Six hours of SG lore for all you Knights of the Soundtable.

Dynomight:

Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.

Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin:

In addition, people often conflate hierarchy with bureaucracy because they often expand in tandem. All else being equal, 50 people will always need more meetings, documentation, and approval processes than five. Nevertheless, it’s possible to reap the positive aspects of hierarchy in a growing startup without suffering from the downsides of too much bureaucracy. Maverick managers get into trouble when they ban hierarchy in the hopes of minimizing bureaucracy, but unleash chaos instead.

Roberto Vitillo:

Putting the options in a single place and seeing them contrasted with each other will help you develop new options and ultimately make a decision.

Little gems strewn within this wide ranging discussion on engineering management.

Mary C. Murphy on the culture around growth mindsets.

Looks like Fuji continues to improve the autofocus and in-body image stabilization on these larger sensor cameras.

I love my GFX100S but this review is triggering upgrade vibes in me.

A sane approach to supporting anonymous questions with teams.

James Stanier:

Instead, you should think about your career like Tarzan swinging through the jungle. Tarzan starts at one tree and knows that he has an ultimate destination, but the path to get there isn’t immediately clear: there are hundreds of different trees that he could swing to. He doesn’t know which one is the right one at any given time. He just has to trust his instincts and his general sense of direction and then progress to the next vine, and then the next, and then the next.

Summaries is a feature I’ve long wanted in Instapaper.

In this post, Brian Donohue goes through how he implemented it.

Steve Nadis:

computer scientists have described a new way to approximate the number of distinct entries in a long list, a method that requires remembering only a small number of entries.

It always fascinates me when introducing randomness enables new approaches.

Naomi Hartono:

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

Phil Le-Brun:

Rather than pretending you can craft the perfect organisation chart and operating model, I advocate starting with principles and tenets to guide your organisation. The former method is an overly logical and static approach to human issues, as I described in my first post on untangling your organisational hairball. Principles have (I hope) shifted from outdated concepts, such as spans of control, in search of elusive efficiencies to those better suited for an era where complexity, speed, and innovation define organisations. Previous blog posts give in-depth examples of principles and decision-making tenets. But remember, the most beautifully crafted principles in the world mean nothing unless a comprehensive understanding of them cascades throughout the organisation.

Roger Martin:

The latter meet my definition of a Strategic Choice. Since the opposite isn’t stupid, it represents a real choice to do something meaningfully different than some or all competitors/peers. The former don’t meet the definition. Does that mean they are unimportant and shouldn’t be mentioned in a strategy document? No. This is what I have come to call an Operating Imperative. Because it is smart and there is no other obvious approach, we will fall behind if we don’t do the positive thing that everybody else is doing.

We make Strategic Choices when we want to gain an advantage over our competitors. That doesn’t happen when we do the same things as competitors. We follow Operating Imperatives when we want to avoid falling behind competitors on a meaningful dimension.

…

With respect to Operating Imperatives, this is the domain in which you should be doing rigorous benchmarking to determine best demonstrated practices. This is the power alley of the (so-called) strategy consulting firms. They have worked for everyone in your industry (at least the biggest ones have) and they can give you chapter and verse on exactly what your competitors are doing and how they do it. They encourage you and tell you how to copy the best practices currently out there. It isn’t particularly ethical for the consulting firms, but that is how that world works. Clients buy their services on that basis so clients shouldn’t be surprised that the firms subsequently sell what they learned on the resultant assignment with (perhaps) their closest competitor. In any event, after receiving this advice about what competition is doing, the task is to rigorously follow the best demonstrated practice.

With respect to Strategic Choices, this is indeed where Benchmarking is for Losers, as I have written about before in this series. This is the domain in which you need to focus your bold choice-making. This is where you need to make sure that the opposite of your choice is what your competitors are doing. This is where you are going to get zero help from those who spend their lives figuring out what your competitors are doing and telling you to do the best version of that. In fact, zero is the best you can expect. They are actually most likely to convince you to replicate your best competitor, which is a recipe for losing. These unique choices are going to be the source of your competitive advantage.

You should have a limited number of Strategy Choices. The number of Operating Imperatives can be longer — say five-to-ten. More than ten and they cease to become real imperatives, in my experience. But there should be three-to-five Strategy Choices. It shouldn’t be one because a singular unique choice is easier to replicate and hence not sustainable.

This framing resonated with me and it’s worth reading the whole post.

I’ve seen loads of strategies that were actually lists of operating imperatives. These are useful, but different to strategic choices.

Mandy Brown:

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work. Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.