Build Your “Inner Board of Directors”: Use Multiple Perspectives to Untangle Difficult Problems

The problems encountered in entrepreneurship usually have no clear path, no clear objective, and sometimes no possibility of a complete solution. Entrepreneurs can only keep wrestling with them and learn to live with them. Such difficult problems arise continually throughout the entrepreneurial journey. What makes a “difficult problem” distinctive is the endless complexity within it: short-term and long-term considerations, all kinds of competing interests and demands, tangled together like a knotted mess. If you consider only your own preferences and needs, you may never untangle it. One very useful way to approach these problems is to build your own “inner board of directors.” Imagine people with different perspectives sitting in your mind, telling you how they see the problem and how they think it should be handled. A Dedao product manager's example follows below. There is another way to convene an “inner board.” You need not imagine other people. Invite yourself—but ask versions of yourself in different circumstances. For example, when making a decision, repeatedly ask yourself these questions: If I had nothing and were starting over, what would I choose? If I were going to die tomorrow, what would I choose? If I were in front of my children, what would I choose? After cooling down for three days, knowing myself as I do, what would I choose? If my self ten years from now were beside me, what would that person advise me to choose? If the person I most admire were beside me, what would that person advise me to choose? And so on. ---- A Shi, who leads the team behind the Dedao app's Listen to a Book Every Day, gave a talk about the thinking she uses to manage a product with long-term goals. She said that when facing choices as the team's leader, she makes judgments by imagining a decision-making panel. It consists of six people she has invented. The first is a user paying for a subscription right now. What value should you offer this user? One very important element is new books: titles that are just becoming popular and are about to become talking points. Helping users understand them quickly is an important knowledge service. It lets users keep up with society's hottest topics. So a current user sitting on this imaginary inner board would vote for high-value new books. That is what the team does. Dedao's editors practically wait at the doors of major publishers, taking typeset files before the books have even gone to print and working with the authors to refine the scripts. The result? The listening product goes live on the same day the new book is released. That is the speed they aim for. But a board cannot consist of this one person alone. In other words, new books alone are not enough. This is, after all, a product meant to accumulate value over the long term. What about the classics of human history? Plato's Republic, for example, is thousands of years old. As the saying goes, all Western philosophy is really a series of footnotes to this book. Even today, even in the Chinese-language market, the Republic sells 200,000 to 300,000 copies a year, exceeding the vast majority of new books and bestsellers. Books like this also need interpretation. So A Shi says her inner board needs a second “director”: a user ten years from now. This person's decision does not depend on whether a book is new, but on whether it is sufficiently enduring and has long-term value. That is how Listen to a Book Every Day came to have its “Treasures of the Collection” series. That is still not enough. The inner board needs a third member. Who? An ordinary person, with no particular preferences or specialist knowledge. This person must also be invited onto the board. Why? For quality control. Only when someone without particular preferences or specialist knowledge can understand a book and becomes interested in it does the listening product pass the quality test. This ordinary person's role on the inner board resembles an ancient Roman tribune: no decision-making power, but a veto. Exactly. However good the book or its interpretation, if an ordinary person cannot understand it or gains nothing, that person should naturally be able to veto it. Then there is a fourth person: imagine a doctoral student about to graduate and look for work. This student faces two choices. One is to stay at the university as a teacher, then work up through associate professor and professor. The other is to join Dedao and become a full-time writer for Listen to a Book Every Day, providing professional knowledge services. Which would this person choose? In other words, inviting this imaginary doctoral student onto the inner board brings in another perspective: what value can this product provide to its producers? Can it offer a dignified income, a degree of social recognition, and a chance to develop their craft? This places another set of constraints on the product's development. The fifth person is someone from the publisher. Can an interpretation of a book they publish improve its sales and enhance the publisher's reputation? That is what this person considers on the board. The sixth and final person brings another important perspective: the author. The author's greatest concern is whether an interpretation exaggerates, omits, misreads, or distorts the book. When all six people sit at the same table, convene this board in your mind whenever you make a major decision. Let each person offer an opinion, perhaps even vote. Then what you should do becomes clear. It is obvious that people in different positions have different interests and concerns. As long as you keep them in mind, they can help you make decisions. --- #得到 #邏輯思維 — Dedao / Logical Thinking My own addition: “This is actually much like Amazon's practice of leaving an empty chair at meetings. That chair represents the customer. Customers cannot attend, but their perspectives, needs, and interests must be met. Amazon therefore symbolically leaves a chair empty as a reminder to make decisions from the customer's perspective.”