Slowly but steadily, data are forcing their way into every nook and cranny of every industry, company, and job. Managers who aren’t data savvy, who can’t conduct basic analyses, interpret more complex ones, and interact with data scientists …

Here’s a simple rule for the second machine age we’re in now: as the amount of data goes up, the importance of human judgment should go down.

Not a week goes by without us publishing something here at HBR about the value of data in business. Big data, small data, internal, external, experimental, observational — everywhere we look, information is being captured, quantified, and …

When it comes to the importance of good people management, one data point speaks loudly above the rest. That is, people leave managers not companies.

In my years of coaching managers and individual contributors, I’ve routinely heard the following complaints about their bosses:

This was first published on my mailing list The Looking Glass. Every week, I answer a reader’s question.

01 Dec 2017

For the past four years, we’ve done scrum the same way. Standing up at 9am sharp.

A few years ago, having a flat organizational structure was all the rage. Well-known companies like Zappos, Medium, and Buffer were singing its praises and writing detailed posts explaining their reasoning.

Tomas Barreto, VP of Engineering at Box, takes biohacking seriously. Like sequencing-his-genome, running-currents-through-his-body seriously.

Illustration by mikoto

Here a sailor loads a torpedo. Even when operations don’t have glaring problems, an assessment can reveal areas for improvement.

All too often, shipping product is seen as an end. A milestone reached, a good time to move onto the next project, an even better time to move onto another team. We believe the opposite is true, that shipping is a beginning.

Documents with superpowers. Faster than an email thread. More powerful than a three-hour meeting. Able to bring your team together in a single doc. Quip is here to save the workday.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

Economy

As the “Slaughterbots” video of (fictional) killer drones goes viral, here are some quick thoughts from a guy who helped start the “hey, open source drones, what could go wrong?” movement. (I also run Dronecode, the leading drone software …

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARK MAHANEY INTERVIEW: NICK COMPTON

laura schneider FOR HBR

Being at an early-stage startup is a bit like being in grade school — but in this version, you have to skip a grade every 6 months and still get all As.You learn quickly because you have to. And while you manage to skip grade after grade, …

Long story short: I learned that going completely off the social grid for a few days has tremendous benefits, and very few downsides. The hardest part is starting.

The condo building I live in has a property management company. This makes sense. The building is 120+ units across 12 floors with retail and office space. What doesn’t make sense is this same company’s poor communication. They are …

The exact types and amounts of botanicals used in gins are usually a closely guarded secret. However, by law, gin must contain juniper berries. Juniper berries & coriander seed typically constitute 90% of the total botanicals used.

Sophie is a physical penetration tester and information security consultant. She specializes in social engineering security assessments including physical, voice (vishing) and text (phishing). She consults in remediation and prevention of …

Hundreds of examples on how to use awk, the extremely powerful UNIX string manipulation tool.

A native macOS HTTP client for working with API requests, including handling for dynamic values, authentication, extensions and more.

A new mentor of mine suggested I read Jeff Bezos’ Letter to Shareholders to refine my thoughts around building a career and a business.

Foo Camp, the original unconference thrown by O’Reilly every year, is one of my favorite events in the technology world. In many ways, it’s often felt like one of the safest — it welcomes crazy ideas, breaks down social barriers, starts …

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was …

Many breakthrough technologies were hatched by hobbyists in garages and dorm rooms. Prominent examples include the PC, the web, blogs, and most open source software.

Really cool library of visualizations with standardized colors to remove unnecessary visual variations. Love it.

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Illustration by Havana Nguyen

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen …

Credit: Flickr / Ivan

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.