A tool from Hashicorp for adding document review and collaboration workflows over Google Docs.

Dan Rockwell:

Smart people have lousy meetings. Keeping meetings on track is like organizing a barrel of hummingbirds.

I especially like the “fill in the blank statements” strategy.

Joshua Sokol:

In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

Roger Martin:

The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.

If you had that as your conceptualization, you would naturally do things such as organize around decisions; measure output in terms of decisions; measure and work on enhancing the productivity of producing decisions; and so on. But companies don’t do any of the above because their conceptualization is of a coordination and control structure, not a decision factory.

Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman:

Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organizational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.

Dan North:

tl;dr

• Model and visualise your value chain.
• Structure the people around the value chain.
• Make all the demand visible, so there is no hidden work. This is key.
• Identify work that will reduce drag and give you more discretionary capacity.
• Decide what you want to invest in, and structure the people around that.
• Repeat every quarter, which is long enough to get work done, and short enough to iterate.

Rands:

Leaders sound like they know what they’re talking about because they’ve taken the time to understand the situation entirely. They read the room; they communicate clearly and consistently to their audience. Their context has been carefully constructed by asking penetrating questions from the humans who most understand the situation.

This entire post is on the money.

Jason Fried:

Innovation should almost never happen. It’s incredibly rare. It mostly happens by accident, not by intention. It’s wonderful when it does, but you merely fluctuate in and out of it, it’s not steady state.

Work is mostly mundane. It’s mostly maintenance. It’s mostly local improvement and iteration. Work is mostly… Work. Any innovation is an outlier, nearly a rounding error.

A long list of gems and tools.

Butch talking through his recording process on Smashing Pumpkins albums and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

What’s a transition file?

It’s a document that you prepare for whoever ends up succeeding you in your role. It should contain all the information you’d want them to know to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. Done right, the document should help them step into your role with a minimum of disruption.

James Stanier:

When you’re staring a huge, challenging project in the face, don’t align your team around just getting it done. Instead, align your team around continually reducing uncertainty.

You reduce uncertainty until the software exists. You reduce uncertainty by doing: prototyping, designing, writing code, and shipping. Each of these actions serve to reduce the uncertainty about what is left to build.

Zero Defects means the goal would be considered ‘failed’ if there were even a single defect, so even if the intention behind the goal was good, it puts great pressure on people to find other ways to achieve this impossible objective.

Eric Melloul:

Another important capability is assembling an ecosystem of partners and suppliers that do the work for you. Because of limited resources, you cannot do it all.

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The ability to be more patient and take more risks is what sets midcaps apart.

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I see many companies move from an incentive structure that was based on growth and profit to one based exclusively on profit. That drives the wrong behavior because it forces managers to focus on cost instead of growth, short term instead of long term.

Aaron Lerch:

Hiring for additivity requires intentionality. It seeks to answer the question “how does this person change us for the better?” It avoids both stagnation and a lift-and-shift cultural change.