Links: 4-27-2018

  • EX-99.1
    LOVE so much about this: 1) "Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be – something this coach understood well." 2) "Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos – the memo is from the whole team.)"
    (categories: amazon leadership management culture team team-first )

  • Can You Pass a C.E.O. Test? – The New York Times
    Quote: "The most important thing is that you treat everybody incredibly well and lead with a bit of humility. I’ve found that when I go into a company to lead it’s important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. So even before I go into a company, or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, “What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?” Then what I…
    (categories: leadership management priorities )

  • Spurs’ Title Is a Testament to Persistence – The New York Times
    Quote: "“When nothing seems to help,” it reads, “I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it — but all that had gone before.”
    (categories: persistence long-view time )

  • Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt.
    Quote: "Lore tells us that Googlers have a phrase, "Running to stand still", to describe a team whose entire capacity is consumed in upgrading dependencies and patterns, such that it can’t make forward progress on the product/system they own."
    (categories: engineering programming development devops software )

  • My Berkshire Hathaway Reflections
    Quote: "The world we live in is full of 24/7 noise — full of people who are trying to tell us to learn about the new and novel, people telling us we can get something for nothing, people trying to tell us the unknowable, people who won’t do the work. When you’re living in the moment, it’s hard to see that you’re in this system. It’s only when you step back that you realize that your mind has become cluttered and you’ve lost a sense of what’s important and what’s meaningful."
    (categories: business life culture long-view thinking time-horizon )

Links: 4-17-2018

  • Career Development:  What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP | Kellblog
    Quote: "Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project, but typically can’t make it. Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get…
    (categories: management organization career )

  • Going from director to VP isn’t as easy as it seems | Financial Post
    Good list: 1) Must be thought of as an expert and trusted source in their area of influence; a technical master and authentic subject-matter expert 2) Contributes at the senior level by working across different strategic and business units in the company; able to set, engage and champion the objectives of the organization across the board and with their team, 3) Builds organizational capacity; motivates and challenges others in a way that inspires and promotes excellence. Leads and develops peop…
    (categories: management career organization )

Links: 4-12-2018

  • No, seriously. Root Cause is a Fallacy. – Will Gallego
    Quote: If you’re looking for a substitute for the phrase “root cause”, one that would typically allow for you to illustrate an important point without conceding that there’s a place to stop (beyond our finite limit to dig into everything), I use the following: Contributing factors Surrounding events One of many components Influencing ideas Conditions States"
    (categories: engineering rca root-cause-assessment )