From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What is your philosophy on leadership?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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What is your philosophy on leadership?

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(upbeat music) - What is your philosophy on leadership? - Something I like to always try to instill in teams is that data science is a team sport. You don't get to do this alone. If you try to do it alone, it's like the old adage, African adage, which is "you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together." It's very true in data science as well it's like make it a team sport, make it collaborative. My favorite thing fundamentally is to be proven wrong on something. Where I'm like "I had this theory" and someone comes back and they're like "you're totally wrong." I'm like "that's amazing, let's figure out why, let's understand that and what, what, what actually is going on there, and lets iterate from there." and if we're making it in bite-size iterations, we're always learning. It's not like big spectacular "I'm wrong, the failure" We're iterating constantly to it. You have to really grow talent, not just recruit people. You have to grow talent, people who are on your team have to come in and be setup for success. Then there is the fundamental part of actual execution, and how do you actually produce and deliver value? There's something that I, I try to talk about with startups often is like what, what, what is most important is cadence. Cadence is that ability like when you're biking, or you're bicycling, it's the speed at which you're going and you can have that, that, that has a rhythm and you can increase that rhythm or you can decrease the rhythm and so what you're looking for is that rhythm to be increasing every day as you're executing and building and you're going faster and you're doing more and you're accomplishing more. And that's what we typically call speed and then velocity. There's that other part which is acceleration, and you want your acceleration to be positive as well as your, your, your speed to be a positive. And the reason for that is if you're constantly getting faster you're getting wiser you're iterating faster, as you compete or you're trying to learn something, you may not win on lap 1, but by lap 7 or 10 or 15, you are now a lap or two ahead of everybody else. My job is to look across the landscape and go "what job is taking away everyone else's energy or blocking them, or something causing a hangup?" and my job is to either get them into a job where everything about their job is giving them energy, getting them into a place where there is alignment, or removing an obstacle. And if I can do that the team can, can move faster. That many times sucks for the leader (laughs) because you're starting your day with problems, but that's a version that's there. It's like your job as a leader is not to be served, your job as a, as a leader is to serve. (upbeat music)

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