The Low-Pass CEO
To be an effective leader, you must distinguish the longer term important things and filter out the high frequency unimportant things. In other words, you need to be a Low-Pass CEO.
Signal and Noise
Business leaders have a finite amount of time and energy. And one of the most challenging and seemingly impossible tasks required of them, particularly at early stage companies, is to know where to focus their attention. I have learned the hard way that most of the things that people intuitively assume they should spend their time on are actually short-term distractions. An effective and efficient leader must know how to separate the signal from the noise. The signal, in this case, are the big things, the long term things, the ones that truly impact whether you are successful or not. The noise? That’s everything else. The short term stuff.
Sometimes the short term stuff is negative: a negative article, a series of user complaints, a bad bug experienced by many users. Sometimes it’s positive: praise from a celebrity, an influx of users, a viral tweet. Whether positive or negative, these short term blips come rapidly and with high velocity. So, they’re hard to ignore.
But in my experience as a founder and someone who’s built products and communities from the ground up, I can assure you that most of the short term noise (not all of it, but most of it) is irrelevant to your long term success. In fact, it’s generally a mistake to waste energy on it, even the positive stuff. The things that really matter are the longer trends, the ones that take a while to manifest: the sentiment of your team over years, the competitive landscape over years, the retention of your users over years, etc. Time periods that determine success are not measured in media cycles or DAU cycles, but in lifecycles.
An effective leader must find a way to (mostly) ignore the high frequency noise. They shouldn’t get too excited by the quick wins, nor should they get too bogged down in the flashy crises. An effective leader needs to be what I call a Low-Pass CEO.
Filters
Let’s look at analogies in science and math, as I like to do. (I recently wrote this article comparing early stage product development to quantum physics and this article that applies database theory to organizational structure).
Most of what we perceive through our senses is a mixing of signals of different frequencies. White light, for instance, is simply a combination of various frequencies of color. The rich texture of the music we love comes from the union of pitches and their overtones, which are also frequencies. The field of signal processing studies these types of phenomena, and looks at how the complicated intersection of many different signals can be broken down into component parts.
Filters are innovations that allow for just that. Tons of engineering feats are accomplished using filters, which do exactly what their name implies: When bombarded with different frequencies, they let some things through and keep others out (i.e. they filter them).
One of my favorite examples of a filter in action is the suspension in a car. Roads are riddled with bumps and potholes, yet when driving you don’t feel every nuance in the road. In fact, generally the ride feels completely smooth. That’s because your car’s suspension system is able to use shock absorbers to filter out the high frequency noise and only let through the bigger changes.
This type of filter is called a low-pass filter. It’s called that because, quite aptly, it lets the low frequencies pass. In other words, it filters out (removes) the high frequencies. The things that spike up or down suddenly. It averages out the noise, and in so doing, makes for a smoother ride.
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The Low-Pass CEO
A typical day in the life of a business leader looks something like this:
It’s chaotic, has unpredictable ups and downs, and makes it very difficult to decide how to feel at any given moment. That’s because of a constant bombardment of information. Employees are happy; employees are sad; employees are quitting; money is running out; an investor is angry; an investor wants to invest more; a product doesn’t work; a product unexpectedly works very well; a partnership opportunity presents itself; a partnership opportunity falls through; the news hates you; the news loves you; the news won’t bother writing about you at all.
How can you tell what’s important?
What is critical to keep in mind is that this roller coaster is only the sum of its component parts. This chaos is made up of waves. So let’s break it up into its component waves:
Most of what leaders experience on a day-to-day basis is high frequency noise. It’s the stuff that doesn’t actually matter in the long term. Sometimes these are positive blips. Most often they are negative.
Yet the things that really matter are the slow things, the hard things, the things that require long term focus and dedication. They’re the trends that play out over very long periods of time.
Just as a car’s suspension system is able to smoothen the ride by muffling the quick ups and downs, an effective leader needs to process information through their own low-pass filter of sorts.
Perspective
All of this is a way of just providing some additional perspective. As that chaotic day to day unfolds, it’s worth pausing and reflecting on whether the loudest issue or the loudest praise are actually things that will have a long term impact.
Of course, it’s not always possible to predict that. In hindsight, vision is always 20/20. Yet sometimes, in the moment, an effective leader should be able to use that low-pass filter, to let through the important stuff, to sift out the noise.
P.S. Signal processing is one of those things that, once I learned about it, I see everywhere. It has myriad applications to other fields in unexpected ways. For instance, it can be used in a counterintuitive way to improve democratic representation, a topic I’ve written about here.
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