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As you grow and as you start having children, or as people start to become
more important to you, then seeing their successes is a great thing. I'm per-
sonally very glad that some people I managed at Skype have now grown into
managers themselves and are now growing their own managers. As I was
leaving Skype, an interesting situation happened where my manager, his man-
ager, and I were all sitting around the table. At this meeting, there was also
someone I had grown into manager. Being part of that full circle was what I
would define as success.
Gutierrez:
How do you think about whether you're solving the right
problem?
Karpištšenko:
This is a big question I think about frequently. I've done so
many different things. As technology evolves, as the environment we work in
changes so frequently and rapidly, we need to continuously adapt what we
do and how we do it. If you don't, you stagnate quite often or your skills or
knowledge become obsolete. So there is a big part of intuition in choosing
the most important problem. I use a simple model—you could call it a deci-
sion tree or you could call it qualitative labels for the different opportunities
I have—to evaluate whether I want to do it, whether that's my passion, the
different rewards it will bring me either socially, financially, or culturally, and
finally, if there is something new I am going to learn. I think about where this
route is going to take me in the long run. That's the first set of criteria.
Once you've made the big decision, then you have to think about what prob-
lems are going to come up inside the company, organization, or team that is
going to do the thing you have decided to do. Now you have to think about
the situation to decide what is important and what is not. This leads to a lot
of juggling between long-term goals and short-term goals. Of course, we all
know about different matrices for deciding what's important. You have CRM
systems for deciding on customer importance. You have different technologi-
cal portfolio managing methods and tools to decide into which part of the
system to invest in. What is strategic? What just needs to be sustained? What
should be outsourced? So you use different tools and methods continuously,
depending on the dimension you are optimizing for.
These days, a lot of what we do is positioning in the sense that we are posi-
tioning ourselves to be lucky. We follow the adage that luck is being prepared
for an opportunity and seizing it when it appears. So it's thinking about which
opportunities might present themselves in a week, or a month, or a year, or
in 10 years and then pushing what you are and what you do in that direction
so that when the opportunity presents itself, you are ready. You don't usually
know when or how the opportunity comes, but you want to recognize it.
Then, if you recognize it, you want to be able to seize the moment and do it.
So it's saying yes to some new opportunities but then being focused enough
to say no to many things that will guide you in a completely wrong direction.
No magic formula there.
