Evan LaPointe
Evan LaPointe is the founder of CORE Sciences, which teaches companies and individuals how our brains work and how that translates to improved collaboration, better products, faster decision-making, and more growth. Previously, Evan was the co-founder of Satellite, the fourth-largest analytics product on the internet today (it mostly runs behind the scenes, and pretty much everyone listening will have used it today without knowing it), which was acquired by Adobe, where he later ran product strategy, innovation, and long-range thinking for Adobe’s digital experiences business.
Communication Skills
Effective influence requires being intentional about your 'character' or style and seeking permission for that role.
"The starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode... Am I the devil's advocate approach, or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with..."
Influence can be achieved by providing stakeholders with new information that shifts their perspective over time.
"The moderate influence... is the concept of teaching people something. And then when they live with this new knowledge, they'll see things that they weren't seeing before."
Most meeting dysfunction stems from skipping the 'priming' phase where context and alignment are established.
"Meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making... A lot of meetings skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making."
Aligning on underlying principles (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) prevents circular tactical arguments.
"It's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Individual behavior and the 'experience' one provides to others is the foundational layer of team dynamics and relationships.
"It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worr..."
Leaders should focus on designing the 'habitat' or environment to naturally encourage high performance rather than just managing individual interactions.
"I think of companies and teams, almost like little terrariums that we're inside of... you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's predisposed to high-functioning thinking and high-f..."
Effective culture is built on logical deduction of the company's role and value in the world rather than performative mission statements.
"The biggest flaw in people's approach to culture... is to be performative... The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive... Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist?"
Leadership Skills
Effective feedback is designed by working backward from the intended behavioral outcome rather than just delivering the message.
"I struggled for years with feedback to generate the intended outcome... As soon as I started closing the gap and realized I need to try harder to think about the story arc of this feedback, that becom..."
Product Management Skills
Visionary ideas often fail because they trigger an 'inconceivable' neurological response in stakeholders who lack the same openness or context.
"Your brain is going to sort those ideas into believed, believable, kind of conceivable and inconceivable... A lot of the vision thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activat..."
Reverse engineering desired outcomes helps bridge the gap between abstract vision and pragmatic execution.
"The best exercise for a conscientious person especially to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering... to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome."