Nice story about how looking at improving everything by small increments can make a massive difference over time. (Yeah, obvious, but it raised the question, at least for me, of “huh, OK, well what can I improve a little bit that I routinely overlook?”).

Naming is a powerful tool for any creative activity, and leadership is a creative activity. My notes on why it’s powerful, good names and bad names, the timing of names, and why getting too attached to names is a bad idea.

We love to form tribes - it’s one of the ways we misuse names. This a simple, but useful reminder, about how easy it is to label “the other people”, how it damages organizations, and what to do about it.

A good look at what really “hiring for fit” might mean. Strong article.

“When we hire for fit without thinking about what a fit means to us, we use an unfortunate proxy: similarity to hiring managers. The result: homogeneous teams, with poor results for employee experience and the bottom line”

Elad Gil (Google, Twitter, AirBnB among others) goes through all necessary practical steps to hire fast, and then faster as you scale. Very complete. Worth returning to as you build your hiring.

My notes on breaking through stuck conversations. You’ve tried being clear and direct. You’ve tried repeating yourself. You are baffled by the responses and are about to start giving up, or getting loud and insistent. A “WTF moment”. A breakdown of what to do instead.

“We have inherited and unquestioningly perpetuated management practices that date back to the Industrial Revolution. Systems and processes, hierarchy and outdated structures impede our ability to transform our organisations to be future-ready”

Interestingly, I think this is still true in the tech industry, although to a much lessor extent than outlined here. But take a look.

The hive mind at Hacker News gets into what makes a great manager/leader/CEO. Really worth reading.

Simple. Handy. Lines up with Jeff Bezos’ Type 1 and Type 2 decisions to a degree. Useful.

Neat post: hire people who are going to grow into the positions you have. Your key hiring skill is spotting the people who have miles of room to run, not the ones who already have the resume.

Followup to a link I posted a couple of weeks ago. Woman are confident, and express it, but don’t get heard.

Lots of evidence of how men still behave towards women in professional settings (conferences, for example).

Sarah points out how sexism recurs, like production outages, despite everything we know and do.

This is wild! An in-depth report from Stripe on developer efficiency and its dollar effects on business (hint: large). An amazing document.

Questions like: “In your opinion, as a whole, how productive are developers at your company?” and “How much of a negative impact does each of the following have on your personal morale?” I’m going to spoil the answer: 1) overwork 81% and 2) changing priorities 79%.

An approach to understanding management based on my twenty years doing it, and four+ years coaching it. A bit of a long read, but I hope helpful in thinking through the art/craft/path of guiding people at work.

A good set of questions to ask about your calendar (doesn’t apply just to CEOs, by the way). I would add: make the overall question you are asking be more pointed: “what do I really, really need to keep?”. Everything else should go.

“Management is full of mechanics that could easily become process performances”

Yep. Distinguish the outcome you want from the process you are following. You want the outcome. The process is a means to get there.

Curiosity is a super-power, I believe. It’s also scary if your view of management is control. This is a longish, but complete piece of research into the value of curiosity and how to foster it in an organization. Good stuff.

It happens: an important leader leaves unexpectedly. This is a clever page of “dos and donts”. Put it somewhere. At some point you’ll need it.

“I will occasionally have someone ask me about what to do with a person who won’t listen. My answer is always some variation of “I don’t know, I’ve never met someone who wouldn’t listen.”

Short, to the point, and valuable.