On a ride back to the city, I started a conversation with my Uber driver.
He mentioned he’d been driving for a couple weeks. He’s taking a short break after 20 years of working. He shared he received an MBA and went on to manage a team at a company which resold products on Amazon.
He wondered what I did for a living and I responded with, “I work with engineers.”
Pressing for more clarification, he asked, “What do you do? Are you in tech? Do you write software?”
I tell him I’m in engineering management.
The conversation continued. He was also a life coach running corporate training sessions for managers and C-level executives. We discussed concepts around composure, wisdom, and knowledge. We got a sense of each other’s management style.
He then said, “Alright this is the first scenario I run for all the managers. I want to hear your answers to 3 questions. Assume you have a pie diagram.”
“You mean a pie chart?” I asked.
He nodded, “Yes that’s how you would say it in English. Given the pie chart, what percentage of knowledge would you say you know? How would you draw that slice?”
“I don’t really know anything man,” I said. “Every day I get surprised by something I thought I knew was correct but then I’m wrong. Recently product, engineering, analytics and design shot down one of my suggestions. Can I say I have a little dot? How about the thin line of the circumference of the circle?”
“Give me an integer value. 1 to 100. You’re drawing a pie slice.”
“I can’t say zero?”
The driver teased, “You’re telling me you have nothing in your head? You clearly know something so how would you draw your slice?”
“Alright fine. 1%. Lowest I can go.”
The driver continued, “What would you draw as the percentage of things you know you don’t know?”
“1%,” and I preempted the final question with, “The other 98% is things I don’t know that I don’t know.”
He laughed and shook my hand, “Correct. Ego is your enemy as a manager. If you think you know the answers to everything, you will make many, many mistakes. You can claim you understand those three sentences after training. But they are worthless if you can’t internalize them.”
I nodded in agreement. I could quote a few things from Andy Grove’s High Output Management back in college when I took a class on management but there’s nothing like trying to manage in real life, re-reading the book and having a deeper appreciation for the concepts.
He then said, “Many managers draw a slice of 20% as the knowledge they know. I have those students open a dictionary and read through the columns. I haven’t met anyone who knows all the words and definitions by heart. Once they go through this exercise, their ego dampens and they’re more likely to listen to my advice.”
I admitted, “Well another Uber driver once told me three things” –
- There are things we know
- There are things we don’t know
- There are things we don’t know we don’t know
And I’ve been thinking about those three things since then.
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