jet lag, two proposals and a broken website (both are amply reflected in the graph).

I love how I know exactly how much time to budget for when writing the next proposal.

The Toggl interface could improve, but thats true of all of us and everything. Its a really neat tool if you want to figure out where your time goes and what to cut.

This coming week I want to focus on learning, planning long-term and following up on projects.