IDEA ABSORPTION Idea generation is one of my biggest strengths as a problem solver but the inability to watch when / where i was doing it, was a big weakness early in my career as an executive / leader. I didn’t even realize I was inundating my org with ideas, until a peer Eng leader came to me and said “Gokul you’ve got to stop generating idea confetti. The org needs focused execution, not more ideas.” I’ve never forgotten that line from nearly two decades ago. I made two changes: (a) ideating in very small, mostly 1:1,settings with senior leaders, to flesh out a concept (I do this with AI today!), vs in groups, unless the goal of the group meeting was to ideate, and (b) trying to be Socratic in phrasing: “should we consider X” and being clear that X is a suggestion, not a directive, and it’s the team’s job to decide if X makes sense vs all the other things on their plate. Learnt this the hard way after being presented work output by someone who had worked on a project for a week based on misinterpreting a throwaway comment from me at a meeting. It was cathartic to see that Bezos had the same issue early on in his career. From a recent interview: “Jeff Wilke came to me one day he worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century but this is when he probably knew me only for a year and he said “Jeff you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” And this was such a shocking idea for me Jeff said you have enough ideas per minute per day per week to destroy Amazon. I was like what do you what do you mean? He’s like you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it and he was a manufacturing expert and so you know his view of the world was every time I released an idea I was creating a backlog a queue work in process and because it was just stacking up it was adding no value and in fact it was creating distraction and so he said ‘Look you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them and this was I mean this sounds so obvious but it was not obvious at the time to me and this was a profound insight for me and so I started prioritizing the ideas better keeping lists of them keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas and then I also started figuring out how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas that’s about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time and so and and that is what we built we built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time and you do want to build as the company gets bigger you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time but that idea of releasing the work was very profound for me and it made it made us operationally more effective while still being inventive and do you think you’re a better inventor.”