42 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 25: Bite-Sized Lessons on Leadership and Establishing a Career

By Anders Lindholm

42 things I wish I knew when I was 25 is a collection of concepts that I have come across during the last 15 years or so. Throughout the book, I offer my reflections on various learnings that I have had during my time as a strategy consultant, as a husband and father, while attending a top tier MBA, and when working in several management roles in multinational industrial companies.
The concepts of the book can be broadly categorised into 5 areas: leadership, critical thinking, culture, business, and life hacks. Many recurring themes will be found throughout the book, with the importance of trust, bonding, and dialogue being some of the most prominent ones.
The concepts covered in the book are discussed in bite-sized fashion for quick reference. The intention is to trigger the curiosity of the reader by offering personal reflections around leadership and life in general. I would have benefitted from reading this book when setting off on my professional and personal journeys as a twenty-five-year-old, and hope that you will feel the same!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Feb 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781543768497

Anders Lindholm

Anders is 40 years old, married, and has two daughters. He has obtained extensive international experience of management roles in multinational companies, after having been educated as a Chemical Engineer and MBA. Anders is from Finland and currently lives in Singapore.

Book preview

1

GO-FEVER AND THE WEAK SIGNAL

When you have invested significant time and effort in a project and your reputation may, in part, depend on it being a success, it gets difficult to pull out, even if the project starts to look worse and worse as time goes by. Once you have invested time and effort into something, you might not be able to objectively judge the optimal course of action; you become like a horse with blinders on, you can only see one path ahead, and that path is to deliver the project in full and on time.

In the US space industry, it has been common to see an overall hurry and go-fever before a rocket launch. As go-fever kicks in, there is an increased risk of taking shortcuts (e.g. with regard to safety) to keep a deadline and achieve a set milestone. Go-fever is seen as one of the reasons why NASA’s Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch in 1986. On the morning of the launch, the temperature at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was minus two degrees centigrade, far below normal temperature in the region and far below any temperature experienced during previous launches. The project management team had deadlines to meet, and having faced delays already, they were itching to get the Challenger up in the air. They had go-fever.

The project management team decided to go ahead with the launch, even if there were several people and several signs saying that the launch should have been postponed. Sadly, the Challenger disintegrated barely one minute after launch, killing the entire crew of seven. Indeed, the freezing temperature had been the culprit as some of the materials used on the rockets failed due to the exposure to freezing temperatures. The hurry to launch the space shuttle had led to a catastrophic accident.

Management teams in business are also susceptible to go-fever. Once you have decided to do something, you develop a certain tunnel vision and might miss signals that you will register in normal circumstances. To counter this, you should take two and thoroughly assess the consequences and risks involved in the decision to be taken. By taking two, you step back and critically assess a decision that you are about to make. I have had go-fever several times myself. When you have worked years on preparing a major investment project, assessing it from all angles, in the end, you just really want the project to go ahead, and you may – sometimes subconsciously – turn a blind eye to any weaknesses that you may find in the project. You may find yourself rationalising the project by thinking that the positives surely outweigh the negatives in any case.

Recently, I and my wife, Heidi, experienced go-fever when buying an apartment. After agreeing on the price with the owner of the apartment, we heard from the tenant that there had been some water dripping from the ceiling some time ago but that this had been inspected and corrective works executed. Sure enough, a few weeks after buying the apartment, a significant leakage occurred from the ceiling. We had missed the weak signal and not investigated the leakage mentioned by the tenant, and now we were left to handle some needed corrective work in the ceiling. Before buying this apartment, we had looked at several others and made many unsuccessful bids. As the market was hot and prices kept going up, we were anxious to get a deal done, feeling like we had missed several other good opportunities already. We didn’t want to miss out on this one, and hence, we turned a blind eye to a weak signal that we heard.

Correctly registering and daring to act on weak signals is a trait that can set you apart as a business analyst or leader. Being attentive and diligently going through all details of your project gives you a better chance of avoiding mistakes, even if you and your team might be suffering from go-fever. Where most people only hear noise, some people will be able to register a weak signal. This weak signal can be an all-important fine print sentence in a legal contract, or it can be the voice of a customer informing about a potential issue with a product. It is easy to dismiss or not even hear such signals, but in the age of information overload, it is even more important to be able to pick up these weak signals that can help you avoid making costly mistakes.

2

MODULAR APPROACH

I’ve witnessed several impressive applications of modularisation. Consider a world-scale chemical plant with hundreds of kilometres of pipelines in it. The pipelines are the blood vessels of the plant, carrying raw materials, additives, cooling water, fire water, high-pressure steam, low-pressure steam, by-products, and end products to where they need to go. At first sight, I thought it will be impossible to modularise the construction of such a plant to any great extent. Surely, all these pipes snaking around the entire plant will need to be installed once the other equipment is erected, I thought. And so did many others, until recently.

As it turns out, today many such plants are built through a fully modular approach. The plant is split in several modules as if you will take a chainsaw and cut the finished plant in many rectangular pieces. At each cross section, you will have cut through tens of pipes and many steel structures. These modules are fabricated at specialist plant building yards and then transported by ship to the location where the plant is being erected. Each module can weigh tens of thousands of tonnes. As the prefabricated modules arrive at the construction site, they are moved in position by funny-looking flatbed vehicles with hundreds of small wheels. Once two adjacent modules are in the right position, the pipes are welded together and steel structures connected. Often such plant modules will travel halfway around the world, from the prefabrication yard to the construction site. Such a modular construction technique can save a project in the range of 10 per cent to 20 per cent on construction costs and allow for faster execution than when stick-built at the construction site. Naturally, the savings will depend on many factors, like location, type of plant, market situation, and so on and so forth.

Inspired by the building of a chemical plant, I decided to apply a modular approach to this book. To achieve maximum modularisation, the book is built up of discrete chapters that are autonomous and bite-sized and placed in no particular order. I hope that this will benefit the reader in that he or she can decide to jump over a few chapters and still be able to enjoy the book. Moreover, I hope that it will resonate with our increasingly busy schedules, where we might not find the time to read more than a handful of pages at any one time.

Many analysts use modular approaches for their financial models. A spreadsheet-based model is a lot easier to follow and update if it is set up in modules. The overall model is built up of many independent models that analyse a certain part of the business case, for instance, the fixed costs, the sales volume, and the growth expectations. These independent models within the overall model interface with one another, together producing the required outputs (like profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement) needed by the analyst.

Applying a modular approach can help isolate the different drivers of a certain phenomenon, and under the right circumstances, it is a powerful concept to break down something complex into manageable parts that can be solved in isolation. You can more easily ramp up the efforts on a modular versus sequential process as you can assign different teams to build modules in parallel and independently of one another as long as the interfaces are well defined.

When designing a project, drafting a management report, or setting up a financial model, I will first examine if the work can be modularised. More often than not, I find that it can, and this realisation has helped me effectively execute several work tasks during my career.

3

INFLUENCE AND PERSUASION

To build convincing arguments, it is important to be able to influence and persuade others. Influence and persuasion is applied in many situations in both private life and at work. For instance, during any buying or selling transaction, you are trying to persuade your counterpart either to buy something from you or to give you a discounted price on what is offered to you. When someone tries to convince you of investing money in their business, you will accept or dismiss it depending on how persuaded you are by their arguments.

To persuade someone during a negotiation, make their argument better and understand their view of the world, said Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. To effectively persuade, it is important to be empathetic and to listen to the concerns of others and to really put yourself in their shoes and try to understand their perspective.

What, then, drives us to be persuaded by someone else’s idea or argument? Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, identified seven fundamental levers that illustrate how the process of influence and persuasion works. Below, I share the identified levers, together with my personal interpretation and reflections.

1. Social proof – To influence you to follow traffic rules, it helps if other motorists are following the rules. If others don’t appear to be following the rules, you are likely to be less motivated to follow them.

I sometimes faced a dilemma when driving through an unpopulated area to visit a company facility, a trip that I made frequently during one part of my life. The highway was under construction, and the speed limit was set at 60 km/h for long stretches of road. However, in many parts of these stretches, there was no construction activity, and the road was in good shape. Normally, this kind of road would have a speed limit of 120 km/h. At first, I tried to keep the speed limit but soon found that this was kind of dangerous as other cars kept much higher speeds, and there was even a risk of being hit from behind. The tipping point came when I saw that the police were not reacting to drivers who were doing normal highway speed. I eventually also started to use what seemed to be a socially acceptable speed, even if the traffic signs indicated otherwise. I had been convinced by social proof that not following the speed limit in this case was acceptable.

2. Reciprocity – If someone is nice to you, you are more likely to be nice to them. By helping someone with a task, you have influenced them to help you when you require help with something. The old saying ‘You scratch my back, and I scratch yours’ sums up this lever quite well, and I am quite certain that this is a technique that is applied by most people from time to time.

3. Authority – You are more likely to be persuaded by a recognised expert in a specific field than a layman. If you are