Jack Kornfield is one of the early pioneers of bringing Vipassana meditation, which we now call mindfulness, to the West. This is a short, clear, rather beautiful piece about pain, anger and how to respond with skill.

“In a healthy response to pain and fear, we establish awareness before it becomes anger. We can train ourselves to notice the gap between the moments of sense experience and the subsequent response”

Neat model for managing retrospectives for anything (not just agile projects). Half a page, dead simple, nice structure. Check it out.

This is cool: practical lessons learned from building a distributed team. Includes notes on how to build relationships, the right communication tools to use, and how to use them, and a bunch more. Good stuff.

A set of excellent articles from Chelsea Troy around remote working. Hard to choose one, so I didn’t - browse ‘em.

Benedict Evans (Andresssen Horowitz) with his yearly look at the future. Another reminder that two or more decades into the Big Revolution, we haven’t seen anything yet.

My notes on why pre-scripting difficult conversations is futile: it’s driven by anxiety, and we can never really know how the conversation is going to go. What to do instead…

A simple post about praise: how to make it work, why it sometimes lands awkwardly, how to adjust. You can’t praise enough. Read it.

A quick, useful read. Super-helpful to be reminded of the basics.

“If neither person clings to a position, much can be learned. Remember the other person is just as convinced as you are that he or she is right and you are wrong”

There are good ways of dealing when a leader suddenly takes off, and not so good. A one-page cheat-sheet. Take a look. (I think I’ve posted this before - it’s still good!).

A neat approach to building team alignment: practical, sensible, doable. Cool.

“Becoming more effective by banning overtime, enforcing monotasking and being serious about prioritizing ? These ideas are heresy in some workplaces ! Have a look around you. Are people overworked ? Are they fire fighting all the time ? Are they drowning in multitasking ?” Indeed. Take a look.

Nice discussion of some very early startup tricks. Cool to browse if you’re thinking of trying something new.

“But when it comes to sales in pre-chasm markets, how do companies go from “hunting” for product-market fit to actually scaling a sales org around a repeatable sales process?”

Great post.

Fake videos are getting really good. Detection is trying to keep up.

What happens when the system takes a pic, gets it wrong, and decides you broke the law?

This story - “Nobody Bats 1000” - has been useful to clients moving from manager or early director on up to bigger roles. It’s about the moment when the org becomes large enough and complex enough that the leader has to embrace, and become friends with, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Examines the cognitive biases that kick in when somebody is not achieving in their work: we may quickly make an unskillful response that makes the situation worse (“X is lazy”, rather than “I wonder what is really happening with X?”).

Marcus on the great value of retrospectives and continuous improvement for everything. A simple, powerful idea.

I am increasingly asking my clients to write, and circulate, “Manager Readmes” - introductions to their personality and working style. This idea is bubbling up from the engineering community and is a great, simple tool to increase personal connection and understanding. Take a look, choose a format you like, and go for it.

Should everybody have “readmes”? Seems right!

An aside: in “Principles”, Ray Dalio describes “baseball cards” that employees at Bridgewater have to describe their biases and ways of working. “readmes” feel like a more human way of achieving something like the same degree of openness.