Month: December 2019

The Four Layers of 2020 Goals Hierarchy

While I was setting up the goals for 2020, instead of grouping to traditional categories (areas of goals) like before, I’ve layered the goals based on the impact across the different layers of society.

There’s a phrase “修身齊家治國平天下” from an ancient Chinese classic “大學”, which translates into four phases of ruling the world:

  1. 修身: Developing and disciplining yourself to raise your intellectual and moral capacity
  2. 齊家: Taking care of your family and organizing your household
  3. 治國: Ruling the country
  4. 平天下: The world will be peaceful

Inspired from this phrase, I’ve organized the goals into the following four laters of 2020 goals hierarchy:

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The Art of Setting Personal Annual Goals

People tend to be a bit skeptical about setting a personal annual goal. Plans often don’t align with your reality and we’ve all experienced the frustration of setting a goal and giving up a few months into the year, unintentionally hurting your self-esteem.

But, if we don’t have a goal and a plan, we don’t really know whether we are headed in the right direction nor whether we’re making a progress towards a goal or not.

I deeply believe one of the core purpose of personal goal setting is not only to achieve them, but to build up your confidence and increase your self-esteem.

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Scaling Leadership through Two Management Frameworks

As an organization reaches certain scale, it is inevitable, at least due to the current limitation set by human interaction mechanisms (e.g. verbal communication, synchronous meetings, groups, hierarchies, physically independent) that there is a certain level of structure that needs to be put in place to manage the organization.

There is a few frameworks that can be useful when scaling the leadership. It’s local applications of the general management frameworks, so let’s explore how they can be relevant to scaling leadership.

1. Convergence <> Divergence framework

This framework demonstrates how to navigate within the horizontal layer (x-axis) of management.

As your organization scales, one thing you constantly run into is the overall increase in diversity within the organization. The proportion of diversity may increase or decrease, but the absolute number of diverse entity (in this case, employees) will simply increase as your headcount grows.

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