Utkarsh Amitabh describes a CEO Fellowship that teaches critical thinking, writing, and public speaking to help people become the "CEO of their careers." The program caps at 50 seats and targets students, professionals, and executives who want to build what he calls a "category of one."
Chapters
Hi everyone. I'm Utkarish here to tell you about the Network Capital CEO Fellowship that's starting in a few weeks from now. Essentially, the CEO Fellowship is not just for people who are looking to lead organizations or startups or movements of social change, but for all of us trying to build our category of 1. If you remember my HBR article, the first one, it was focused on transcending competition, building a community, and essentially taking concrete steps towards doing something that you're uniquely good at, doing something that the world needs, and doing something that you can be paid for as well. Essentially, when you come to work, there are three key elements that define meaningful work. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. But when you're leading an organization and you're leading a social movement, when you're trying to create your category of one, you not just have to attain autonomy, mastery and purpose for yourself, but for the larger teams, entire countries, companies, what have you. Whether you're a poet or a quant, you need to be able to inspire collective action and lead to the kind of change that will make a measurable difference in the world around. That is why the Fellowship is designed into three key component parts. The first is critical thinking. I truly believe in this 21st century, so much happens around us that this supply chain of information is a challenge. So to make sense of the world around, we need to sit quietly with ourselves, build a latticework of mental models as Charlie Munger explains it, and try and make sense of all this confusing data and information that is being infected at us. Without clarity, without thinking and developing our own chain of mental models, it'll be impossible to do that for the rest of our teams and people involved in our communities. So we focus extensively on the first module, on developing this toolkit of decision making. The second is writing. I don't know a single CEO in the world, whether it's Satya, Nadella or Warren Buffet, who doesn't write well or doesn't invest time in communicating his or her ideas with the public, with the teammates. So in this CEO Fellowship, we're going to spend a lot of time with our community, trying to become better writers, trying to communicate our ideas with the power of words purposefully and systematically. Deliberate practice is a key component of everything we do on network capital, which is why the community based learning model is essential for our progress. So by the end of the fellowship, you would have written a wide range of articles, getting feedback from your peers and community members, and essentially you would have taken a concrete step towards becoming the CEO of your own career and the third and most important is public speaking. Warren Buffet often says that one of the best investments he's ever made is investing in becoming a better public speaker. And when it comes to, you know, being a CEO, leading any kind of change in any organization, this ability to really inspire others to feel more like co creators in whatever we're building is essential. Invest in public speaking, invest in writing, and invest in critical thinking and you would have taken the steps that are required to one day becoming the leader that you can be proud of and the leader that inspires others. The CEO Fellowship is a marquee fellowship on network capital. It's one of the most popular ones in addition to the I Don't know what I Want to do with My Life fellowship. And we are in this pursuit together so that we can build our category of one and create and lead the world slightly better than it was. We've all suffered through a lot of pain and challenges in the last year, year and a half and pain plus reflection equals of progress. I do feel that wherever you are in your professional life, whether you're a student, you're a young professional, you're an executive, it's time to reflect on your core strengths and re pivot and reimagine your career of the future. CEO is not just a designation. CEO is a way of life. And if nothing else, we owe it to ourselves to be the CEO of our careers. For our loved ones, for our communities. I hope you all embark upon this adventure. We will be capping the number of seats for the fellowship at 50. I hope to see you there. Take care and be well.
