Farnam Street:

Sometimes doing nothing at all or removing inputs is the better approach.

Derek Thompson on how solving finite games can ruin the infinite games that surround them.

Dina Denham Smith and Alicia A. Grandey:

Leaders are expected to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout (while also addressing their own), demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility and remote work — all while managing the bottom line, doing more with less, and overcoming challenges with hiring and retaining talent. They should appear authentic, but if they get too honest about their distress, others may lose confidence in their leadership, known as the “authenticity paradox.”

This whole article resonates with my experience.

Jason Yip:

Organizational effectiveness in market development is efficiently running a lot of experiments to find promising opportunities.

Organizational effectiveness in growth and maturity is efficiently building, scaling, iterating, and exploiting capabilities in order to maximize business value.

Organizational effectiveness in decline or commodity / hygiene capabilities is reducing total cost of ownership.

Charity Majors:

The strategy for a fulfilling, lifelong career in tech is not to up the ante every interval. Nor is it to amass more and more power over others until you explode. Instead:

1. Train yourself to love the feeling of constantly learning and pushing your boundaries. Feeling comfortable is the system blinking orange, and it should make you uneasy.
2. Follow your nose into work that lights you up in the morning, work you can’t stop thinking about. If you’re bored, do something else.
3. Say yes to opportunities!! Intensity is nothing to be afraid of. Instead of trying to cap your speed or your growth, learn to alternate it with recovery periods.
4. If you aren’t sure what to do, make the choice that preserves or expands future optionality. Remember: Most startups fail. Will you be okay with your choices if (& when) this one does too?

Noah Brier:

Lumpers think splitters are neurotics, and splitters think lumpers are careless.

Camille Fournier:

Either way, it is important to realize that these more senior levels are not a measure of betterness, or quality, or raw intelligence and technical skills. They are instead a measure of demonstrated impact and confidence in the scope of work that the person can be tasked to accomplish. The people who get these promotions are trusted to navigate the systems of the company, to understand what is valued by the people around them and where to spend their time, because they have done just that.

Cam Daigle:

I’m hoping this system helps you have better meetings – that the people running the meeting feel like it’s worth their time to run them, and that the people in attendance feel like their presence there matters.

Anthony Murphy:

Having overlap is deliberate and a good thing. It helps create shared accountability and remove any bottlenecks or single-points of dependencies.

Roger Martin:

Use every opportunity to talk to customers — both end-customers and channel (if your business sells through a channel). You don’t have to be at all formal or scientific about it. Make it easy to get started by doing it in a comfortable situation. If you have stores, wander a few of them talking to customers. If you are B2B, tag along with salespeople. Don’t have an agenda. Just soak in the customer thoughts, reactions, and behaviors.

…

Strategy is a team sport in which better strategic decisions arrive out of productive interpretations of diverse data and insights. Force yourself to learn how to integrate multiple views into your strategy-making by never engaging in strategy work alone. And I mean: never. That is what will get you the dialogue practice you need.

Tony Stubblebine:

Many things at Twitter were broken to the point that they could bring the entire site to a halt. Greg’s strategy, now distorted through multiple retellings and my own foggy memory, was to focus on short-term triage rather than long-term fixes.

Essentially, he realized that a collection of temporary, duct-taped fixes was the only thing that would give the Twitter team the breathing room to start working on longer-term fixes.

I think of this in school grade terms. Greg went looking for all the Fs and then turned them into Ds. Then he turned all the Ds into Cs and then all the Cs into Bs, etc.

Advice on managing stress and how to create conditions for rest and recovery.

Derek Thompson:

Role-switching is important not because quitting is so wonderful, but rather because sampling from different skills and fields is helpful, provided that you’re prepared to pounce on an area that clicks for you. Explore, then exploit.

…

He argues at one point that artists and other professionals feel happiest when their “body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Richard Mironov:

Prioritization is more than an analytical/intellectual exercise. It’s an organizational challenge with natural disagreements among stakeholders. Product leaders need to think about motivating the right kinds of participation and addressing the emotional issues that arise. Spreadsheets and models are necessary, but not sufficient.

A post that looks at various aspects of being a senior leader.

I personally have a fondness for framing the role as building the machine that builds the machine and all that entails.

Richard Marmorstein:

There’s nothing wrong with a fondness for data. The trouble begins when you begin to favor bad arguments that involve data over good arguments that don’t, or insist that metrics be introduced in realms where data can’t realistically be the foundation of a good argument.

Chris Stjernlöf:

When reading Robert’s Rules of Order, I learned two things that struck me as deeply important, which I had misunderstood in the past:

• The purpose of debate is not winning, it’s about information sharing.
• Votes should not need to be counted, the result should be clear anyway.

Sam McAfee:

Many organizations still focus the majority of their decision making on one person or one small group of people at the top. This concentration of decision making isn’t just inefficient, it’s degenerative. No organization that maintains such centralized control over decisions will be able to adapt at the speed required by today’s markets.

…

The other key to promoting autonomy is to ensure individuals and teams have the skills they need to act on the clarity that comes from strategic thinking. Skills are honed through delegation. Managers must practice delegation to successfully develop new skills in their direct reports. And yet, good delegation skill is more rare than it should be.

…

Teams can then take the clarity they capture from long-term strategic thinking, the capabilities they’ve built by having decisions delegated to them, and combine them into action that is fast, flexible, and responsive.

Skills that lead to good code stewardship.

Kara Cutruzzula:

Why is defensiveness such an obstacle to collaboration? When we get defensive, “we put way more into self-preservation than we do into problem-solving,” Tamm says. “We’re trying to prove that we’re right rather than search for creative solutions.” When this happens in a workplace, it can be a recipe for chaos and failure.

…

OK, now that we understand the dangers of defensiveness, here’s what we can do about it. You can start by learning to spot the warning signs of defensiveness in yourself. When you feel yourself experiencing them, pay attention and take action. According to Tamm, here are the 10 most common warning signs that you may be getting defensive: A spurt of energy in your body; sudden confusion; flooding your audience with information to prove a point; withdrawing into silence; magnifying or minimizing everything; developing “all or nothing” thinking; feeling like you’re a victim or you’re misunderstood; blaming or shaming others; obsessive thinking; and wanting the last word.

John Cutler:

We confuse clarity/coherence and certainty. If clarity/coherence equals certainty, and a strategy is supposed to be clear and coherent, then unless we are certain, we can’t have a strategy. Meanwhile some high percentage of the audience for our strategy wants certainty. If they haven’t heard confident certainty, then they haven’t heard a strategy.

…

The unlock, I think, is realizing that you can confidently communicate a coherent strategy that also acknowledges uncertainty. You know what you know. You assume what you assume. You believe what you believe.

Dave Bailey provides a manager’s guide to holding their teams accountable.

Jason Yip:

• Authority-focus: “Not my job, not my problem.”
• Responsibility-focus: “What is the right thing to do? How can I help?”

Responsibility-focus reflects the belief that “we’re in it together”.

Jason Yip:

When you work in team-based product development, you will need to deal with drift.

By drift, I mean an increasing mismatch in understanding about:

• the problem we’re trying to solve;
• the solution we’re attempting;
• each other and how to relate.
• Drift in shared understanding creates confusion, mistakes, and generally a bad working experience.

…

Daily standups ensure understanding is integrated across a team at least once a day.

Dave Kellog:

In the end, there are two types of things that CEOs can potentially stress about:

• Things they can control. They shouldn’t stress over these because they should do something about them, instead.
• Things they can’t control. They shouldn’t stress over these because doing so will not change the outcome. Worse yet, it may well change the outcome — for the worse — over the things they can control.

Ergo, CEOs should never stress about things. QED.

I’m still a sucker for code editors.

Suggestions for how to make meetings worthwhile.

Miriam Posner:

You could say, then, that by the late 1960s, software development was facing three crises: a crying need for more programmers; an imperative to wrangle development into something more predictable; and, as businesses saw it, a managerial necessity to get developers to stop acting so weird.

Peter Seibel:

A feedback process 100% aimed at professional growth would, I suspect, be totally divorced from promotions and compensation bumps. Not because those things should be unrelated to professional growth but because truly reflecting on how you can do better and being open to feedback from your peers and managers is already tremendously difficult; when you are also worrying about whether or not you’re going to get that promotion or raise you were hoping for, it’s probably impossible.

Lots more in there on feedback, biannual reviews, titles, promotions, and the role of management.

Dave Anderson:

A promotion to a higher job level puts you in a more influential position. You are being given more responsibility. It’s not a reward. Instead, it’s the company granting you more influence.

Of course, increased pay often accompanies a promotion. However, the added responsibility is the reason the company did the promotion, not the compensation.

Those who run the company are always looking for people to take on more responsibility. They’re looking for people who can come up with the next business idea, lead larger spaces, identify opportunities, and fix recurring problems. It is relatively easy to find people who are good at their jobs, and hard to find people capable of doing the next level job.

Circling back, companies promote people into larger responsibilities when that person looks like a leader. Leaders identify their own opportunities.