Final Week! Flashcards
If the goal is to “grow sales” need to
increase revenue, don’t worry about costs. Can we raise prices to raise revenue? Are there good substitutes in the market if we do? Can we lower prices to increase sales? Can we expand to new markets? Economies of scale. Can we create new products? Economies of scope (avg cost to produce is lower if produce more types of goods) Can we better market to existing customer segments?
of businesses in USA
28M
Failures:
Failure #1: SAHS History Lesson Plans
Failure #2: Elevator
Failure #3: Pep Rally
Failure #1: Lesson plan structures with history department first year
I had really learned how to teach at a charter school in Newark called North Star Academy. They were one of the highest performing schools for low income students in the country - they were taking students from poor neighborhoods and getting them all into colleges, many of them on full scholarships. People were literally traveling around the world to visit and learn from our school. North Star did many things right, but one way in which they were unique was they required all teachers to follow specific lesson plan structures that built in best practices for each classroom. For instance, all teachers had to give students independent work to do for the first five minutes of class, so that students would be calm and productive from the time they entered your room and you could check in with students and set the tone for a productive class. Nobody really challenged these best practices at North Star because they were clearly so effective, because all leaders and managers were totally bought into them, and teachers’ evaluations measured implementation of teacher practices like these. As a young teacher, being required to implement these practices just seemed like learning how to teach well, and I was very successful in part by using these strategies.
Therefore, when I became an Assistant Principal at another school, I thought that I should replicate these best practices, both on the teacher side and the management side. I thought that I could successfully require all teachers to use common lesson plan structures and they would be enthusiastic to do so, once they understood how effective they were. I was ready to collect and give feedback on lesson plans, just like my bosses did at North Star.
This approach failed miserably. The culture at my new school was totally different because Andy was opposed to anything didactic and didn’t believe instruction was the key to success - he wanted teachers to spend most of their time building relationships with students and parents and didn’t believe the details of a lesson were the key lever, so he didn’t write lesson plans when he was a teacher and he didn’t believe that teachers had to write lesson plans. As such, he didn’t put any kind of guardrails on instruction and didn’t really support my desire to collect and give feedback on lesson plans. However, I still thought that I should collect and give lesson plan feedback and should require teachers to implement best practices.
A few of my veteran teachers were very annoyed that I had higher requirements for lesson planning than their friends in other departments had, that they had to put more work in, that they had less flexibility in how they designed their lessons. Often they just disregarded the lesson plan structures and didn’t submit their lesson plans to me. I tried to hold them accountable but my principal clearly didn’t have my back. It was really tense for a bit as I saw these teachers really struggle and saw that they were fairly uninspired as a result of my management.
For the remainder of the year and for the entire next year, I totally changed my approach. I focused on setting very clear vision for what excellence looked like in student work samples, or the outputs, and didn’t put much emphasis on evaluating the inputs such as teacher actions or lesson plan design. I used data from student writing samples and exams to get teachers to deeply reflect upon what they were doing effectively and ineffectively and then coached them to improve upon their ineffective behaviors, based upon a shared understanding of the result that we wanted to change. Teachers had much more flexibility to design lessons creatively and to solve problems creatively.
I learned a ton from this failure. 1. It’s so much more effective to influence rather than tell, unless safety is involved. 2. It’s critical to be aligned with your manager and with the organizational culture or everything you try to do with your team will be much harder. 3. My job as a manager is to set vision, coach, motivate, and support, not to tell how to do the job.
Failure #2: Elevator
- This is a story about my failure to gain alignment with my boss and my boss’s boss and my failure to change course when I knew I didn’t have alignment.
One of the five teams I was managing was our operations team, which in part is responsible for maintaining excellence in facilities. This team was overwhelmed with major projects that directly affected our ability to achieve of mission of preparing students for success in college - for instance, they were fighting a major real estate developer who was doing construction during school hours that was so loud that students couldn’t hear their teachers, and they were improving safety systems to make sure we were prepared for emergencies in our building.
They were already above capacity when our CEO, my manager’s manager, decided that it was important that we address an escalator in our building that would break down once every few weeks. We shared a building with five other schools and the elevator was probably 70 years old and was maintained by bureaucrats in the Department of Education who moved slowly on everything and had a shoestring budget. The escalator was not a priority for them, no matter how many times we raised concerns about it, because they had legitimate safety issues in their hundreds of buildings throughout the city. The escalator was an issue for our CEO because she brought potential donors to our school for tours, and she didn’t like that they’d either have to walk up stairs or take an old elevator.
My managers and I agreed that fixing the escalator was a not a legitimate priority, that the city wouldn’t dedicate the necessary resources to fix it (and that it would be ethically questionable to put so much political pressure on them to spend the little money they had on this issue when other schools nearby had legitimate safety issues with their facilities). We agreed to continue pushing the city, but that we wouldn’t spend so much time on it that it would hurt our other priorities that were actually mission-critical. My bosses thought that if we communicated incremental progress to my CEO, that she’d be fine with us and would give us room to do the work we really needed to do for our kids.
I should have realized that my bosses and the CEO were not aligned and that he wasn’t willing to spend the political capital to tell her so directly. Instead, it appeared to her that we were just incompetent and too slow to move, since she didn’t see rapid progress. As a result, she had less faith in us, resulting in us having less space to make the necessary bold decisions we had to make to be successful as a school, with everyone terrified of her wrath each day.
I should have known that we were destined for failure if my bosses were not aligned with their manager, and I should have insisted that we fight for more resources or find a way to deprioritize other projects to free up resources if nobody was willing to tell her directly that her priorities on the issue were off.
In the end, I learned how important it is to gain alignment and buy-in up the hierarchy. It’s better to do many great but not perfect actions efficiently because you have buy-in than it is to struggle to do fewer ideal actions without buy-in. Obviously you should work to gain buy-in, but if I know that my boss is not aligned with her boss, then I need to re-evaluate how to proceed.
Failure #3: Pep Rally –> quick background about NSA culture, my belief in different management style of promoting ownership and giving a lot of autonomy. Made the mistake of not carefully checking pep rally plan that Meredith had owned (new hire but highly acclaimed and brought in to our school as a top performer, very unsure how to manage her against my instincts to be more involved. She failed to oversee her team, I failed to oversee her because I wanted to give autonomy and not feel like a micromanager and I was stretched very thin with many open spots so I couldn’t thought partner with her along the way. Saw the plan the morning of and I had to scramble last second to salvage. I learned that I need to be comfortable laying out on the friend end the criteria for success, giving a lot of flexibility to produce a first draft by a set benchmark date, then feel comfortable making my direct reports own revisions or redoing to ensure the criteria are met.
California’s house of representative count
53 out of 435 –> about 12% of the population of 320m
$200M growing at 10% for 3 years will be worth?
260M
Estimate Baseline: 200,000 CAGR: 50% Years: 1
300,000
Estimate 50,000 / 300
167
Estimate 60% x 260,000
156,000
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
How to use BreakevenQuantity to determine the quantity needed to reach target profit level
Quantity needed = (Profit desired / MP) + Qbe Target profit/profit per item + quantity needed to breakeven and start earning a profit
Estimate 6,300,000 / 55,000
115
Why did you study history and psychology
History: I was required to take a humanities course and so I chose American history, feeling a sense of obligation to better understand the country I lived in. The class was so different from my high school history experience and it really opened my eyes to how much I could learn by training to think like a historian. Unlike my high school class which simply required us to memorize stories the teacher told and to answer fact-based MC questions, in college I had to analyze dozens of primary sources to corroborate and challenge hypotheses about the past, to consider each document in the context it was written in to understand motivations, biases, and deeper meaning in language. I had to pit documents against each other to gain a fuller picture of what was happening at the time, and I had to weave together fact-based narratives that were persuasive in their carefully-crafted logic and in their precision and concision. I’ve always been deeply interested in understanding people and systems, and history gave me a useful way of learning more while developing critical thinking and communication skills I knew I’d need the rest of my life.
Psychology: I took an intro to psych course my first year, unaware of what psychology really meant, and I was hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed studying and critiquing creative research design and learning why humans think and act the way they do so I could better understand the world around me. I became truly passionate about psychology in my first social psych course when I began to understand how much people respond to their environment, and how the same person can act in totally different ways with small adjustments to their environment without realizing. I saw clearly how I could use intentional environmental and cultural design to get the best out of people, how to recognize and avoid cognitive biases and heuristics that cause people to make preventable mistakes, often tragically. Ever since, I’ve been passionate about organizational design, training, and behavioral economics.
Studies that fascinate me:
What do you do when you know you’re right, but the rest of the group disagrees with you? Do you bow to group pressure? In a series of famous experiments conducted during the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people would give the wrong answer on a test in order to fit in with the rest of the group.
In Asch’s famous conformity experiments, people were shown a line and then asked to select the line of a matching length from a group of three. Asch also placed confederates in the group who would intentionally select the wrong lines. The results revealed that when other people picked the wrong line, participants were likely to conform and give the same answers as the rest of the group.
While we might like to believe that we would resist group pressure (especially when we know the group is wrong), Asch’s results revealed that people are surprisingly susceptible to conformity. Not only did Asch’s experiment teach us a great deal about the power of conformity, it also inspired a whole host of additional research on how people conform and obey, including Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments.
Books I’ve read:
Drive by Daniel Pink
Nudge - Richard Thaler
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
% of households that are homeowners in USA
66%
Estimate 78% x 36%
28.08%
Estimate Baseline: 5,000,000 CAGR: 10% Years: 3
6,655,000
Canada’s population
36M
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
Estimate Baseline: 50,000 CAGR: 40% Years: 2
98,000
Estimate Baseline: 600,000,000 CAGR: 70% Years: 4
5,011,260,000
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 100% Years: 2
1,600,000
New York house of representative count
27 out of 435 –> about 6% (same as Florida)
Time about working in ambiguity
When I am working on a project with a lot of ambiguity, I actively fight the natural anxiety most people feel. I’ve tried multiple strategies, but the four that I’ve found most successful have been to:
- Shift my questioning about “what should I do” to “what could I do?” This makes a huge difference in reducing pressure, and opening up space for creative problem solving that often leads to critical insights.
- I change my context and my inputs, finding a balance between creating white space (time when I have no meaningful stimulation and my mind can wander and connect the dots for me, such as washing dishes or going on a walk) and reviewing a wide variety of materials without the pressure to find the perfect solution immediately.
- I change my inner dialogue to focus on how lucky I am to work on something challenging and meaningful. If there is a clear path forward, that would indicate my work isn’t pushing the boundary, and I’m grateful for the privilege to do work that makes a difference.
- I push myself to commit to the most likely to succeed action plan, and I carefully design the benchmarks at which I will assess progress and the metrics that I’ll use to assess whether my experiment is working. I make sure I methodically experiment and learn on the ground rather than getting caught up in the clouds for too long, which is my natural tendency if unchecked.
I honed this ability working on a leadership team that was designing and building a brand new high school model. We were actively designing a school we hoped to revolutionize what future high schools would look like. We rejected most popular beliefs about what schools have to look like, so every day there was a ton of ambiguity about how to proceed in our design and on-the-ground execution. For instance, I was promoted into a role in which I’d be managing our athletic director and our arts director. However, before I transitioned into this role my boss fired the athletic director and the arts director quit, and we were unable to find a strong enough candidate to hire. However, I still had responsibility for a vague outcome of ensuring that we had world class arts and athletic programming. I had no idea how to proceed - I had been put in my role because I had demonstrated success with managing managers across a wide variety of functions and the arts and athletic directors needed better management, but I didn’t know anything about their subject matter.
Tried to break down the problem into its component parts - there was a lack of vision for excellent arts and athletics programming, the traditional public school model teachers were never evaluated for students’ progress or skill development - as long as kids had fun and didn’t cause trouble, the teacher was given high ratings. I wanted teachers to work with the same level of urgency and accountability as history and math teachers, focusing on student outcomes rather than just the feel of their class. So I had teachers create 4-year sequences of in-school and out-of-school programming a student might take including clear skill and knowledge outcomes for each year, so we could measure progress and assess the efficacy of our experiments.
Estimate 640,000,000 / 6,800
94,118
Estimate 96% x 39%
37.44%
Strengths
Strength #1: I have great emotional self-control in stressful environments - I can remain calm, rationale, clearheaded, respectful, and strategic when involved in conflict. - Joel
Strength #2: I am great at taking people’s pie in the sky and half-baked ideas and transforming them into detailed and achievable implementation plans that are grounded in facts and analysis. I identify flaws in plans and analysis that most people miss, I analyze situations from various perspectives, and I anticipate surprises and complications. –> Kayla and SpEd plan
Strength #3: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement. - 9th turnaround
Strength #1: I have great emotional self-control in stressful environments - I can remain calm, rationale, clearheaded, respectful, and strategic when involved in conflict.
Honed this strength when working in a chaotic classroom in a dysfunctional high school where kids would try to fight in class, would curse at me, try to walk out. I had to maintain my composure, give clear directions and consequences, instruct about complicated concepts in a clear way while correcting distractions. Learned to control my breathing, to challenge my own assumptions and instincts, decide what I want the outcome to be, and make a strategic move to get closer to my desired end result.
For instance, I was leading a turnaround of an underperforming 9th grade teaching team. At one stage, it was critical for all teachers on this team to check every students’ homework every day, by 3pm, so we could hold students accountable before they were dismissed.
One teacher on the team, Joel, was furious about this new requirement, especially because he thought we were adding an hour of work to his plate each day. His response was triggering for me. I wanted to assertively respond: “Don’t talk to me so aggressively, who do you think you are? And part of choosing to work in this school is accepting your obligation to do whatever is necessary to help our students succeed, even if it means working until midnight like I do every night.” Of course that would have been ineffective. So…
I took three deep breaths, then I asked myself what’s the most generous interpretation of why he’s acting like this and what does he need, I asked myself what do I want to get out of this interaction, and then I decided on my next move.
I started talking a bit more slowly to calm myself down and to de-escalate the situation. I said, “Joel, you seem upset about this. I understand that you think this requirement is going to add an hour of work for you each day. If I am able to prove to you that it doesn’t have to, will you give it a shot for a week and we can re-evaluate?” That gave me room to think quickly about ways for Joel to meet my requirements as efficiently as possible.
I literally walked around an empty classroom, pretending to talk to students, modeling for him how he could use a checklist on a clipboard with some pre-determined criteria to quickly assess the quality of student’s homework within the first five minutes of class as students did independent work. I then had him practice so I could coach him on how to be even more efficient and how to avoid pitfalls with the plan.
He bought in, realized how big of an impact this new routine had on his class, and became my biggest advocate. Many moments like these helped us transform a team and drive major results for students, leading to a doubling in the # off students who completed 100% of their homework each week.
Strength #2: I am great at taking people’s pie in the sky and half-baked ideas and transforming them into detailed and achievable implementation plans that are grounded in facts and analysis. I identify flaws in plans and analysis that most people miss, I analyze situations from various perspectives, and I anticipate surprises and complications.
For example, one of my teams was trying to radically improve the quality of our instruction and support for students with disabilities, because they were performing about 11% below the rest of the school. Kayla, the special education director, had good picture ideas, such as adding new classes, changing assistant principals’ KPIs and daily routines, and doing whole-staff trainings about how to improve their instruction. I worked closely with her to improve her draft implementation plan. We improved the sequence of interventions, we adjusted the plan based upon the perspectives and concerns we anticipated each stakeholder would have, and we revised the logistical details to avoid overloading teachers or students at certain parts of the day. This plan led to us closing the gap between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers from 11% to 3%, making us the leader in the network of 40 schools.
Strength #3: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement.
9th grade turnaround - noticed in my data analysis a need to provide students with a more consistent experience from class to class to improve homework completion rates and to reduce the number of escalated behavioral issues we faced.
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 100% Years: 5
12,800,000
India’s population
1.4B (same as China)
Estimate 40,000,000 / 1,200
33333
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
Estimate 28% x 7%
1.96%
Estimate 48,000,000 / 1,400
34,286
Estimate 27,000 x 29,000
783,000,000
Ways to enter a new market
- Start from scratch and build in house
- Form a joint venture
- Acquire an existing player
What am I taking next semester (demonstrates interest in the job?)
–> Google, HC, Consulting
Power and Influence: To learn how to map power dynamics and politics in organizations, to learn how to gain and exert influence within an organization.
Beyond that, I’m intentionally stretching myself. If I did what was most enjoyable to me or easiest for me, I would take the dozens of management courses I am very excited by. Instead, I am thinking about the skills I will need to make a big impact and I’m taking courses that will make me more well-rounded and more capable of deriving actionable insights from large data sets - Business Analytics 2, Applied Regression Analysis. Econometrics for Modern Business, and a coding course in SQL to be able to access databases.
Additionally, Operations Strategy and Napoleon’s Glance, which is about strategic intuition.
Estimate 21% x 23%
4.83%
If we lower prices by 10%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
11.11% (1/9)
Estimate 39,000 x 93,000
3,627,000,000
Estimate Baseline: 20,000,000 CAGR: 85% Years: 5
433,399,731
Estimate 65% x 98%
63.70%
Tell me about a time you used quantitative skills, data modeling skills
I’ve done my most sophisticated quantitative work at business school, especially in business analytics. In that class we had to design simulations to optimize hotel bookings, we learned how to use excel functions to optimize investment portfolios, we learned how to measure the impact of experimental interventions in charter schools to control for the impact of luck, and we used logistic regressions to optimize spending on medical interventions.
I’m building upon this foundation this coming semester, taking rigorous quantitative electives such as Business Analytics II, Applied Regression Analysis, Econometrics for Modern Business, and Intro to Programming in SQL.
At work, I used a wide variety of data to create our COO’s geographic expansion strategy [see story above]
I also used quantitative analysis to study gaps in student performance to create action plans after each exam.
Ways to expand internationally
- Exporting
- Licensing
- Franchising
- Joint Venture
- Foreign direct investment (acquisition or startup)
If we lower prices by 50%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
100%
If we lower prices by 25%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
33.3%
Pressure test: “I was at Wharton yesterday and interviewed 10 candidates all of whom are more qualified than you…” - “You have a lot of accomplishments but nothing that qualifies you to be a consultant…” - How should I respond?
I respectfully disagree and I know I will be a great value-add for your firm.
My leadership and managerial experience far exceeds most people you’ve interviewed from MBA campuses, not only in terms of years but also in terms of quality and impact. I’ve helped build and lead some of the highest performing charter schools in the country, schools that are sending 100% of their students to college while our neighboring schools are sending only 50-60%. In the process I’ve exhibited the same skills you are looking for:
- I had to effectively build relationships with and influence a wide variety of stakeholders, from janitors to senior leader
- Effectively lead teams and manage projects to solve complex problems: I managed a team that led to 48% growth in achievement by students with disabilities. We analyzed multiple data sources to create a strategic plan that our CEO approved, and then retrained teachers and improved daily support systems.
- Design and implement strategies that have major business impact: I designed and executed a plan to integrate two schools by streamlining operations, communications, and data systems. My work reduced enough redundancies to provide our students seven additional teachers. Most recently, I developed our Chief Operating Officer’s strategy for new school locations by analyzing multiple data sets such as census data, school applications data, and school building occupancy rates.
- Act with high levels of ownership and initiative: While managing twelve direct reports across various functions, I took the initiative to design and implement our school’s first onboarding program, our first performance evaluation process, and a brand-new data management and communications system.
Estimate 37,800,000 / 63,000
600
An investment project requires an initial investment of $1M and will result in a profit of $10M in 8 years. The discount rate is 9%. What’s the NPV?
NPV = PV of profits - PV of Investment+costs
With discount rate of 9%, using “Rule of 69-72”, the investment will double in 8 years.
So the $10M profit 8 years from now is worth half today, or $5M.
So the NPV = 5M - 1M = 4M
Estimate 59% x 73%
43.07%
What do you do outside of school, not on your resume?
Live music and food and friends
Spend a lot of time doing informational interviews about pre-schools, interviewing school leaders and senior level leaders in supporting organizations, economists. Work with Appletree to help them determine whether to open in NYC, to craft their approach to potential partnerships, etc. Connect them with economists
Pressure test: “I was at Wharton yesterday and interviewed 10 candidates all of whom are more qualified than you…” - “You have a lot of accomplishments but nothing that qualifies you to be a consultant…” - How should I respond?
I respectfully disagree and I know I will be a great value-add for your firm.
My leadership and managerial experience far exceeds most people you’ve interviewed from MBA campuses, not only in terms of years but also in terms of quality and impact. I’ve helped build and lead some of the highest performing charter schools in the country, schools that are sending 100% of their students to college while our neighboring schools are sending only 50-60%. In the process I’ve exhibited the same skills you are looking for:
- I had to effectively build relationships with and influence a wide variety of stakeholders, from janitors to senior leader
- Effectively lead teams and manage projects to solve complex problems: I managed a team that led to 48% growth in achievement by students with disabilities. We analyzed multiple data sources to create a strategic plan that our CEO approved, and then retrained teachers and improved daily support systems.
- Design and implement strategies that have major business impact: I designed and executed a plan to integrate two schools by streamlining operations, communications, and data systems. My work reduced enough redundancies to provide our students seven additional teachers. Most recently, I developed our Chief Operating Officer’s strategy for new school locations by analyzing multiple data sets such as census data, school applications data, and school building occupancy rates.
- Act with high levels of ownership and initiative: While managing twelve direct reports across various functions, I took the initiative to design and implement our school’s first onboarding program, our first performance evaluation process, and a brand-new data management and communications system.
What are 5 adjectives that describe your interpersonal skills and communication style?
Direct
Steady
Great listener
Paraphrase a lot in order to ensure I understood correctly
Genuine
Breakeven formula
Profit = (MP*Q)-FC or Profit = (Price * Quantity) - (Variable Cost * Quantity) - FC Set profit = 0 BreakevenQuantity = FC / MP
Estimate 60% x 7,100,000
4,260,000
Resume story - book club
Book club focused on ethics and policy Ethics and the Real World -
“Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
“Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Life 3.0 - when we have artificial intelligence driving us, how does it decide when it’s about to run into a person what to do - should it hit the person ahead or swerve and hit a different group of people? What if directly ahead is one person that’s 99 years old and to her right is a group of pregnant mothers?
Quest for Cosmic Justice
21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Harrari (Sapiens, Homo Deus)
Winners Take All
Weapons of Math Destruction
Time anticipated business need for org and how I got ahead of it
Special Education - all my boss cared about was pleasing his boss with an efficient paperwork process for special ed. I realized that was a tiny part of the problem we ultimately had to solve. I found a way to do that process better than anyone else in the network. Then I moved on to the core of the issue, which was improving instruction. See SpEd story.
Brainstorm: Your client is a company that provides full-genome sequencing direct to consumers. It’s considering launching a platform that allows consumers to opt-in to a marketplace to sell their genetic data to researchers, biopharma and healthcare companies. The benefits are clear: consumers would be able to offset costs of the testing, allowing the firm to reach a wider consumer audience. In addition, it opens up a second lucrative revenue stream selling genetic data which could lead to important medical break-throughs. The path forward will be tough though and they’re looking for a well-versed third party to lay out all the key risks for them.
Data privacy: A customer’s genome (arguably the most personal of all data) could be stolen or leaked There is risk of researchers oversharing genetic data after purchased (e.g., gets inappropriately copied, etc.) Data misuse: Various healthcare companies might start acquiring data for purposes outside of medical research For example, insurance providers might improperly screen for pre-existing conditions Demand matching: Will there be enough demand? Will there be enough consumers interested in supplying genomic data? How will they kick-start the two-sided marketplace flywheel?
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
EU’s population
500M
Estimate 25% x 95%
23.75%
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 5% Years: 3
463,050
Estimate 73% x 85%
62.05%
Tell me something unique about yourself
Wrote our wedding contract and ceremony, wrote and officiated friend’s wedding.
I have had meaningful relationships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, giving me a very unique perspective on the world: Janitors in rural NC that are single mothers, Yemeni immigrant custodians, teachers in rural NC that are horribly racist, Singaporean millenials, first generation students from the rust belt, west african teenagers.
Estimate Baseline: 6,000,000 CAGR: 5% Years: 1
6,300,000
Estimate 16,000 x 400,000
6,400,000,000
Number of seats in the house of representatives (for market sizing purposes - percent of US population for key states)
435
If we increase prices by 25%, how much does quantity have to decrease for us to break even?
20%
$1.8B growing at 8% for 6 years will be worth?
2.7B
Estimate Baseline: 500,000,000 CAGR: 50% Years: 6
5,695,312,500
Estimate Baseline: 900,000 CAGR: 40% Years: 3
2,469,600
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 45% Years: 3
1,219,450
Weaknesses
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively.
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Hopefully you don’t notice it right now, but I’m naturally a really fast speaker and a mumbler. I’ve had this issue since I was a child. I know it’s hard for some people to understand me if I am not very intentional about my pace and enunciation. However, doing so occupies a lot of cognitive resources and often causes me from sounding as natural and engaging as I do when I’m not focused on being more understandable. This means that when I am having a challenging conversation with someone and I need to be careful with my message, I often don’t sound a bit more robotic and less empathetic than I’d like.
What I’m doing about it:
I’m generally best at communicating when I’ve had a bit of time to prepare what I want to say, because then I can spend more of my cognitive resources on the delivery and not splitting between idea generation and delivery. So I try to prepare for meetings and presentations more than most people.
I’m taking improv classes to get better at thinking and communicating on the fly
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
I am often too risk averse and overly analytical about new ideas or situations. This can frustrate my colleagues for several reasons:
Many people have great ideas from intuition, and they get frustrated with me when I can’t buy-in without a more reasoned justification.
My risk aversion can easily prevent major breakthroughs or innovations.
My desire to seek out more and more information to ensure I get a decision right can cause stagnation.
What I’m doing about it:
I go out of my way when I work with new people to be transparent about my weaknesses. I find that in addition to helping build relationships through my vulnerability, this process helps people understand why I’m operating the way I am and they are able to respectfully push back on my when I’m falling into traps, even if they are my direct reports.
If I’m collaborating with someone on a task, I’ll tell them that I want to set a time limit for how long we spend on a particular aspect of the project to avoid stagnation of my own-creation.
I set timers for myself when I’m 50% of the way done with my time allotted for a task and I ask myself whether I’ll be better off with a more refined product or a finished product, and I adjust course
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
At my last two jobs I received feedback that people I worked closely with loved working with me, but that I initially came across as a bit standoffish and hard to get to know. This really hurt me with people who deeply value relationship building at work, and I’m sure it made people feel less comfortable than I’d like them to be.
I think this might have been because of insecurity with my authority as a very new and young school leader and thought I should act in a more formal way.
I’ve really worked at fixing this at business school, since I have new opportunities almost every day to meet new people in a wide variety of settings.
I’ve made it a point to improve my ability to engage in small talk and relationship building in group settings at each event I’ve attended. I’ve practiced at nightly company presentations during the networking session, I practiced at all the orientation events, and I practice when I walk into a classroom ten minutes early and have an opportunity to get to know my classmates better.
I had to make a mindset shift, to drill home that it’s my job to be approachable, likeable, enthusiastic, and interested. I had to remind myself that I genuinely love learning about people, the work they do, the places they are from, and their passions. When I’m in the right mood I’m a great conversationalist, but I sometimes have to force myself to act that way when I’m not in the mood.
I’ve made drastic improvements - I got wonderful feedback from my learning team on this issue through surveys they filled out about me, I successfully networked to the point I got interviews at all but one consulting firm. I feel confident that hearing two different sets of colleagues give me similar feedback sunk in and I know this is an area to focus on whenever I enter a new group situation.
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively. For the early part of my career, default was to coach, to encourage incremental and consistent growth by changing inputs, to overvalue inputs. This led people to focus too much on one way of doing the job and didn’t allow for as much autonomy as I would like my direct reports to have. In my most recent job, I shifted too much in the opposite direction. I was working in an environment in which my managers only cared about outcomes and their standards were incredibly high, to the point it was unlikely that anybody would ever reach their goals. I tried to mimic this approach with my direct reports, but I found myself having a hard time finding genuine praise on outcomes because nobody ever met the high bar we set. As a result, I worried I was beginning to exhaust my team as I focused too much on the gaps between the product and their gold standard without praising the improvements in their inputs that were beneficial for the school and that might keep them motivated.
I learned each approach working at two different organizations with opposite approaches to management. I fully bought-into each approach when I worked at their organization because I wanted to learn from their successes and give their methods a shot. Now I’m seeking out new ideas about how to blend the best of both approaches - I ask friends and classmates to tell me about their experiences at work, I’m reading leadership and management books, and I’m looking forward to learning from my next employer.
Resume story - food
Wontons in hot oil @ White Panda in Flushing
Pork dumplings at Little Pepper in College Point
Peter Pan and Moe’s Doughs in Greenpoint
Dough Hut in Long Beach, LI
Donuts before dinner and donuts at our wedding
BreakevenQuantity =
FC / MP
Estimate Baseline: 900,000,000 CAGR: 55% Years: 6
12,480,520,514
Estimate 64% x 21%
13.44%
Y1: +20%
Y2: + 30%
Overall Change?
+56%
Time when working on an assignment with unclear owner but had to get the project done, what I did
One way I’ve consistently contributed to teams I’m on is by providing structure, clarity, and accountability for work streams. When I was an Assistant Principal I was part of an 8 person leadership team that was designing and building a brand new high school model day by day. It was a highly entrepreneurial and fluid project with daily leadership team meetings at 5:30pm to assess our daily progress, to solve issues that arose that day, to respond to the most up to date data, and to plan what everyone was going to work on that evening before the next day. By 5:30 everyone was exhausted and so people would want to get out of the meetings as soon as possible, so there was a lot of pressure and momentum to quickly rattle through the problems and updates from the day. I immediately saw a huge problem coming - we had identified a dozen ideas for solutions to problems that were raised but nobody had been assigned ownership over the next steps or a deadline by which to complete them. I decided it was critical to pause the meeting, backtrack, and assign owners and deadlines for each task. I did this day after day, with my colleagues often frustrated that the meeting went a few minutes longer, but to great effect for our team. I soon advocated to my boss to be the facilitator and note-taker at our meeting, ensuring that we drafted an shared document to the entire team with meeting notes, next steps with owners and deadlines as we went, and that we wouldn’t move on to the next agenda item until we had clarity on ownership.
When I wasn’t in the room to proactively solve delegation issues. Sometimes my principal would send out a memo to our leader team with his analysis of school-wide issues and what he thought were aligned solutions. He invariably would leave off owners and deadlines. As soon as I would see these emails, I’d draft a delegation plan taking into account different leader team member’s strengths, workloads, and work streams. I would reply to the email saying that I want to ensure that these action items get done at a high level and I’m concerned about ownership. Can you please reply back to the group with clear owners, and here’s a delegation plan you can adopt wholesale or in part? He would thank me every time and forward my delegation plan back to the team and have them report progress to me.
Of course there were rare occasions when I couldn’t support the team by organizing the work and I just took it on myself. I never let a task go unaddressed to kids detriment just because nobody had assigned me it.
Estimate 30% x 10%
3%
If you could come up with a new capability for one of your favorite Google products, what would it be?
Better integration with Evernote or OneNote since Google doesn’t offer a platform nearly as powerful for task management. I can’t easily capture information from my email or the web or by taking pictures and tag my action item on it, and constantly reorganize the task lists given my priorities.
Consulting 2 minute pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to structure and solve, much like a consultant. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved designing strategy and that I wanted to do similar work as a consultant across a wide range of industries. As I explored consulting opportunities, I realized I was a perfect fit - 1. I knew how to ramp up quickly, as I had to learn new content with each new class I taught; 2. I knew how to influence diverse stakeholders, from janitors to CEOs; and 3. I had learned how to solve a wide variety of problems within my classroom and at the school level. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit and to open doors for consulting because it’s the perfect job for me. [Planting seeds for next question]
How I work on teams
Teamwork Story #1: SpEd - just de-emphasize my management role, emphasize my role as a refiner, helping to create high quality implementation plans from pie-in-the-sky ideas.
How I work on teams:
–> Provide structure for the work, ensure we have clear goals for each meeting, clear action steps/owners/deadlines at the end of each meeting.
–> Refiner - ID flaws in plans and ideas, anticipate surprises and complications because I can think multiple steps ahead from various stakeholders’ perspectives
–> Find flaws in analysis or explanations, help refine them so they are less prone to refutation
–> Keep the team positive, building positive momentum, give a ton of gratitude.
Why Org/HC?
I have two reasons: 1. The work’s aligned with my intellectual passion; and 2. I’m motivated by my experiences working in two types of organizations, one of which was wildly more successful as a result of their approach to human capital.
- I’ve been intellectually fascinated by organizational and human capital issues since I took my first psychology course as a freshman in college. I quickly decided to add psychology as a second major, and have been studying how to make teams, organizations, and individuals meet their potential ever since. I read all the Harvard Business Review, behavioral economics, and human capital literature I can find. I even advocated to be given projects that allowed me to test my skills and interest in doing human capital work. For instance, I
–> I designed our high school’s first onboarding program and performance review process.
–> I overhauled our school’s communication and data storage systems to improve teacher’s ability to communicate across the school more effectively and to access the information they needed to do their job.
–> I led a merger of two high schools, designing and executing strategies to integrate leadership teams, teaching teams, and communication systems to free up resources for students.
–> I helped design our school’s org chart to align our management reporting and training structures to meet our strategic goals.
—–> Helped structure the long term growth of the school when we found out we’d be keeping the 8th grade with us. Other APs and Andy had originally advocated for APs by grade level and then department chairs at each grade level (the latter which doesn’t make sense). i advocated (and ultimately succeeded in convincing the team) to adapt an AP by discipline model and to add deans by grade level and to add an AP for Talent because I saw two hours a day not being strategically managed for maximum benefit. I also pushed for the development of an IL system to develop more content-based leadership experience and pipeline for new high school APs.
- I’ve worked in two types of schools: A traditional public school as part of Teach For America, and in two high performing public charter schools. On the surface, the schools were similar - they had about 600 teenagers attend, almost all black, almost all poor. They had the same goal of getting students into college. Critically, we didn’t choose our students in any of the schools, and the schools were free for students. However, the outcomes couldn’t have been more different. [Pause] The traditional public school couldn’t get a single student to pass a college-level exam and they had abysmal college acceptance rates. The charter schools had 100% college acceptance rates, high test scores, and our students earned nearly a million dollars in merit-based scholarships.
What truly separated these schools was the quality of their human capital processes and organizational design:
–> Unlike the traditional public school that failed in nearly each of these ways, the charter schools had developed effective talent acquisition and management programs, great staff training, and industry-leading leadership-development programs. The Chief People Officers had led principals to create wonderful working environments in which teachers were happy to put in 70+ hours per week with low pay, and development programs that pushed teachers and leaders to constantly improve.
It is tragic that millions of people spend most of their life at work, failing to meet their potential, often because their organizations, much like my NC public school, failed to create environments that promoted their best work. In my post-MBA career, I want to help organization’s improve their effectiveness as they grow, morph, and deal with the significant disruption they are facing in a rapidly changing technological and competitive landscape.
China’s population
1.4B (same as India)
Estimate 16,000,000 / 7,200
2,222
If the prompt involves “green” or something non-profit, need to…
incorporate non-financial factors as well
Name a process that wasn’t working and what you did to fix it
One of the top complaints from our staff our first two years is that they were constantly distracted by our communication systems and expectations and that they didn’t know where to find any of the information they needed. They felt totally discombobulated daily, and their managers were complaining that teachers weren’t reading their emails or completing their tasks. I suggested to my principal that I spend a lot of time over the summer and in the early fall designing a new communication system and associated staff-wide expectations to address the issue.
First gathered data from a wide variety of staff members across multiple teams - what were their biggest sources of frustration with our current communication and data storage, what would they want to be true about an improved system?
Then I analyzed all the interviews and survey results and noticed there were three top priorities:
Teachers needed to be able to focus on their most critical work without constantly being interrupted by text messages from their colleagues, or with fear that they would miss out on critical information if they weren’t constantly checking their email. At the same time, leaders needed their direct reports to read updates fairly frequently as were building the school day to day and plans were constantly changing.
Teachers felt like they were receiving deliverables from all angles at all times of the day. There wasn’t a single list of tasks they had to complete for the various departments that were making requests of them, and people were requesting time-intensive action at the last minute due to poor planning. People were missing deliverables right and left.
Teachers needed a consistent place to find the various documents and trackers their teams and managers were creating and using - they seemed to have a new tracker to fill out every couple of days and couldn’t keep track of them in their email.
I then created a high level vision of how communication would be different for the next year - I didn’t choose specific tools or get into the details. The big pillars were:
- Clear rules about when to use email versus when to use a text-message like communication tool, based upon how urgently the recipient would have to read the message.
- 95% of tasks teachers had to complete would be put in a single document that was collaboratively created and then carefully edited by Thursday of each week, for the following week. This was to promote better future-planning and to decrease the number of missed tasks.
I would create a website that would serve as a hub for all of our communication tools and key documents. If a staff member had a question or had to reference a document, they would clearly be able to find it on the webpage or through a clearly-marked link from the webpage.
Then I went to my manager, the principal of the school, to share my findings and to get his buy-in on the outcomes I was striving for in the system. I knew that he was the number one offender in teachers’ minds of constant and disorganized communication, and that he was motivated to change his own behavior and the school’s culture given the complaints we’d received.
I then developed a few prototypes and met with various staff members to get feedback on each of them. Then I refined them and got more feedback from my principal.
Then I prepared my change management plan and rollout messaging and presentation.
The end product:
No SMS - use Hangout/Gchat groups for your team as a replacement for group texts and direct messages as replacement for text messages (put the “texting” on the same screen as email since we used Gmail, easy to search, and easy to mute notifications when doing focused work)
Everyone had to check the Hangouts 3x a day - once before starting work, once at lunch, and once before leaving for the day. All leaders or people delegating work had to put tasks and updates in the appropriate channels, knowing the recipient was not obligated to check except these three times a day (preserve focus, encourage future planning, allow for course corrections every four hours)
I created the Hub with Google Sites - integrated the task lists (via Trello), Google Calendar, embedded Google Docs, embedded YouTube videos, etc.
I led task list creation meeting each Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday.
Result - So much praise, shout outs at meetings, shout outs to my manager. People said they were much better able to focus and get updates and respond effectively. Anecdotally far fewer missed deliverables. However, I left before I did any formal surveys as I was still in the process of change management, changing habits. Wasn’t perfect when I left.
What is NPV?
PV of cash inflows MINUS PV of cash outflows (investments)
Situation in which I used metrics to convince a group to take a certain action
- Geographic Expansion Strategy
- 9th grade history team turnaround
- Decision to re-do 9th grade history during my first summer as AP
Estimate 1,600,000,000 / 6,480
246,914
Estimate Baseline: 7,000,000 CAGR: 20% Years: 2
10,080,000
Why Org/HC?
I have two reasons: 1. The work’s aligned with my intellectual passion; and 2. I’m motivated by my experiences working in two types of organizations, one of which was wildly more successful as a result of their approach to human capital.
- I’ve been intellectually fascinated by organizational and human capital issues since I took my first psychology course as a freshman in college. I quickly decided to add psychology as a second major, and have been studying how to make teams, organizations, and individuals meet their potential ever since. I read all the Harvard Business Review, behavioral economics, and human capital literature I can find. I even advocated to be given projects that allowed me to test my skills and interest in doing human capital work. For instance, I
–> I designed our high school’s first onboarding program and performance review process.
–> I overhauled our school’s communication and data storage systems to improve teacher’s ability to communicate across the school more effectively and to access the information they needed to do their job.
–> I led a merger of two high schools, designing and executing strategies to integrate leadership teams, teaching teams, and communication systems to free up resources for students.
–> I helped design our school’s org chart to align our management reporting and training structures to meet our strategic goals.
—–> Helped structure the long term growth of the school when we found out we’d be keeping the 8th grade with us. Other APs and Andy had originally advocated for APs by grade level and then department chairs at each grade level (the latter which doesn’t make sense). i advocated (and ultimately succeeded in convincing the team) to adapt an AP by discipline model and to add deans by grade level and to add an AP for Talent because I saw two hours a day not being strategically managed for maximum benefit. I also pushed for the development of an IL system to develop more content-based leadership experience and pipeline for new high school APs.
- I’ve worked in two types of schools: A traditional public school as part of Teach For America, and in two high performing public charter schools. On the surface, the schools were similar - they had about 600 teenagers attend, almost all black, almost all poor. They had the same goal of getting students into college. Critically, we didn’t choose our students in any of the schools, and the schools were free for students. However, the outcomes couldn’t have been more different. [Pause] The traditional public school couldn’t get a single student to pass a college-level exam and they had abysmal college acceptance rates. The charter schools had 100% college acceptance rates, high test scores, and our students earned nearly a million dollars in merit-based scholarships.
What truly separated these schools was the quality of their human capital processes and organizational design:
–> Unlike the traditional public school that failed in nearly each of these ways, the charter schools had developed effective talent acquisition and management programs, great staff training, and industry-leading leadership-development programs. The Chief People Officers had led principals to create wonderful working environments in which teachers were happy to put in 70+ hours per week with low pay, and development programs that pushed teachers and leaders to constantly improve.
It is tragic that millions of people spend most of their life at work, failing to meet their potential, often because their organizations, much like my NC public school, failed to create environments that promoted their best work. In my post-MBA career, I want to help organization’s improve their effectiveness as they grow, morph, and deal with the significant disruption they are facing in a rapidly changing technological and competitive landscape.
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
What is Gross Margin %?
Gross Margin = Sales - COGS
As a percentage, it’s:
(Sales-COGS)/Sales
How to measure whether your retail company’s growth is from opening new stores or from improved performance?
Same Store Sales
Tell me about a time you used quantitative skills, data modeling skills
I’ve done my most sophisticated quantitative work at business school, especially in business analytics. In that class we had to design simulations to optimize hotel bookings, we learned how to use excel functions to optimize investment portfolios, we learned how to measure the impact of experimental interventions in charter schools to control for the impact of luck, and we used logistic regressions to optimize spending on medical interventions.
I’m building upon this foundation this coming semester, taking rigorous quantitative electives such as Business Analytics II, Applied Regression Analysis, Econometrics for Modern Business, and Intro to Programming in SQL.
At work, I used a wide variety of data to create our COO’s geographic expansion strategy [see story above]
I also used quantitative analysis to study gaps in student performance to create action plans after each exam.
Estimate Baseline: 600,000 CAGR: 35% Years: 4
1,992,904
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
If we lower prices by 33.3%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
50%
Estimate Baseline: 90,000 CAGR: 30% Years: 3
197,730
Estimate 95% x 55%
52.25%
Estimate 2,900 x 98,000
284,200,000
$240M growing at 5% for 5 years will be worth?
300M
Brainstorm: For the last three weeks, you’ve been working with a small team on an LA-based case for a medium-sized film production company that has a track record of producing high brow, niche content and partnering with film distribution companies. A new Associate just joined the team and has been assigned to benchmarking production costs against key players (e.g., Netflix). Unfortunately, his first case was focused on the oil and gas industry and he’s completely lost on where to start. Which key cost buckets would you recommend he dig into?
Above the line (pre-production costs): Principal actor(s) compensation Key creative team compensation (e.g., director) Screenplay costs (acquiring rights and screenwriter costs to tweak) Below the line (production costs): Production crew (art direction, lighting, sound engineering, costume, make-up, etc.) Set design expenses Special effects Editing Equipment (cameras, lighting, audio recording gear)
Estimate 96,000 x 85,000
8,160,000,000
Inverse proportions - give examples of formulas and the general rule
How have you seen tech make a difference? How does google fit into your path
[If not mentioned earlier in my pitch: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, Google Classroom revolutionized teachers’ ability to efficiently give high impact feedback on student writing, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays.]
I can expand upon what I said earlier:
In my personal life, Google has essentially taken over my life - I switched to Android after my first Iphone, eight years ago. I was an early adopter of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google Maps.
Estimate 640,000 / 680
941
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
If we increase prices by 10%, how much does quantity have to decrease for us to break even?
9.09% (1/11)
Estimate 567,000,000 / 855,000
663
Estimate 15,000,000 / 2,010
7,463
Weaknesses
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively.
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Hopefully you don’t notice it right now, but I’m naturally a really fast speaker and a mumbler. I’ve had this issue since I was a child. I know it’s hard for some people to understand me if I am not very intentional about my pace and enunciation. However, doing so occupies a lot of cognitive resources and often causes me from sounding as natural and engaging as I do when I’m not focused on being more understandable. This means that when I am having a challenging conversation with someone and I need to be careful with my message, I often don’t sound a bit more robotic and less empathetic than I’d like.
What I’m doing about it:
I’m generally best at communicating when I’ve had a bit of time to prepare what I want to say, because then I can spend more of my cognitive resources on the delivery and not splitting between idea generation and delivery. So I try to prepare for meetings and presentations more than most people.
I’m taking improv classes to get better at thinking and communicating on the fly
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
I am often too risk averse and overly analytical about new ideas or situations. This can frustrate my colleagues for several reasons:
Many people have great ideas from intuition, and they get frustrated with me when I can’t buy-in without a more reasoned justification.
My risk aversion can easily prevent major breakthroughs or innovations.
My desire to seek out more and more information to ensure I get a decision right can cause stagnation.
What I’m doing about it:
I go out of my way when I work with new people to be transparent about my weaknesses. I find that in addition to helping build relationships through my vulnerability, this process helps people understand why I’m operating the way I am and they are able to respectfully push back on my when I’m falling into traps, even if they are my direct reports.
If I’m collaborating with someone on a task, I’ll tell them that I want to set a time limit for how long we spend on a particular aspect of the project to avoid stagnation of my own-creation.
I set timers for myself when I’m 50% of the way done with my time allotted for a task and I ask myself whether I’ll be better off with a more refined product or a finished product, and I adjust course
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
At my last two jobs I received feedback that people I worked closely with loved working with me, but that I initially came across as a bit standoffish and hard to get to know. This really hurt me with people who deeply value relationship building at work, and I’m sure it made people feel less comfortable than I’d like them to be.
I think this might have been because of insecurity with my authority as a very new and young school leader and thought I should act in a more formal way.
I’ve really worked at fixing this at business school, since I have new opportunities almost every day to meet new people in a wide variety of settings.
I’ve made it a point to improve my ability to engage in small talk and relationship building in group settings at each event I’ve attended. I’ve practiced at nightly company presentations during the networking session, I practiced at all the orientation events, and I practice when I walk into a classroom ten minutes early and have an opportunity to get to know my classmates better.
I had to make a mindset shift, to drill home that it’s my job to be approachable, likeable, enthusiastic, and interested. I had to remind myself that I genuinely love learning about people, the work they do, the places they are from, and their passions. When I’m in the right mood I’m a great conversationalist, but I sometimes have to force myself to act that way when I’m not in the mood.
I’ve made drastic improvements - I got wonderful feedback from my learning team on this issue through surveys they filled out about me, I successfully networked to the point I got interviews at all but one consulting firm. I feel confident that hearing two different sets of colleagues give me similar feedback sunk in and I know this is an area to focus on whenever I enter a new group situation.
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively. For the early part of my career, default was to coach, to encourage incremental and consistent growth by changing inputs, to overvalue inputs. This led people to focus too much on one way of doing the job and didn’t allow for as much autonomy as I would like my direct reports to have. In my most recent job, I shifted too much in the opposite direction. I was working in an environment in which my managers only cared about outcomes and their standards were incredibly high, to the point it was unlikely that anybody would ever reach their goals. I tried to mimic this approach with my direct reports, but I found myself having a hard time finding genuine praise on outcomes because nobody ever met the high bar we set. As a result, I worried I was beginning to exhaust my team as I focused too much on the gaps between the product and their gold standard without praising the improvements in their inputs that were beneficial for the school and that might keep them motivated.
I learned each approach working at two different organizations with opposite approaches to management. I fully bought-into each approach when I worked at their organization because I wanted to learn from their successes and give their methods a shot. Now I’m seeking out new ideas about how to blend the best of both approaches - I ask friends and classmates to tell me about their experiences at work, I’m reading leadership and management books, and I’m looking forward to learning from my next employer.
Estimate 7% x 39%
2.73%
Conflict with Manager
Conflict with a manager #1 - History course sequence
Conflict with manager #2 - Andy blaming me for other people’s constructive feedback he took personally:
——–
Conflict with a manager #1 - History course sequence
I had been hired in January to start as an Assistant Principal at a new high school in Manhattan (it had been open for one year but was such a mess they fired everyone and I was part of a team brought in to reboot the school). One of my key role deliverables was ensuring that students were successful in their college-level AP history tests, so I had to manage the curriculum, train and manage the teachers, and provide instructional leadership.
I did a lot of prep work in the months leading up to my start date, including carefully analyzing student work samples and their academic data to know what students had mastered and what they had failed to learn. I discovered that the 10th graders’ previous teacher had designed a course that was not aligned at all with what they had to know to reach our goals for them, and that they hadn’t even learned what the teacher had expected them to. The students were essentially a year behind in a two year course sequence leading up to an exam that would allow them college credit.
I decided I had to persuade my principal to have the 10th graders redo the first year of world history, and take the exam a year later than expected. This was risky for several reasons:
I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with my new boss or his boss. The only credibility I had was I was highly successful as a history teacher and a manager of history teachers at my former school, and they had hired me accordingly.
It’s risky to have students redo a class - it makes it very likely they’ll feel bored as they do lessons they think they’ve done before, and that can lead to a lot of misbehavior and overall a poor learning experience.
I was implicitly arguing that my boss’s manager, the CEO of the charter school network and a person widely known to be a very challenging person, had made a mistake in her school design or in her management of the previous history manager.
Despite the risks, I decided that I had to make this strong recommendation because we would be setting the students and their teachers up for failure if I didn’t. So I prepped my talking points and included some example so skills and content the students hadn’t learned last year and that they had to know. What I failed to consider is that Andy didn’t actually know much about the history curriculum or course sequence, he was brand new on the job and was trying to ramp up in the areas that he was directly managing.
Andy initially rejected my proposal, saying that he didn’t see why they would have to redo it, we can just fill in the gaps and keep pushing on. I first tried to keep an open mind and see if there was a way I could write a curriculum map that would keep students on their current course track. I tried several different iterations and couldn’t get it to work. Therefore, I I had to go back and prove to him that I was right, and try to persuade him.
I scheduled a phone call with him a week later since he wasn’t available to meet. I laid out my argument carefully with a lot of visual evidence - I had sent him annotated scans of student writing, I showed him the difference between what students had done the previous year and the types of work they would have had to do on in order to be on track. I showed on a curriculum him how much we’d have to cover in one year’s time (2 years’ worth of content and skill instruction).
I named explicitly that I knew that this was a risky move for me and for him, because of the state of our relationship, my lack of proven credibility within the organization, and the implication about his boss that he’d have to sell this to. I told him that I was so confident that this was a necessary step for our shared goal of student’s achievement that I was happy to put my neck on the line. I then presented him with a plan for what the history curriculum would look like this coming year, if he agreed to my proposal. I made sure to lay out specifically how we’d message to students why we were making them redo what they thought was last year’s content, and the steps we’d take to make the class enjoyable and engaging when they were seeing topics they studied last year. I also drafted a communication plan for parents, who might not be happy about our decision without us explaining it well.
Impact:
Had 100% of students pass their end of course exam, allowing them to graduate high school, and had 66% pass the AP exam, which is one of the top passing scores in the country.
Conflict with manager #2 - Andy blaming me for other people’s constructive feedback he took personally:
Andy had assigned me to lead all of our leader team meetings. He knew I was far better than him or anyone on our team at planning ahead, knowing what issues had to be resolved when and with what people and what resources available, identifying what the stress points would be coming down the line, knowing what work would have to get done to avoid last minute scrambling until midnight each night. So he assigned me with owning a list of issues or topics that leaders could contribute to as nominations for leader meeting agenda items. I would review all of the nominations, figure out what could be done without the entire leader team and without a meeting, and then draft an agenda with key outcomes and time stamps for the most critical issues. There was a lot of tension and conflict when we’d review these items because many of the agenda items were indictments of his poor leadership or he felt high levels of ownership over the problems that people were raising. He would lash out in meetings at whoever brought up the issue, so I started meeting with him ahead of time to review the agenda, give him a chance to process it in private with me ahead of time, strategize about how to make each section of the meeting most successful, and get his buy-in. But he would then view any issues that were triggering to him as my complaining and would lash out at me. I’d sit there, thinking to myself, I didn’t bring this up, it’s actually a valuable point and we should be happy it’s being raised, and you are blaming me for other people’s ideas that you asked me to compile. For a two weeks I let this happen, knowing I was sacrificing my happiness at work for the betterment of the team, happy to take the emotional hit each week so the overall leader team and meeting would be more productive, but hoping it wouldn’t be a pattern, just a temporarily stressful time for him. Then it continued happening and I decided that this was actually becoming a pattern and I addressed it with him. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assumed he didn’t realize what he was doing or what effect it was having, and so stated it clearly and respectfully. He felt bad about that, appreciated that I brought it up, and committed to trying to improve.
Estimate 3,000,000 / 4,000
750
Estimate 45% x 5%
2.25%
Time anticipated business need for org and how I got ahead of it
Special Education - all my boss cared about was pleasing his boss with an efficient paperwork process for special ed. I realized that was a tiny part of the problem we ultimately had to solve. I found a way to do that process better than anyone else in the network. Then I moved on to the core of the issue, which was improving instruction. See SpEd story.
Challenges and Benefits of Creating a Diverse Workforce
Benefits:
Organizations do their best work when their teams reflect the constituencies they are serving, which in Google’s case, is the entire world. Diverse teams solve problems more effectively because they have insight from more unique perspectives and are less likely to make mistakes due to avoidable blind spots.
Google is competing for the world’s top talent, and this talent is wildly diverse. However, people from underrepresented backgrounds face unique challenges in the work place that often cause them to fail to meet their potential or make them not want to work in a particular organization. For many people, it’s important for to have friends, mentors, and colleagues at work who are similar to them for them to feel included and appreciated.
Challenges
Need to eliminate as much bias as possible in human capital systems, from hiring, to training, to pay, to promotion. It’s great that Google takes this so seriously:
–> The vast majority of Googler’s have done unconscious bias training
–> That Google has eliminated statistically significant pay gaps by gender or race.
–> Hiring decisions are made on rubrics and by a committee to reduce bias
–> 20% time for diversity efforts: Diversity Core is a formal program in which Google employees contribute one-fifth of their time to initiatives aimed at attracting more women and minorities and creating a more welcoming culture for them — both at Google and in the tech industry.
It’s challenging to create an inclusive work environment that will make people from underrepresented backgrounds want to join and stay on the team. People have deeply ingrained conscious and unconscious biases that affect the way they interact with their colleagues, often creating a toxic environment.
Disagreement within our society about how much of a role identity-based bias plays in outcomes, and whether or not as a society we should even strive for equity in outcomes. This makes it hard for some companies to focus on diversity because their shareholders are not uniform in their beliefs and demand immediate returns, and it’s not always easy to quantify the profit benefit in the short term of promoting diversity in your workplace. Especially, since research shows that in certain circumstances, diverse teams are less productive.
–> My experience:
I’ve spent my entire career in some of the more progressive organizations in the country. I’ve only worked in schools that serve low-income brown and black children and most of my managers have been people of color. In each organization, we did dozens of hours of diversity and inclusion work each year, which I fully supported and contributed to. As a result, I’ve been a bit shocked at business school to realize what the rest of the world is like - I have a lot of classmates who think that D&I work is a waste of time and is a threat to them, people have walked out of our D&I workshops midway, visibly annoyed. It’s really awoken me to the challenge that we face across corporate America. As a result, I’ve been trying to contribute to making Columbia a more inclusive space: 1. I took on a leadership role in a men’s ally group for women in business, and I joined the campus’ diversity and inclusion club to try. We have a ton of work to do.
Most common way of measuring efficiency in retail?
Sales per square foot, compare to competitors
How I work on teams
Teamwork Story #1: SpEd - just de-emphasize my management role, emphasize my role as a refiner, helping to create high quality implementation plans from pie-in-the-sky ideas.
How I work on teams:
–> Provide structure for the work, ensure we have clear goals for each meeting, clear action steps/owners/deadlines at the end of each meeting.
–> Refiner - ID flaws in plans and ideas, anticipate surprises and complications because I can think multiple steps ahead from various stakeholders’ perspectives
–> Find flaws in analysis or explanations, help refine them so they are less prone to refutation
–> Keep the team positive, building positive momentum, give a ton of gratitude.
If we increase prices by 50%, how much does quantity have to decrease for us to break even?
33.3%
Brainstorm: A partner, who you often work closely with, is interested in pitching new business that involves accurately quantifying the cost of vaccines in an effort to help the company lobby for better prices offered to third world countries in Africa. He’s asked you to develop a cost model which would incorporate the key cost buckets that make up the cost of producing any vaccine. Off the top of your head, which key cost buckets should be investigated?
Development Research and design cost to create the drug Clinical trials in both the US and international markets Marketing Marketing vaccines in Africa Operations Drug production (raw materials plus required factory and equipment) Distribution and storage costs in Africa
Estimate Baseline: 2,000,000 CAGR: 35% Years: 1
2,700,000
Estimate Baseline: 7,000,000 CAGR: 100% Years: 2
28,000,000
Y1: -25%
Y2: -16%
Overall Change?
-41 + 4 = -37%
Consulting 2 minute pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to structure and solve, much like a consultant. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved designing strategy and that I wanted to do similar work as a consultant across a wide range of industries. As I explored consulting opportunities, I realized I was a perfect fit - 1. I knew how to ramp up quickly, as I had to learn new content with each new class I taught; 2. I knew how to influence diverse stakeholders, from janitors to CEOs; and 3. I had learned how to solve a wide variety of problems within my classroom and at the school level. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit and to open doors for consulting because it’s the perfect job for me. [Planting seeds for next question]
Tell me something unique about yourself
Wrote our wedding contract and ceremony, wrote and officiated friend’s wedding.
I have had meaningful relationships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, giving me a very unique perspective on the world: Janitors in rural NC that are single mothers, Yemeni immigrant custodians, teachers in rural NC that are horribly racist, Singaporean millenials, first generation students from the rust belt, west african teenagers.
Estimate 5,000 x 570,000
2,850,000,000
Estimate 1,800,000 / 445,000
4
If we increase prices by 20%, how much does quantity have to decrease for us to break even?
16.6% (1/6)
Estimate 7,600 x 22,000
167,200,000
Estimate Baseline: 40,000 CAGR: 30% Years: 1
52,000
What is contribution margin?
Same as marginal profit = sale price minus variable cost per unit
Conflict with Manager
Conflict with a manager #1 - History course sequence
Conflict with manager #2 - Andy blaming me for other people’s constructive feedback he took personally:
——–
Conflict with a manager #1 - History course sequence
I had been hired in January to start as an Assistant Principal at a new high school in Manhattan (it had been open for one year but was such a mess they fired everyone and I was part of a team brought in to reboot the school). One of my key role deliverables was ensuring that students were successful in their college-level AP history tests, so I had to manage the curriculum, train and manage the teachers, and provide instructional leadership.
I did a lot of prep work in the months leading up to my start date, including carefully analyzing student work samples and their academic data to know what students had mastered and what they had failed to learn. I discovered that the 10th graders’ previous teacher had designed a course that was not aligned at all with what they had to know to reach our goals for them, and that they hadn’t even learned what the teacher had expected them to. The students were essentially a year behind in a two year course sequence leading up to an exam that would allow them college credit.
I decided I had to persuade my principal to have the 10th graders redo the first year of world history, and take the exam a year later than expected. This was risky for several reasons:
I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with my new boss or his boss. The only credibility I had was I was highly successful as a history teacher and a manager of history teachers at my former school, and they had hired me accordingly.
It’s risky to have students redo a class - it makes it very likely they’ll feel bored as they do lessons they think they’ve done before, and that can lead to a lot of misbehavior and overall a poor learning experience.
I was implicitly arguing that my boss’s manager, the CEO of the charter school network and a person widely known to be a very challenging person, had made a mistake in her school design or in her management of the previous history manager.
Despite the risks, I decided that I had to make this strong recommendation because we would be setting the students and their teachers up for failure if I didn’t. So I prepped my talking points and included some example so skills and content the students hadn’t learned last year and that they had to know. What I failed to consider is that Andy didn’t actually know much about the history curriculum or course sequence, he was brand new on the job and was trying to ramp up in the areas that he was directly managing.
Andy initially rejected my proposal, saying that he didn’t see why they would have to redo it, we can just fill in the gaps and keep pushing on. I first tried to keep an open mind and see if there was a way I could write a curriculum map that would keep students on their current course track. I tried several different iterations and couldn’t get it to work. Therefore, I I had to go back and prove to him that I was right, and try to persuade him.
I scheduled a phone call with him a week later since he wasn’t available to meet. I laid out my argument carefully with a lot of visual evidence - I had sent him annotated scans of student writing, I showed him the difference between what students had done the previous year and the types of work they would have had to do on in order to be on track. I showed on a curriculum him how much we’d have to cover in one year’s time (2 years’ worth of content and skill instruction).
I named explicitly that I knew that this was a risky move for me and for him, because of the state of our relationship, my lack of proven credibility within the organization, and the implication about his boss that he’d have to sell this to. I told him that I was so confident that this was a necessary step for our shared goal of student’s achievement that I was happy to put my neck on the line. I then presented him with a plan for what the history curriculum would look like this coming year, if he agreed to my proposal. I made sure to lay out specifically how we’d message to students why we were making them redo what they thought was last year’s content, and the steps we’d take to make the class enjoyable and engaging when they were seeing topics they studied last year. I also drafted a communication plan for parents, who might not be happy about our decision without us explaining it well.
Impact:
Had 100% of students pass their end of course exam, allowing them to graduate high school, and had 66% pass the AP exam, which is one of the top passing scores in the country.
Conflict with manager #2 - Andy blaming me for other people’s constructive feedback he took personally:
Andy had assigned me to lead all of our leader team meetings. He knew I was far better than him or anyone on our team at planning ahead, knowing what issues had to be resolved when and with what people and what resources available, identifying what the stress points would be coming down the line, knowing what work would have to get done to avoid last minute scrambling until midnight each night. So he assigned me with owning a list of issues or topics that leaders could contribute to as nominations for leader meeting agenda items. I would review all of the nominations, figure out what could be done without the entire leader team and without a meeting, and then draft an agenda with key outcomes and time stamps for the most critical issues. There was a lot of tension and conflict when we’d review these items because many of the agenda items were indictments of his poor leadership or he felt high levels of ownership over the problems that people were raising. He would lash out in meetings at whoever brought up the issue, so I started meeting with him ahead of time to review the agenda, give him a chance to process it in private with me ahead of time, strategize about how to make each section of the meeting most successful, and get his buy-in. But he would then view any issues that were triggering to him as my complaining and would lash out at me. I’d sit there, thinking to myself, I didn’t bring this up, it’s actually a valuable point and we should be happy it’s being raised, and you are blaming me for other people’s ideas that you asked me to compile. For a two weeks I let this happen, knowing I was sacrificing my happiness at work for the betterment of the team, happy to take the emotional hit each week so the overall leader team and meeting would be more productive, but hoping it wouldn’t be a pattern, just a temporarily stressful time for him. Then it continued happening and I decided that this was actually becoming a pattern and I addressed it with him. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assumed he didn’t realize what he was doing or what effect it was having, and so stated it clearly and respectfully. He felt bad about that, appreciated that I brought it up, and committed to trying to improve.
Estimate 30,000 / 600
50
Estimate 10% x 55%
5.50%
Ethical Dilemmas I’ve faced at work
Christian Lehr’s dad’s book being pushed by him to other teachers to push to kids, and having the school order 10. Confronted him and alex and andy, shut it down after hearing rationale and explaining my rationale.
Deliverable of 20% of kids with IEPs by March –> pushed back with logical argument to Andy, he bought it but wouldn’t fight for it. Pushed back again to sped leaders, all agreed but wouldn’t fight Eva for it. Pushed back on LaMae, she didn’t buy it. So I resigned.
Resume Story: My favorite topic in history (in case there’s a history buff):
Diffusion of religions and cultures across long distance trade routes such as the Silk Roads, the Indian Ocean trade networks, and the Trans-Saharan trade routes.
Islam to western Africa from the Middle East by merchants traveling by camel across the dessert trading gold, and by leaders like Mansa Musa looking for better economic connections.
Buddhism from India to China and how the Chinese people initially thought Buddhism was a terrifying cultural invasion that would destroy their country, wouldn’t let Buddhists into the cities.
Islam blending with Hinduism in the art in Cambodia (stories from the Quran on Hindu architecture)
Estimate 20,000,000 / 3,000
6667
Mexico’s population
130M
Percentage change of revenue when adjusting price, quantity
% change = price change 1 + price change 2 + (price change 1 * price change 2) example: A company has $300m in revenue which grows by 20% and then shrinks by 10%. What’s the net change in revenue? 1 + 20% - 10% + (-10%*20%) –> 120% - 10% + -2% = 108%, so 8% change. example: How much will revenue change if a company increases prices by 20% which leads to a 20% decrease in sales? –> 1 + 20% + -20% + -4% = 96% –> change of -4%
Estimate 30,000,000 / 12,000
2500
Ethical Dilemmas I’ve faced at work
Christian Lehr’s dad’s book being pushed by him to other teachers to push to kids, and having the school order 10. Confronted him and alex and andy, shut it down after hearing rationale and explaining my rationale.
Deliverable of 20% of kids with IEPs by March –> pushed back with logical argument to Andy, he bought it but wouldn’t fight for it. Pushed back again to sped leaders, all agreed but wouldn’t fight Eva for it. Pushed back on LaMae, she didn’t buy it. So I resigned.
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
3 ways to price differentiate/discriminate in order to improve revenue and profitabality
Different prices for different WTP
Different prices for different segments (attributes - i.e. students, seniors, local citizens)
Different prices for different quantities (i.e. bulk discounts)
Florida house of representative count
27 out of 435 –> about 6% (Same as NY)
Estimate 14,400,000 / 3,600
4,000
Estimate 30% x 52,000
15,600
Texas house of representative count
36 out of 435 –> about 8%
Estimate 70% x 85,000
59,500
Why Consulting?
IF THEY START WITH THIS, SAY, CONSULTING IS THE PERFECT JOB FOR ME, CAN I TELL YOU A BIT ABOUT MY HISTORY TO TELL YOU HOW I GOT TO THE POINT WHERE I KNOW CONSULTING IS PERFECT FOR ME?.
There are two major reasons I want to be a consultant: 1. I’m motivated to make organizations and people more capable and better off. 2. Given that this will be my first time working in business, I want the steepest learning curve and the widest exposure across industries.
As exhibited by my nine years working in education, I have a deeply engrained passion for helping people and organizations thrive. Consulting provides a unique opportunity to work on teams to solve problems for clients who are anxious about their future and to design implementable strategies that will make their companies more capable and higher performing. When I worked in schools, I particularly loved projects in which I improved our organization’s capabilities, whether through designing org charts, developing onboarding and training plans, overhauling performance management systems, or improving the way teachers and leaders communicated and stored information. While I’m thrilled about the idea of joining as a generalist to gain broad exposure and to develop a basic consulting toolkit, I’m most excited about eventually specializing in the [HC/Org] practice.
Given that this will be my first time working in business, I want the steepest learning curve and exposure to the widest range of industries. At the same time, I love learning through deep dives and I regularly itch for something new to learn about or something new to solve. The idea of working on interesting new problems with new people every few months is a dream. In my opinion, there’s no better place to do this work than [firm]. [Planting seeds for next question]
Estimate 85% x 85%
72.25%
Y1: + 20%
Y2: -15%
Overall Change?
+2%
Estimate 75% x 50%
37.50%
Proudest Accomplishments
9th grade turnaround story
SpEd story
Avg size of household in USA
2.5 people (there are 120m households with 300m/2.5-=120)
Name a process that wasn’t working and what you did to fix it
One of the top complaints from our staff our first two years is that they were constantly distracted by our communication systems and expectations and that they didn’t know where to find any of the information they needed. They felt totally discombobulated daily, and their managers were complaining that teachers weren’t reading their emails or completing their tasks. I suggested to my principal that I spend a lot of time over the summer and in the early fall designing a new communication system and associated staff-wide expectations to address the issue.
First gathered data from a wide variety of staff members across multiple teams - what were their biggest sources of frustration with our current communication and data storage, what would they want to be true about an improved system?
Then I analyzed all the interviews and survey results and noticed there were three top priorities:
Teachers needed to be able to focus on their most critical work without constantly being interrupted by text messages from their colleagues, or with fear that they would miss out on critical information if they weren’t constantly checking their email. At the same time, leaders needed their direct reports to read updates fairly frequently as were building the school day to day and plans were constantly changing.
Teachers felt like they were receiving deliverables from all angles at all times of the day. There wasn’t a single list of tasks they had to complete for the various departments that were making requests of them, and people were requesting time-intensive action at the last minute due to poor planning. People were missing deliverables right and left.
Teachers needed a consistent place to find the various documents and trackers their teams and managers were creating and using - they seemed to have a new tracker to fill out every couple of days and couldn’t keep track of them in their email.
I then created a high level vision of how communication would be different for the next year - I didn’t choose specific tools or get into the details. The big pillars were:
- Clear rules about when to use email versus when to use a text-message like communication tool, based upon how urgently the recipient would have to read the message.
- 95% of tasks teachers had to complete would be put in a single document that was collaboratively created and then carefully edited by Thursday of each week, for the following week. This was to promote better future-planning and to decrease the number of missed tasks.
I would create a website that would serve as a hub for all of our communication tools and key documents. If a staff member had a question or had to reference a document, they would clearly be able to find it on the webpage or through a clearly-marked link from the webpage.
Then I went to my manager, the principal of the school, to share my findings and to get his buy-in on the outcomes I was striving for in the system. I knew that he was the number one offender in teachers’ minds of constant and disorganized communication, and that he was motivated to change his own behavior and the school’s culture given the complaints we’d received.
I then developed a few prototypes and met with various staff members to get feedback on each of them. Then I refined them and got more feedback from my principal.
Then I prepared my change management plan and rollout messaging and presentation.
The end product:
No SMS - use Hangout/Gchat groups for your team as a replacement for group texts and direct messages as replacement for text messages (put the “texting” on the same screen as email since we used Gmail, easy to search, and easy to mute notifications when doing focused work)
Everyone had to check the Hangouts 3x a day - once before starting work, once at lunch, and once before leaving for the day. All leaders or people delegating work had to put tasks and updates in the appropriate channels, knowing the recipient was not obligated to check except these three times a day (preserve focus, encourage future planning, allow for course corrections every four hours)
I created the Hub with Google Sites - integrated the task lists (via Trello), Google Calendar, embedded Google Docs, embedded YouTube videos, etc.
I led task list creation meeting each Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday.
Result - So much praise, shout outs at meetings, shout outs to my manager. People said they were much better able to focus and get updates and respond effectively. Anecdotally far fewer missed deliverables. However, I left before I did any formal surveys as I was still in the process of change management, changing habits. Wasn’t perfect when I left.
Estimate 20% x 85%
17%
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 50% Years: 1
600,000
Estimate Baseline: 3,000,000 CAGR: 35% Years: 1
4,050,000
Estimate 480,000,000 / 4,000
120000
Estimate 43% x 4%
1.72%
Estimate 80% x 74%
59.20%
Estimate 55% x 40%
22%
Time about working in ambiguity
When I am working on a project with a lot of ambiguity, I actively fight the natural anxiety most people feel. I’ve tried multiple strategies, but the four that I’ve found most successful have been to:
- Shift my questioning about “what should I do” to “what could I do?” This makes a huge difference in reducing pressure, and opening up space for creative problem solving that often leads to critical insights.
- I change my context and my inputs, finding a balance between creating white space (time when I have no meaningful stimulation and my mind can wander and connect the dots for me, such as washing dishes or going on a walk) and reviewing a wide variety of materials without the pressure to find the perfect solution immediately.
- I change my inner dialogue to focus on how lucky I am to work on something challenging and meaningful. If there is a clear path forward, that would indicate my work isn’t pushing the boundary, and I’m grateful for the privilege to do work that makes a difference.
- I push myself to commit to the most likely to succeed action plan, and I carefully design the benchmarks at which I will assess progress and the metrics that I’ll use to assess whether my experiment is working. I make sure I methodically experiment and learn on the ground rather than getting caught up in the clouds for too long, which is my natural tendency if unchecked.
I honed this ability working on a leadership team that was designing and building a brand new high school model. We were actively designing a school we hoped to revolutionize what future high schools would look like. We rejected most popular beliefs about what schools have to look like, so every day there was a ton of ambiguity about how to proceed in our design and on-the-ground execution. For instance, I was promoted into a role in which I’d be managing our athletic director and our arts director. However, before I transitioned into this role my boss fired the athletic director and the arts director quit, and we were unable to find a strong enough candidate to hire. However, I still had responsibility for a vague outcome of ensuring that we had world class arts and athletic programming. I had no idea how to proceed - I had been put in my role because I had demonstrated success with managing managers across a wide variety of functions and the arts and athletic directors needed better management, but I didn’t know anything about their subject matter.
Tried to break down the problem into its component parts - there was a lack of vision for excellent arts and athletics programming, the traditional public school model teachers were never evaluated for students’ progress or skill development - as long as kids had fun and didn’t cause trouble, the teacher was given high ratings. I wanted teachers to work with the same level of urgency and accountability as history and math teachers, focusing on student outcomes rather than just the feel of their class. So I had teachers create 4-year sequences of in-school and out-of-school programming a student might take including clear skill and knowledge outcomes for each year, so we could measure progress and assess the efficacy of our experiments.
How to give feedback to classmate/teammate who is falling short of expectations? (googleyness)
–> So as we wrap up this week/project/component of project, I want to take a step back.
–> make sure to ask for feedback for me, ask for their evaluation of how they are doing, etc.
–> organically get to the spot where I can say where I think they are doing strengths and current areas of underperformance
–> need to go against my instincts of being direct –> I didn’t used to be this way, but I quickly adapted to my previous organization’s culture and I can do it again at Google to fit in within the culture.
Estimate 100% x 45%
45%
Estimate 73% x 24%
17.52%
Estimate Baseline: 900,000 CAGR: 40% Years: 1
1,260,000
Tell about time taking a risky approach to reach goal, why take this approach?
I had been hired in January to start as an Assistant Principal at a new high school in Manhattan (it had been open for one year but was such a mess they fired everyone and I was part of a team brought in to reboot the school). One of my key role deliverables was ensuring that students were successful in their college-level AP history tests, so I had to manage the curriculum, train and manage the teachers, and provide instructional leadership.
I did a lot of prep work in the months leading up to my start date, including carefully analyzing student work samples and their academic data to know what students had mastered and what they had failed to learn. I discovered that the 10th graders’ previous teacher had designed a course that was not aligned at all with what they had to know to reach our goals for them, and that they hadn’t even learned what the teacher had expected them to. The students were essentially a year behind in a two year course sequence leading up to an exam that would allow them college credit.
I decided I had to persuade my principal to have the 10th graders redo the first year of world history, and take the exam a year later than expected. This was risky for several reasons:
- I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with my new boss or his boss. The only credibility I had was I was highly successful as a history teacher and a manager of history teachers at my former school, and they had hired me accordingly.
- It’s risky to have students redo a class - it makes it very likely they’ll feel bored as they do lessons they think they’ve done before, and that can lead to a lot of misbehavior and overall a poor learning experience.
- I was implicitly arguing that my boss’s manager, the CEO of the charter school network and a person widely known to be a very challenging person, had made a mistake in her school design or in her management of the previous history manager.
Despite the risks, I decided that I had to make this strong recommendation because we would be setting the students and their teachers up for failure if I didn’t. So I prepped my talking points and included some example so skills and content the students hadn’t learned last year and that they had to know. What I failed to consider is that Andy didn’t actually know much about the history curriculum or course sequence, he was brand new on the job and was trying to ramp up in the areas that he was directly managing.
Andy initially rejected my proposal, saying that he didn’t see why they would have to redo it, we can just fill in the gaps and keep pushing on. I first tried to keep an open mind and see if there was a way I could write a curriculum map that would keep students on their current course track. I tried several different iterations and couldn’t get it to work. Therefore, I I had to go back and prove to him that I was right, and try to persuade him.
I scheduled a phone call with him a week later since he wasn’t available to meet. I laid out my argument carefully with a lot of visual evidence - I had sent him annotated scans of student writing, I showed him the difference between what students had done the previous year and the types of work they would have had to do on in order to be on track. I showed on a curriculum him how much we’d have to cover in one year’s time (2 years’ worth of content and skill instruction).
I named explicitly that I knew that this was a risky move for me and for him, because of the state of our relationship, my lack of proven credibility within the organization, and the implication about his boss that he’d have to sell this to. I told him that I was so confident that this was a necessary step for our shared goal of student’s achievement that I was happy to put my neck on the line. I then presented him with a plan for what the history curriculum would look like this coming year, if he agreed to my proposal. I made sure to lay out specifically how we’d message to students why we were making them redo what they thought was last year’s content, and the steps we’d take to make the class enjoyable and engaging when they were seeing topics they studied last year. I also drafted a communication plan for parents, who might not be happy about our decision without us explaining it well.
Impact:
Had 100% of students pass their end of course exam, allowing them to graduate high school, and had 66% pass the AP exam, which is one of the top passing scores in the country.
Estimate 60% x 80%
48%
What is Gross Profit?
Sales - COGS
COGS includes fixed and variable product costs but excludes SGA
Resume story - live music - jazz, soul, funk, rock
Jazz - Robert Glasper
Soul - Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Funk - Dumpstaphunk
Rock - My Morning Jacket
Imagine put on project outside of core work and strengths, everyone else is more senior. How would I proceed?
[humility, quick to learn]
That sounds like a dream, such a great opportunity to learn.
I would meet with people on the team to gain a deep understanding of:
- The project’s goals
- The context for the project
- The best resources I can use to self-teach any knowledge or skills I need
- The team member’s working styles and preferences
- What knowledge and skills I have that are applicable to the project, what are the ways in which I can most effectively and most uniquely contribute that might not be immediately obvious
- The team members’ expectations for me
The key is to act with humility, recognizing that I need to listen and learn more than I contribute at first, but that I can contribute in specific moments and specific ways from the start.
Equally importantly is putting the work in outside of normal hours to get myself up to speed, to ask for frequent feedback and course correct on a daily basis, and to go into each day with a growth goal for myself.
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
What do you get excited about? What turns you on?
“Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
“Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Estimate 75% x 520,000
390,000
Challenges and Benefits of Creating a Diverse Workforce
Benefits:
Organizations do their best work when their teams reflect the constituencies they are serving, which in Google’s case, is the entire world. Diverse teams solve problems more effectively because they have insight from more unique perspectives and are less likely to make mistakes due to avoidable blind spots.
Google is competing for the world’s top talent, and this talent is wildly diverse. However, people from underrepresented backgrounds face unique challenges in the work place that often cause them to fail to meet their potential or make them not want to work in a particular organization. For many people, it’s important for to have friends, mentors, and colleagues at work who are similar to them for them to feel included and appreciated.
Challenges
Need to eliminate as much bias as possible in human capital systems, from hiring, to training, to pay, to promotion. It’s great that Google takes this so seriously:
–> The vast majority of Googler’s have done unconscious bias training
–> That Google has eliminated statistically significant pay gaps by gender or race.
–> Hiring decisions are made on rubrics and by a committee to reduce bias
–> 20% time for diversity efforts: Diversity Core is a formal program in which Google employees contribute one-fifth of their time to initiatives aimed at attracting more women and minorities and creating a more welcoming culture for them — both at Google and in the tech industry.
It’s challenging to create an inclusive work environment that will make people from underrepresented backgrounds want to join and stay on the team. People have deeply ingrained conscious and unconscious biases that affect the way they interact with their colleagues, often creating a toxic environment.
Disagreement within our society about how much of a role identity-based bias plays in outcomes, and whether or not as a society we should even strive for equity in outcomes. This makes it hard for some companies to focus on diversity because their shareholders are not uniform in their beliefs and demand immediate returns, and it’s not always easy to quantify the profit benefit in the short term of promoting diversity in your workplace. Especially, since research shows that in certain circumstances, diverse teams are less productive.
–> My experience:
I’ve spent my entire career in some of the more progressive organizations in the country. I’ve only worked in schools that serve low-income brown and black children and most of my managers have been people of color. In each organization, we did dozens of hours of diversity and inclusion work each year, which I fully supported and contributed to. As a result, I’ve been a bit shocked at business school to realize what the rest of the world is like - I have a lot of classmates who think that D&I work is a waste of time and is a threat to them, people have walked out of our D&I workshops midway, visibly annoyed. It’s really awoken me to the challenge that we face across corporate America. As a result, I’ve been trying to contribute to making Columbia a more inclusive space: 1. I took on a leadership role in a men’s ally group for women in business, and I joined the campus’ diversity and inclusion club to try. We have a ton of work to do.
$400M growing at 10% for 5 years will be worth?
600M
Estimate 15% x 7,300
1,095
If we lower prices by 20%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
25%
What’s been most interesting from what I’m learning in school:
Business Analytics - Predictive analytics, using tools like K-nearest neighbors to predict whether someone will like a movie or a song based upon the characteristics of the content or the person, like what Netflix and Pandora use to recommend content to keep you engaged.
Strategy class - Learning how to make decisions the leverage your competitive advantage. I.e. Should Disney own hotels and cruise lines? They could easily sign contracts with hotel and cruise companies to pay licensing fees but the Disney brand is about meticulous attention to detail in the customer experience, so they expanded their corporate scope to include owning and managing dozens of properties around the world.
of households in the USA
120m (300m population divided by 2.5 people per household)
Price elasticity and inelasticity
If price elasticity is greater than 1, we can decrease prices to increase revenue. If price elasticity is less than 1, lowering prices will lower revenue. If a good is inelastic, that means that quantity bought doesn’t really change with changes in price. I.e. raising a $200 drug to 202 (2%) increase will cause sales to drop by less than 1%.
What are the four main stages of a product’s lifecycle?
New product, growth, maturity, decline
Favorite Google Product
Android - allows me to constantly learn, quickly access information I need, communicate easily, and customize my experience.
Constant growth formula
multiply growth rate by the number of years, that gives the percent it will grow
What do you know about Google’s culture?
Talked to several Googlers:
Nikhil Kumar (Strategy and Operations Manager in SF) - CBS, DOO at USI, now at Google
Adrianna Samaniego (worked at Google for 8 years and is now at CBS - worked on diversity initiatives within Google’s startup incubator)
Shaun Warren (staffing specialist)
Christie Clark (Google staffing, TFA)
Caroline Ziegler
I also read Work Rules(Laszlo Bock) and read a lot of blogs.
It’s clear that the culture is founded upon a few key principles:
A deep belief in the mission, to organize all of the world’s information and to make it universally accessible
Defaulting to openness and transparency, trusting Googlers and giving them voice, expecting them to act like owners.
Outside the box thinking and high quality work product
Bringing your authentic self to work every day
Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult colleague
Whenever I deal with someone who’s difficult, I:
- Begin with the premise that they have great intentions, nobody gets up in the morning trying to be difficult.
- I then try to figure out the root cause - it’s usually that they have some unmet need, a blindspot or bad habit, or they have a different perspective on how to reach our shared goal.
- I then do a lot of listening to make sure the person feels heard and to figure out what the root cause is so I can directly address it.
- I then point out the destructive behavior, assuming the best, and support them in changing it.
For instance, I had to deal with two members of our leadership team, Lindsey and Sarah, who were acting immaturely to each other and were projecting negativity into our office, especially affecting our junior hires.
The issue started a few days before, when my principal announced, without any framing or explanation, that I had been promoted to be his #2, and that I would be managing half of the existing leadership team. Part of this re-org involved my managing Lindsey, who then manage Sarah. Before this meeting, the three of us were at the same level as members of the leadership team.
I pulled Lindsey and Sarah aside to ask them what was bothering them, and I listened carefully and made sure they felt heard. I probed a bit and realized there were two main issues:
- Sarah felt like she had been demoted
- Sarah and Lindsey were both unhappy with their new roles and responsibilities that my principal laid out for them when he announced my promotion and the org shakeup.
In each conversation, I stated directly: I know you don’t mean any harm and I know you are dedicated to our mission. However, I’ve noticed the following specific behaviors that are having the following toxic effects on the team. Then I’d pause for several seconds - this allowed the impact to sink in, it allowed the other person to explain what was going on or to apologize and propose how to fix it. In that moment I’d use my role power by saying that the behavior was unacceptable on my team, but I could have easily said to a colleague “these behaviors are destructive to our team, I know you don’t intend them, and I’m not sure you are aware that you are doing them or how they are impacting how people are viewing you. I’m happy to support you in changing them if you want.”
I then led a mediation to resolve the interpersonal conflict, and I worked to address the core issue they were upset about - the titles and the division of labor.
I gathered a lot of data before determining a path forward - each of their strengths and weaknesses, their goals, their preferences, our school’s needs for the next several months. Then I creatively found a solution to the inequality in the split of deliverables that they agreed to.
Analyzed the effectiveness of this plan, revised a couple of times, and ultimately found a model that made a lot of sense and was effective at motivating each team member and that took advantage of their strengths. Led us to be the highest performing Special Education department in the network of 40 schools, CEO asked us to lead training for the other 39 schools.
Fixing a process that’s not working, problem solving
One of the top complaints from our staff our first two years is that they were constantly distracted by the quantity and variety of communications from their colleagues and managers, and that they didn’t know where to find any of the information they needed.
Similarly, their managers were complaining that teachers weren’t reading their emails or completing their tasks.
I suggested to my principal that I spend a lot of time over the summer and in the early fall designing a new communication system and associated staff-wide expectations to address the issue.
First gathered data from a wide variety of staff members across multiple teams - what were their biggest sources of frustration with our current communication and data storage, what would they want to be true about an improved system?
Then I analyzed all the interviews and survey results and noticed there were three top priorities:
- Teachers needed to be able to focus on their most critical work* without constantly being interrupted by text messages from their colleagues, or with fear that they would miss out on critical information if they weren’t constantly checking their email. At the same time, leaders needed their direct reports to read updates fairly frequently as were building the school day to day and plans were constantly changing.
- Teachers felt like they were receiving deliverables from all angles at all times of the day.* There wasn’t a single list of tasks they had to complete for the various departments that were making requests of them, and people were requesting time-intensive action at the last minute due to poor planning. People were missing deliverables right and left.
- Teachers needed a consistent place to find the various documents and trackers their teams and managers were creating and using* - they seemed to have a new tracker to fill out every couple of days and couldn’t keep track of them in their email.
I then created a high level vision of how communication would be different for the next year - I didn’t choose specific tools or get into the details. The big pillars were:
- Clear rules about when to use email versus when to use a text-message like communication tool, based upon how urgently the recipient would have to read the message.
- 95% of tasks teachers had to complete would be put in a single document that was collaboratively created and then carefully edited by Thursday of each week, for the following week. This was to promote better future-planning and to decrease the number of missed tasks.
- I would create a website that would serve as a hub for all of our communication tools and key documents. If a staff member had a question or had to reference a document, they would clearly be able to find it on the webpage or through a clearly-marked link from the webpage.
Then I went to my manager, the principal of the school, to share my findings and to get his buy-in on the outcomes I was striving for in the system.
I then developed a few prototypes and met with various staff members to get feedback on each of them. Then I refined them and got more feedback from my principal.
Then I prepared my change management plan and rollout messaging and presentation.
The end product:
No SMS - use Hangout/Gchat groups for your team as a replacement for group texts and direct messages as replacement for text messages (put the “texting” on the same screen as email since we used Gmail, easy to search, and easy to mute notifications when doing focused work)
Everyone had to check the Hangouts 3x a day - once before starting work, once at lunch, and once before leaving for the day. All leaders or people delegating work had to put tasks and updates in the appropriate channels, knowing the recipient was not obligated to check except these three times a day (preserve focus, encourage future planning, allow for course corrections every four hours)
I created the Hub with Google Sites - integrated the task lists (via Trello), Google Calendar, embedded Google Docs, embedded YouTube videos, etc.
I led task list creation meeting each Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday.
Result - So much praise, shout outs at meetings, shout outs to my manager. People said they were much better able to focus and get updates and respond effectively. Anecdotally far fewer missed deliverables. However, I left before I did any formal surveys as I was still in the process of change management, changing habits. Wasn’t perfect when I left.
