Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy

John Mark Nickels is a product leader who has worked at Uber, DoorDash, and Waymo, including building Uber Pool and leading commercialization of autonomous ride hailing. The conversation covers conscious leadership, working through fear and emotion at work, developing vision and strategy, lessons from hypergrowth companies, and finding one's life objective function.

01Key learnings

• Treat leadership as any influence you have, not just formal management, and take responsibility for how you show up with others.
• When stressed in high-stakes meetings, first allow the emotion and thought rather than fighting it, since resisting it tends to make the loop self-reinforcing.
• Stop seeking approval or self-worth from presentations and outcomes; anchoring to the mission and the product often improves both work and recognition.
• Build strategy skill by staying deep in one problem space for years, and sharpen it by reasoning from what will likely be true in 10 years.
• Use first-principles questions, like why a 4,000-pound vehicle is needed to move one person a few miles, to surface inefficiencies that point to opportunities.
• Balance vision and execution by noticing when a team has drifted into theory or into running blindly, and adjust the pedal accordingly.
• Treat emotions as information: fear signals something needing attention, sadness signals letting go, anger signals misalignment, and joy calls for celebration.
• Define your life's objective function by imagining your future self looking back, and let that guide daily priorities over short-term work demands.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.