I’ve been thinking about “management” recently, trying to bottle it, simplify how we think about it.  Julie Zhou gets the definition nicely clear in this (older) post.

“Management is the practice of constantly identifying what a team needs in order to be successful and then delivering on those needs”

Some simple, elegant tips, almost koans, from Jule Zhou on management.

This piece is ostensibly about dress code.  Or maybe female leadership.  For me it’s a lovely example of how to clearly and powerfully delegate and empower.  Fun to read.

Worth reviewing to see how you’re doing.

Super nice, very clean description of the “Situation, Behavior, Impact” model of giving feedback.  If you have difficult feedback to give any time soon, bookmark this.

Neat little post about how to vary feedback based on the experience of the person receiving it.

Be specific in giving feedback!  Easy post, makes the point.

Going out on a limb a bit with this one.  Jack Kornfield is a world-renowned teacher of Vipassana Meditation (which we now called “Mindfulness”).  He has been teaching and writing on the subject for close to fifty years (and still teaches at Spirit Rock, north of SF).  This is a typically lucid and gentle post on the subject of anger, which has been on my mind recently.  What is the purpose of anger?   How can we channel it, work with it?  Find a quiet room and give it five minutes.

I am late coming to Jeff Bezos’ letters to shareholders, but now a huge fan.  This one introduces the idea of “Type 1” (large, irreversible) and “Type 2” (smaller, lower stakes) decisions.  And also contains some clear thinking on culture:

“A word about corporate cultures: for better or for worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it – not creating it. It is created slowly over time by the people and by events –by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company lore”

Similar to the notion of “nudges” - simple rules that push behavior and decisions towards resolutions that work.  Interesting article.

If you are selling snow shovels, and there’s a big storm, is it a good idea to raise the price?  This kind of decision shows up a lot: should we bug our site visitors with signup screens?  Should we cut off that really, really useful feature to force subscriptions?  Worth reading.

Nice to see this addressed: the difference between strategy and vision (I would add a third category - stories).  Helpful.

“If strategies describe the harsh tradeoffs necessary to overcome a particular challenge, then visions describe a future where those tradeoffs are no longer mutually exclusive”

Bear with the first half of this - the latter part of the post is a set of simple, helpful ways to bring your attention back to the present moment and get out of the stream of futures, pasts and “what ifs” that clutter our thinking.

Questions are good.  Try them!

Loved this: “Well, first off, I am not sure that we even need a practical answer to that question, it is the “right thing to do”: we live in a pluralistic society where opportunity has been and continues to be unevenly distributed and it is simply the right thing to do as human beings to make sure our fellows have equal access to opportunities across our society”

Shane Snow puts together a series of “you need both of these conflicting points of view” charts for leadership.  “willing to change” vs “willing to fight”; “personal support” vs “intellectual conflict” etc.  The subtleties lie in which choice to make, and when.

A good list.  Short, to the point.  Love the first one: “Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. If it happened, whatever IT was, don’t go on as though it didn’t. Face it. Talk about it”

Yep!  Specifically about engineering teams, but the point of view is general: process is necessary, but not a substitute for the fundamentals.  A quick, useful read.

I enjoyed this.  Finding your “voice” as a leader - the unique express of who you are at work - is a necessary step.  Deb Liu (a VP at Facebook) describes why and how she went about it.

“For me, the hardest part of finding my voice was worrying that I had nothing to say that was worth listening to… over time I found that sharing more of myself was not a weakness but an opportunity to connect”

This is great.  A list of phrases that should raise a red flag when you are intent on creating an inclusive workplace.  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend anyone”.  And “I don’t think she would be a culture fit”.  Make you wince a bit?  Might be some stuff to look at there.