This is interesting: success leads to opportunity.  Opportunity leads to confusion, which prevents the next stage of success, and can sabotage what’s there already. So how to strip out options, reduce confusion, figure out what’s important?  Neat article.

OMG the scale of Apple’s business!  This year revenue from the App Store will exceed ALL worldwide box office revenues.   Fun facts and charts.

How to behave in a civil, successful conversation. Short post, easy, valuable tips.

This may be a bit abstract, but I love the title, and it’s a great read.

“…the majority of people in our world say and do what they do from their own set of fears, conclusions, defenses and attempts to survive. Most of it, even when aimed directly at us, has nothing to do with us”

Another great title, which provokes us to think about some basics: what are we trying to communicate? who to? what context do they have? Short, smart and thought-provoking.

One of those great, easy to understand, easy to do, hard to remember tips. Boils down to “shut up and listen”, but Camille Fournier states it more politely than that. Love it.

Tough love from A16Z. Yes, we should give people the benefit of the doubt. But we almost always, at least early in our careers, overdo it.

“So what do you do when you start getting this pit in your stomach that the senior executive you had so much hope for — that was going to take your darling, ambitious, visionary startup to the next level — might not be doing, well, exactly that?

You fire them”

Don’t know if I agree with the title (OK, let’s be honest, I don’t). But I do like the emphasis on not burying the instincts and intuition that got your company (or team) started as it scales to “grown up size”.

Some good reflections on management. The sections on dealing with emotion, and self-regulation are well-worth the read.

Results of a recent poll of what managers find hard.  Pretty interesting. Communication is the core of the job. And it’s hard.

“a full 69% of respondents said that they found “communicating in general” to be the hardest part about communicating with employees”

A short rant (not by me) about the implications of the “communication is hard” story above.

Yes, a listicle, but a good, practical one: excellent questions for going deeper into conversations with team members and co-workers.  And the author’s book - The Coaching Habit - is a very neat introduction to coaching at work.  Worth checking.

Those of you who’ve worked with me know the “ask what, not why” mantra.  This is good, short re-introduction to the practice of digging into issues without putting a person, or team, on the defensive.

Very cool post from Ed.  Another word substitution: “and” instead of “but”.  As in “I know you’re trying hard, and it’s not enough” vs “I know you’re trying hard, but it’s not enough”.   See the difference?  Pretty neat.

OK, not strictly about questions, but about what to do once you’ve asked a question: wait!   It’s actually tricky to do - to embrace the discomfort of not knowing what the other person is going to say.

Some good, even essential, advice for starting difficult conversations, and staying on track.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman spent decades looking at all the ways we incorrectly think we know what we’re thinking (see “Thinking Fast and Slow” for the gospel).  This is a neat discussion about when we might “trust our gut” (not a lot) and when we might want to think things through some more.

A kind of (much) shorter version of the above post.  Nice summary.

“Intuition can be thought of as subconscious pattern matching, honed over weeks, years, and decades. The more we are within our circle of competence the more likely our intuition proves correct”

Yes, managing up is a skill.  And if you do it well, your boss will thank you mightily for it.  And, no, managing up is vastly different from “kissing up”.  This post is a nice introduction.

Loved this: a very structured approach to building a human-centered engineering team.  Nice!