Listening is a pretty deep skill in itself. Chelsea Troy starts to dig in. A good start to what will likely be a good series of posts.

“You can have two of fast, cheap or high-quality” - the ancient mantra of the Project Manager. But does it really apply to software? This piece argues strongly that it doesn’t: quality ends up being cheaper, faster and, of course better.

Interesting perspective. I like it.

Pretty fascinating account of working through the Three Phases of Microsoft: Gates/90s, Balmer/2000’s, Nadella/Now. Useful as a study in a) how much a strong leader’s personality imprints itself on a company b) how much that cultural change can impact a company for good and/or ill.

Pretty amazing. A collection of epic memos to internal audiences.

The classics are here: the Elop “Burning Platform” (“We too, are standing on a burning platform, and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour” sic), the Myhrvold “Roadkill on the Information Superhighway” (1993: “The confluence of wide area digital communications and ever cheaper computing is going to be a lot more traumatic and far ranging than PCs have been”), the original pitch for PowerPoint (yikes!), and many others.

It’s like a peek into the classic crises and turning points of the last 40 years.

A nice checklist for assessing the degree of psychological safety in a team, and a neat anecdotal illustration of why it’s so important if you want a creative, high-functioning group of people. Good article.

“Delivering criticism to make yourself look good is the easy stuff of fools” and “Criticizing is but the first step in what should be a process. My experience has been that it’s the rare person who’s willing to invest in the whole process”

Criticism is necessary and it takes care to get it right. This post suggests how to get there

A listicle, but a good one. Worth having around to review before you head into a difficult conversation.

Deciding that your partner in a conversation is “stupid” is a quick shortcut to not having a successful dialog. This is a nice breakdown of all the other reasons the conversation may not be working.

This is variation on the “culture trumps process” point of view. You can’t legislate every decision and every move. Your culture (in this case “pride in the work”) will always determine what happens in the places process can’t reach. Nice article.

Good, solid notes on how to maintain alignment on decisions in a distributed team.

Among other useful, practical tips: “It’s really important not to share decisions via Slack only” (this should probably be obvious, but a neat short paragraph on why follows, in case it isn’t).

Another solid post, enumerating the different types of meetings you need to be having as a manager, suggested agendas and timing etc. Clear and practical.

Fun to read, and not a bad list to use to start leveling up more junior engineers, although exactly how one is supposed to develop these skills isn’t clear (!).

The hacker news conversation is interesting, too.

A longish read describing a pretty complete planning process for an entire company. Good to help think through what you need vs what you’re actually doing right now.

Always good to have more clarity around what makes a useful OKR process. Read if you’re just starting to implement OKRs, or have done a few rounds and could use some pointers.

We always kind of suspect that BS mission statements might correlate to BS operational performance. This rather brilliant post a) rates mission statements on a BS index and then b) plots the level of BS vs stock performance. e.g:

Mission: “On the most basic level, Peloton sells happiness.”

Nope, similar to Chuck Norris, Christie Brinkley, and Tony Little, you sell exercise equipment.

Bullsh*t Rating: 9/10

Stock return 1 day post-IPO: –11%

One too many “Unleashing the power of…” posts caused me to write, pointing out the waste of the “Dead Language Drizzle” - the mindlessly repetitive phrases we drift into instead of finding our authentic, powerful, personal voice.

A grab-bag, but a grab-bag full of interesting and wise insights about how to maintain a human-centered and connected organization as it gets big (and, by the way, consider “big” to be anything over the Dunbar number of 150, although this article scales far beyond that).

Includes some good stuff about how to integrate and connect remote teams.

A pretty complete and well-thought-out guide to one on ones. Everybody has their own style, this will help to refine it.

Nice. A thoughtful approach to one on ones from Mathilde Collin of Front. Easy read, good thoughts.

Yes. Delegating and empowering requires clarity and accountability. And some courage if you’re doing it right. Good post.

“Telling people that they have permission means that they still derive all of their authority from you. They aren’t empowered; they’re merely borrowing your power”