Dates covered: November 12-18, 2018 (week 46 of 52)
Business
The New Pressures Facing CMOs and How to Overcome Them (via Harvard Business Review)
A chief marketing officer is responsible for many areas — brand, product marking, data and analytics, and sales support. Some CMOs get ousted by only focusing on the areas they know best. You need to build a team to help you execute and hold them accountable.
No, that thing is not a big deal (via The Software Mentor)
Many nascent companies get caught up in thinking the following things are important — swag, winning every customer, long-term business plans, obsessing about the competition, having an office, worrying about the next feature, A/B testing, and unhelpful metrics. The post explains why each one doesn’t help you in the short-term.
Career
Communicating Your Succession Plan with Customers, Clients, and Shareholders (via Harvard Business Review)
“How well you can ensure clients that the company will be fine under your successor’s leadership.”
1) plan before retirement; 2) figure out how to move tasks to others; 3) select leadership or determine how to attract the right leaders.
How to Leave a Job You Love (via Harvard Business Review)
“We no longer want just respect, security, or money from our jobs. We want passion, fulfillment, and surprise too. We want, in a word, romance.” This was an interesting analogy between a romantic relationship and our identity as a company employee, and how leaving that relationship is a bit like breaking up. The article has some examples of how to make that transition meaningful.
4 Tips to Make the Choosing Your Next Job Easier (via Software Lead Weekly)
1) Always, always, always choose the people; 2) the direct manager is the most key person to consider; 3) optimize for the bigger opportunity; 4) go where you’ll learn. Check out the Twitter thread for more context; there’s lots of good detail that I agree with. (Note: This should have been a blog post; I don’t care for Twitter threads as they’re so disjointed.)
Communication
A silent meeting is worth a thousand words (via Software Lead Weekly)
An interesting collaboration approach where everyone’s on laptops for the first 30 minutes collaboratively editing a document in silence instead of talking. Afterward they discuss.
Culture
This Social Psychologist Explains What’s Wrong With College Campuses Today (via Lifehacker)
Generation Z has an issue with coddling — being overprotected such that they don’t know how to negotiate difficulty because they’ve never had to. Around the mid-1990s we started telling our kids that the world is dangerous and that adults handle anything for you (e.g., don’t go anywhere without adult supervision, if you run into conflict go find an adult to mediate). Similar to management advice from Michael Lopp, parents need to work themselves out of a job by helping kids figure things out for themselves. How to Win Friends and Influence People was mentioned as a starting point.
How We Help Employees Pay Down Student Loans and Save for Retirement at the Same Time (via Harvard Business Review)
Abbot has worked out a pilot program with the IRS where the company puts 5% toward a tax-deferred 401(k) plan for full- and part-time employees if they pay 2% toward student loans. It helps incentivize student loan debt reduction and helping people save for retirement, both of which are particular problems for millenials.
Convincing CEOs to Make Harassment Prevention a Priority (via Harvard Business Review)
In addition to the human cost of harassment, it’s very costly (short- and long-term) to businesses. “Employers need to create a culture of respect and inclusivity, where people feel safe when reporting misconduct, and where there are clear and immediate consequences for having engaged in harassment.”
Research: Whistleblowers Are a Sign of Healthy Companies (via Harvard Business Review)
A recent study shows that whistleblowers help reduce lawsuits and that more incidents can be a sign of a healthy culture for trying to improve things.
Dear HBR: Dysfunctional Teams (via Harvard Business Review)
Three readers describe some issues they’re experiencing on their teams (e.g., conflict-avoidant boss, opaque communication, disrespectful colleagues) and two panelists talk about what could be going on and where the reader can go next. (It’s a 30-minute podcast, but there’s a transcript for easy scanning.) I found the organizational psychologists’ commentary quite useful.
Survey: Remote Workers Are More Disengaged and More Likely to Quit (via Harvard Business Review)
I don’t believe there’s one right answer for any company — remote or on-site — however, this study shows that remote works self-report as less engaged and more lonely. It’s an interesting balance of efficiency, availability, and cost to working in close proximity with others in your tribe.
Leadership
Unite Your Senior Team (via Harvard Business Review)
Even though leaders may be homogeneous demographically, they can disagree on where to grow and innovate. This article outlined some activities and questions to establish common ground, expose misalignments, and some physical activities to make things less verbal and formal.
The Signal Network (via Michael Lopp)
A manager has several sources of signal to determine how things are going, which vary in relevance (how current is the info) and importance (how critical is the info). “The health of your signal network is one lens into the health of your team. Critical information freely moving around the organization decreases surprises, improves the quality of decisions, and builds trust.”
Motivating Your Most Creative Employees (via Harvard Business Review)
1) put them in meaningful, relevant roles; 2) match them with balanced strengths instead of other creatives; 3) reward innovation, don’t just pay lip service; 4) tolerate their dark side (but only up to a point); 5) challenge them; 6) apply the right amount of pressure; 7) hiring for culture fit won’t help diversity; 8) help them practice humility to reduce narcissism
What Stan Lee Knew About Managing Creative People (via Harvard Business Review)
1) Keep talent busy, 2) don’t censor, 3) give credit where it’s due, and 4) dream big.
Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year (via Software Lead Weekly)
Another individual who’s made the developer-to-manager transition sharing his thoughts and resources. When I shifted to a manager role, I agree that it’s a career change, and your success depends on process and people rather than tech skills.
Process
What to Trust in a “Post-Truth” World (via TED)
An enlightening talk about why we believe untrue things, centered around confirmation bias where we 1) accept a story as fact, 2) accept a fact as data, 3) accept data as evidence, and 4) accept evidence as universal. To counteract this bias, 1) actively seek different viewpoints, 2) listen to experts (and check the author and where the information is published), and 3) pause before sharing.
Why It’s Easier to Make Decisions for Someone Else (via Harvard Business Review)
“Not only did participants choose differently when it was for themselves rather than for someone else, but the way they chose was different.” Other people prefer and examine more options before choosing. “Meanwhile, when making their own choices, people tend to envision everything that could go wrong, leading to doubt and second-guesses.” Tip: Ask yourself, “How would someone else tackle this problem?”
5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success (via Harvard Business Review)
1) Intellect is erroneously valued higher than other skills (e.g., relationship building); 2) teamwork frustrates smart people (e.g., difficulty delegating because you do a task better); 3) attaching self-esteem to being smart; 4) smart and curious people tend to find the execution part boring; 5) sometimes seeing in-depth thinking/reflection as the solution to everything
Productivity
Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (via Freakonomics)
Excellent set of interviews from academics and workplace practitioners about the pros and cons of open offices. In short, it depends; companies should build offices (and allow remote work) for different types of activities and employee preferences. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Software development
Against Software Development (via The Software Mentor)
Short, interesting piece about how society and how we engineer are related. I’m 100% behind the part about refusing to work on systems that exploit others. The topic of complexity reminded me of Conway’s Law (“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”).
How to write a good software design doc (via The Software Mentor)
A good design document for a system can be quite helpful. This post covers some dos and don’ts along with some useful tips about determining if you have the right documentation. My favorite was the “vacation test” — can the team understand your document while you’re out of pocket on vacation?
Technology
Announcing .NET Standard 2.1 (via The Software Mentor)
There’s considerable movement in the .NET arena these days, with many concepts to be aware of — .NET Framework, .NET Core, .NET Standard. This update post gives the highlights about what’s in the latest version and why.