From Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain and ServiceNow and now CEO of Snowflake. “There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at […]
“We’re going to analyze media from a systems perspective, and explore the properties that make it a good source of power.” | learn more
I went searching for examples of adding manpower to solve an immediate problem. I found this instead. Adding headcount has diminishing returns because of indivisibility, ramp-up time, and communications overhead. I am still interested in the inverse: when does it work? If […]
“Putting an employee on a performance improvement plan is the worst part of being a team leader. But giving tough feedback is a necessary part of the job.” | learn more
“Across the board, we tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need […]
“Standing up and managing a service or building a custom service is a common desire for engineers. It’s usually a major mistake, that ends up costing a ton of time and money.” | learn more
I recently finished reading Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy. This concept of his made its mark on me, and I’ve been able to use it a handful of times already. Dave Baily expanded it into this short blog post that highlights […]
This is a very insightful post from the anonymously published blog Applied Divinity Studies. “[W]hat’s really happening is that we’ve chosen to privilege certain combinations of skills as impressive, while taking others for granted. A physicist who studies math, can […]
Northwestern’s Melissa Kaufman shares her personal story of almost joining Airbnb in the very early days and the lesson she took from the experience. Punchline: “Forget about the title, compensation, and role. When you stumble upon something that you believe […]
“For a simplistic definition, the eigenquestion is the question where, if answered, it likely answers the subsequent questions as well. Great framing starts by searching for the most discriminating question of a set — the eigenquestion.” | learn more