Howard Gardner on Influence

As I continue to think further about influence and power, Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds offers an extremely helpful conceptual framework, one that I see as a counterpart to Robert Cialdini’s “Weapons of Influence” (discussed at length in Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.) From Gardner’s 2006 edition:

[W]hat…factors might cause an individual to shift his or her perspective[?]… I have identified seven factors–sometimes I’ll call them levers–that could be at work in these and all cases of a change of mind…

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Long-term Building in Japan

Japan’s Ise Shrine and Hōryū-ji Temple offer lessons in how to make a building, or an institution, last through millennia

Alexander Rose Sep 12 · 15 min read

The Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been rebuilt every 20 years for over 1,400 years.

When I started working with Stewart Brand over two decades ago, he told me about the ideas behind Long Now, and how we might build the seed for a very long-lived institution. One of the first examples he mentioned to me was Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been rebuilt every 20 years in adjacent sites for over 1,400 years. This shrine is made of ephemeral materials like wood and thatch, but its symbiotic relationship with the Shinto belief and craftsmen has kept a version of the temple standing since 692 CE. Over these past decades many of us at Long Now have conjured these temples as an example of long-term thinking, but it had not occurred to me that I might one day visit them.

ARPA: A Framework Alternative to the RACI Model

One thing high-performance teams do well is distribute authority — they have a clear system that specifies how decisions are made, and it enables the team to move quickly.

Does making a small copy change require approval from five people? Or do processes exist that empower a single person to make a change and ship it? While it seems clear that a single person should make such a change, it’s tougher than you’d think to design a company that operates this way at scale. Why is that?

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

A ballooning spiderMichael Hutchinson

On October 31, 1832, a young naturalist named Charles Darwin walked onto the deck of the HMS Beagle and realized that the ship had been boarded by thousands of intruders. Tiny red spiders, each a millimeter wide, were everywhere. The ship was 60 miles offshore, so the creatures must have floated over from the Argentinian mainland. “All the ropes were coated and fringed with gossamer web,” Darwin wrote.

A good onboarding experience for new hires requires two key things

In my time as a manger, I’ve encountered quite a few people who were badly onboarded. As a rule it takes as long a time or longer to fix it as it took to poorly onboard them. Sometimes we’re able to re-onboard people and make them successful… and sometimes it’s too late.

It’s always baffling to me when companies do all the work to hire someone and then don’t set them up to be successful. Hiring is so time consuming. Managing people who are not delivering in their role is time consuming, too, not to mention emotionally draining. Onboarding people and helping them to be effective is—by far—the easiest option.

Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management

Jurgen Appelo is an innovative management thinker whose work I admire, and his 7 Levels of Delegation is a framework that I often recommend to clients to help them determine how to allocate authority and decision-making power between themselves and their team. As useful as this conceptual model can be, its effective implementation by a leader also requires skillful emotion management at multiple levels: internally, interpersonally, and across the organization as a whole.

Essential Meetings to Have With Your People as a Manager

When I first started managing, I had no idea what meetings I was supposed to conduct with my staff to help them grow. In part because I was at a smaller organization and we were inventing processes on the fly and also because I did not have a manager who conducted or introduced me to these meetings. I learned about these meetings through years of experience, peers in other organizations, networking, mentors, and reading. A lot of reading!

The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them?

The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them?

Running out of gas? Recognizing the signs of burnout before it’s too late

Posted Nov 26, 2013

Burnout is one of those road hazards in life that high-achievers really should keep a close eye out for, but sadly—often because of their “I can do everything” personalities—they rarely see it coming. Because high-achievers are often so passionate about what they do, they tend to ignore the fact that they’re working exceptionally long hours, taking on exceedingly heavy workloads, and putting enormous pressure on themselves to excel—all of which make them ripe for burnout.

Opinion | The Whistle-Blower Knows How to Write

The Whistle-Blower’s Guide to Writing

His complaint offers lessons on how to make a point.

Ms. Rosenzweig is the director of the Writing Center at Harvard.

Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, holding a marked-up copy of the whistle-blower complaint.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to his blockbuster complaint about the president’s behavior, but I can tell you that the whistle-blower’s college writing instructor would be very proud of him.

A Mental Model For Prioritizing Your Startup’s Energies

I’ve playing with a new mental model for early-stage startups: a pendulum. This pendulum oscillates between the limiting factors of the business at different stages. There only two limiting factors in this mental model: product and go to market.

At the moment a startup is founded, the business is product limited. You can’t do much without a product. After the company establishes product market fit, the pendulum swings to go-to-market.

#2: Open Core —Definition, Examples & Tradeoffs

Joseph Jacks Jul 5, 2018 · 7 min read

In this post, we will explore the following:

• What is open core?
• How is it implemented?
• Where are examples?
• When should it be used?

Visual representation of the open core business model 😅

Data overwhelmingly shows that open core (OC) is the dominant business model used by the most successful COSS companies.

OC is the most misunderstood and polarizing business model implemented by COSS companies.

How I Build Learning Projects — Part I

A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For A Lot of Y-Intercept

Robert Chang Jul 20 · 14 min read

Image credit: When was the last time that you built a learning project?

Motivation

Recently, I came across a blog post written by Simon Hørup Eskildsen on how he approaches reading. It was an inspiring read because I did not know anyone this deliberate about the pursuit of reading. This kind of meticulous, thoughtful, system-level design thinking reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle:

What Makes For a Good Product Manager?

Andy Johns Sep 10 · 12 min read

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on product at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, and have advised dozens of other companies on the role of growth and product. Now, as an investor at Unusual Ventures, I get exposure to an even broader collection of companies, and the product cultures within them. Despite that exposure, there is a lot about the role of product that I still don’t understand. But what I can say for sure is that there are as many philosophies on the role of a product manager (PM) as there are letters in the alphabet. And we’re nowhere near getting to a point of agreement on the basic question of, “What makes for a great product manager?”

The Product-Minded Software Engineer

Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They’re someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide to give up the joy of engineering. I’ve worked with many great product-minded engineers and consider myself to be this kind of developer. At companies building world-class products, product-minded engineers take teams to a new level of impact.

From inbox-zero to todo-list-zero (for managers)

Joe Goldberg Sep 6 · 4 min read

The most Type-A calendar you’ll ever see

[Preamble to software engineers or anyone else on maker-time: you keep doing you, the following might sound absurdly overengineered. I wrote this article with managers in mind]

Inbox-Zero

I have a confession to make: I’m the type of person who gets to inbox-zero daily. I sheepishly admit this, because in a world where busy equals productive, it almost seems like a…

Stripe’s remote engineering hub shows how distributed workforces can thrive

Above: Remote working: Man on sofa… working.

Image Credit: Getty

More than two-thirds of the global workforce operate remotely at least one day a week, according to a study carried out last year by Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG, while around half of the U.S. workforce specifically could be remote by 2020 — up from 39% in 2012.

There are a number of benefits to operating a so-called “distributed workforce.” It gives the worker more flexibility over where they work, improves work-life balance, reduces the carbon footprint (less travel), and saves money — less overhead for the business, and fewer dollars spent on transport and Starbucks for the employee.

Climate change: ‘Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt’

Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

Investments – like the purchase of a water pump for irrigation – can provide a sustainable farming income for farmers like Sanfo Karim in Burkina Faso

Investing $1.8 trillion over the next decade – in measures to adapt to climate change – could produce net benefits worth more than $7 trillion.

This is according to a global cost-benefit analysis setting out five adaptation strategies.

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.

One interesting question that came up repeatedly was: “what are some reasons that someone might not want to be a manager?”

Scaling In Lower Cost Locations – AVC

This is a topic I’ve written about a bunch over the years. I feel like it is becoming more urgent every day.

Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.

The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.

Every manager needs the magic of a work BFF

One of the few pieces of advice I feel good about giving to everyone is this: When your job gets harder, the best thing you can do is make a friend.

This is also backed by the data. Gallup research has consistently shown that having a best friend at work leads to better performance—perhaps related to the findings that people who have a best friend at work are more likely to be engaged in their job, more likely to take risks that spark innovation, and less likely to be actively looking for job opportunities elsewhere.

What I Learned After Becoming an Engineering Manager

This post will help engineers get the best results out of their work with managers, and achieve career goals in a predictable way.

After many years of being an individual contributor and Tech Lead, I decided to transition to the Engineering Manager role. My main expertise is in mobile app development, but notes below are relevant for any software engineering team.

Own your success

Please don’t wait for your manager to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. If you’re part of the big team in the big org — your manager is not expected to have all context on all the details of your projects. Please come up with your own roadmap to ship the next feature, and ask feedback. Drive the development of your project.

Product Team FAQ | Silicon Valley Product Group

Every so often one of my articles seems to strike a chord, and this latest one on the difference between Product Teams and Feature Teams certainly seemed to do that. I am grateful for the very positive response. This morning I woke up to well over a hundred people who took the time to e-mail me a personal note of thanks, and often with follow-up questions.

Product vs. Feature Teams

This article is certain to upset many people.

I’m sorry for that, but the degree of ongoing noise and confusion surrounding the role of product at tech companies is only getting worse. Moreover, I see the issues and problematic behaviors getting institutionalized in conference talks, training programs and so-called certification programs for product people.

I have talked about this issue several times in the past, most specifically in the article and keynote on Empowered Product Teams. However, so many people hear only what they want to in that, and it has become clear to me that I need to be more explicit.

Small Wins

It’s easy to put up a facade of success.

Social media has trained us to only show the best parts of our lives.

The pressure is on to announce and celebrate the big wins.

To curate the narrative in the biggest and most glorious manner possible.

The bigger the better.

And it’s really easy to keep silent when you’re unknown,

when you’re only making small progress,

and when everyone else seems to be doing much better.

Modern applications at AWS – All Things Distributed

Innovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—”invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again“—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Back then, we had only a small fraction of the number of customers that Amazon serves today. Still, we knew that if we wanted to expand the products and services we offered, we had to change the way we approached application architecture.

How to Discover Your Unknown Knowns

Known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns

It’s been almost twenty years since Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of State of Defense, said:

“There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know. “

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You Might Not Be Checking In on Foursquare, But Foursquare Is Checking In on You

Foursquare check-ins in New York City.

Photo: Courtesy of Foursquare

Way back in 2009, when Barack Obama was president and Little Nas X was 10 years old, one of the most talked-about start-ups in the tech industry was an app called Foursquare. The digital compass that pointed your Uncle Tony to the mayorship of your local Boston Market was the most prominent check-in app at a moment when everyone in Silicon Valley was betting on location-based social networks like Foursquare’s biggest competitor, Gowalla. Foursquare was also the best-known of a generation of cutesy local start-ups — think Tumblr and Gilt — poised to transform New York City into the next Silicon Valley.

How to build social connection in a remote team – Know Your Team | Blog

Virtual team building is tough. Here are 7 ways you can build social connection in a remote team, even from afar.

I’ll be shocked if you’re shocked: Building social connection in a remote team is the hardest part of managing a remote team. According to a survey we ran this past fall with 297 remote managers and employees, “fostering a sense of connection without a shared location” was seen as the #1 most difficult part of being a remote manager – and the #1 most difficult part of working remotely, in general.

The 10x Engineer – making a whole team 10x better

Lately there was a lot of talk on twitter about the 10x engineer which started a big debate about what makes a good engineer. Some really stupid things were mentioned such as “10x engineers hate meetings” and “10x engineers come late to the office” and “10x engineers laptop background is usually black”. In general, it seems that some people think that if you are smart enough, it is okay to be an asshole.