- With Goals, FAST Beats SMART
Goal setting via FAST (frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, transparent).
(categories: okr goals fast management )
Links: 8-10-2018
- EX-99.1
Quote: "One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making. Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions…
(categories: decision-making amazon bezos management thinking prioritization )
Links: 8-9-2018
- An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes
Quote: "Why do many complex systems – cultures, environments, economies – seem stuck (or if good, "stable") despite lots of effort to change them? And why, when change does come, it seems to cascade (or if bad, "collapse") all at once?" A great visualization, very well done.
(categories: attractors repellers tipping-point )
Links: 8-7-2018
- How Netflix Redesigned Board Meetings
Quote: "… 30-page online memos in narrative form that not only include links to supporting analysis but also allow open access to all data and information on the company’s internal shared systems" and day long and 2 day long QBR’s.
(categories: netflix management meetings )
Links: 7-28-2018
- How Manhattan’s Grid Created the Pettiest Mosaic Ever Made.
Maps, NYC, history, grids.
(categories: nyc history architecture maps ) - Henry Ford, Innovation, and That “Faster Horse” Quote
Quote: "In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%."
(categories: business innovation ford customerfocus ) - How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting: A Board Meeting for Product
Quarterly product strategy meetings, with metrics… or one key metrics, swim lanes (groups of teams), optimization vs. innovation, tightly aligned & loosely coupled organizations, have it out converations, testing and learning.
(categories: netflix organization strategy meeting planning product )
Links: 7-23-2018
- What Cracking Open a Sonos One Tells Us About the Sonos IPO
A great teardown of consumer hardware, a world I’ll never understand.
(categories: hardware sonos audio teardown ) - REST vs GraphQL APIs, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly | Moesif’s Musings on Software
GraphQL +’s but good to see the honest -‘s.
(categories: graphql rest api ) - Steve Jobs’ Secret for Eliciting Questions, Overheard at a San Francisco Cafe
Great substitution question for "Any questions?" for leaders.
(categories: business management leadership ) - If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is?
The infographic for "How People Interpret Probabilistic Words" is money.
(categories: communication probability statistics datascience likely )
Links: 7-17-2018
- The hotel bathroom puzzle | Alec Nevala-Lee
Quote: "When simple things need instructions, it is a certain sign of poor design.” And that’s as true of stories as of sinks. Whenever a movie gives us an introductory scroll of text, a lingering shot of a sign, or a chyron to explain where we are or how much time has passed, it signals that the underlying problem hasn’t really been solved. If you want to find the right answer, you have to start by asking the right question. And then you can soak in the tub until you’ve figured it out—as long a…
(categories: design usability engineering problemsolving )
Links: 7-4-2018
- Farnam Street Principles
Quote: "All that we write about, think about, and strive for at Farnam Street draws inspiration from one of these five principles: Direction Over Speed, Live Deliberately, Thoughtful Opinions Held Loosely, Principles Outlive Tactics, and Own Your Actions." In my words: think about where you’re going, live in the now, be open to changing your mind, develop your core, it’s ok to be wrong.
(categories: life culture management strategy ) - Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency – Learning By Shipping
LONG post on meetings.
(categories: management meetings meeting work ) - Productivity in the age of hypergrowth.
Quote: "One specific tool that I’ve found extremely helpful here is an ownership registry which allows you to look up who owns what, eliminating the frequent "who owns X?" variety of question. You’ll need this sort of thing to automate paging the right oncall rotation, so might as well get two useful tools out of it!" Not the first time I’ve heard of this. Lots of other good points.
(categories: management engineering programming scaling ) - I’ve Got Some Things to Say | By Romelu Lukaku
One to remember the next time you pull the milk out of the refrigerator.
(categories: culture poverty soccer ) - Andrej Karpathy_Final
Some awesome / interesting challenges for Telsa / AI as we all seek to have self-driving cars.
(categories: tesla ai ml ) - Hit the Ground Running with Distributed Tracing Core Concepts
4k word essay from an engineer at Nike about distributed tracing.
(categories: distributed-tracing tracing monitoring ) - Smarter, Not Harder: How to Succeed at Work
Focus and *attention*. 15m at a time.
(categories: productivity sleep work )
Links: 5-12-2018
- Developer Growth Framework 1.0.xlsx – Google Sheets
A rubric for software developers.
(categories: career programming rubric ) - How to Identify Talent: Five Lessons from the NFL Draft – Behavioral Scientist
Quote: "… This applies to all judgments. Hiring is best thought of as a forecasting process, and the only way to improve forecasts is to map them against results and refine the process over time. By doing this, teams learn which tests matter most, which questions are more informative, and which scouts are best with each position on the field. Many organizations don’t bother keeping score, because the payoff is delayed; it can be years before enough data arrive for reliable insights. The kind …
(categories: management hiring recruiting talent long-view ) - Baron Schwartz on Twitter: "Monitoring tells you whether the system works. Observability lets you ask why it’s not working."
(categories: monitoring observability logging tracing metrics )
- Monitoring in the time of Cloud Native – Cindy Sridharan – Medium
Quote: "Soon enough, if not already, we’ll be at that point where the network and underlying hardware failures have been robustly abstracted away from us, leaving us with the sole responsibility to ensure our application is good enough to piggy bank on top of the latest and greatest in networking and scheduling abstractions."
(categories: monitoring observability devops tracing logging metrics )
Links: 5-6-2018
- Keep The Degree Of Difficulty Down – AVC
Quote: "I have sat through numerous pitches where I am listening to the founder explain their technology and go to market plan and I think “this is going to be a reverse triple somersault with two twists in pike and there is no way they are going to land it.” I’ve sat through similar pitches… all inside companies though. Also, ".. doing the easier things perfectly thousands of times instead of the hard thing just once."
(categories: simplicity risk strategy )