Dates covered: December 31, 2018 – January 6, 2019 (week 1 of 52)
Business
The Board’s Role in Strategy (via Harvard Business Review)
Individually the CEO and the board don’t develop the strategy. The CEO should work with the board to listen to their concerns, develop several strategies and refine them, then present fully-baked versions from approval. If this can’t happen, you either have an ineffective CEO or ineffective board.
Giving After Disasters (via Harvard Business Review)
Firms with good reputations in the local area of the disaster can benefit by being the first to help. Other companies (with good or poor reputations) benefit if they “take the challenge” of the first company. Companies with a local presence (e.g., UPS with logistics and supply chain experience) have the best outcomes, both for the disaster victims and the company.
How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals (via Harvard Business Review)
Being socially responsible is an easier pill to swallow when shareholder earnings aren’t at stake. When things get tight, there’s a clear winner for certain projects/companies.
- Organizational guardrails – protect weaker party (e.g., Ben & Jerry’s being acquired by Unilever was mediated by having an independent board)
- Dynamic decision making – keep high-level principles, but understand ground-level needs (e.g., hiring underprivileged workers, but they need basic skills too)
- Leadership needs to balance the important paradoxical goals of being responsible and profitable
Is Capitalism Worth Saving? (via Nick Julian)
This interview mentions some current aspects of American capitalism that will eventually be unsustainable, essentially coming down to inequality and distrust. It’s not a capitalism-bashing post, as the interviewee cites examples in Europe that don’t have America’s problems. Likely the way forward is to adopt changes gradually, such as campaign finance reform, tax reform, and clearer expectations between society and business.
Career
What to Do If You Think Your Boss Is Shutting You Out (via Harvard Business Review)
- Revisit your assumptions; is your boss treating everyone like this?
- Try and determine what made things shift to see if the relationship can be repaired
- Don’t let poor management affect your performance; find other ways to excel
- Reach out and build an indirect base of report; there may be cross-functional teams you can participate in to branch out
Communication
Work Principle 4; Get and Stay In Sync (via Software Lead Weekly)
It’s helpful to have a way for everyone in the org to surface differences and figure them out in a meritocratic and respectful way. This article describes how Bridgewater does this through feedback channels. Fun fact: I first read about Ray Dalio and his company in the book An Everyone Culture.
Leadership
How to Manage Someone Who Is Totally Disorganized (via Harvard Business Review)
- Reflect on the impact of the problem; is this person’s approach creating negative outcomes, or is it just a style difference?
- Be empathetic; maybe it’s something this person struggles with (e.g., ADHD) or maybe it’s something that’s recently become a problem
- Talk to them; explain how their behavior is impacting things (e.g., makes me anxious, makes us look bad to clients)
- Share how you stay organized; don’t make your system mandatory though
- Offer career advice; explain how their behavior could impact their work (e.g., haphazard work has to be redone after hours)
- Break down assignments; lay out milestones, goals, and deliverables, or just walk through how to break down the problem and help them get organized
- Be patient
A Simple Way to Get Your Leadership Team Aligned on Strategy (via Harvard Business Review)
This reminds me of Planning Poker… Poll (or otherwise survey) people involved in a change and see where they are on the spectrum (e.g., how much money do you think we should invest in developing a machine learning strategy), then talk to the outliers to learn what you or others may not have considered.
How to Break Bad Management Habits before They Hit the Next Generation of Leaders (via TED)
- “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too light to be broken.” — Warren Buffett
- The pejorative term “middle managers” should be rethought; these are the folks in the pipeline to the C-suite
- Values of future leaders: speed, flexibility, trust, cooperation
- The old command-and-control mindset isn’t going to work. What got us here won’t get us there.
- Future leaders are practicing bad management because they’re under the microscope by those above them; acting like their bosses gets them promoted.
- On the job learning is best, but our role models need to be updated, and our work environments are always being disrupted by change.
- Solution: pilot different ways of doing things and ask for management support to let you try/learn.
- You can’t trust people to make good decisions if you don’t let them practice.
- Solution: Get outside coaches to (1) prevent the blind leading the blind, and (2) look at interactions between leadersinstead of with the leaders individually.
Why We’re Drawn to Leaders Who Emphasize the Negative (via Harvard Business Review)
The research in this article was about whether people interpret naysaying (negating, refuting, criticizing) as a power-signaling cue. “And though they perceived naysayers as less likeable and no more competent than cheerleaders or leaders who made more neutral statements, the participants nevertheless endorsed them as leaders…” The caveat is that once in power, people’s opinions of that leader can change. There also seems to be a relationship between disadvantaged people and naysayers.
Attracting people to work for you (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Direct applicants — make a solid job description; what they can learn/experience from you? look for adaptability; post broadly on several sites
- Recruiters — get recommendations from colleagues; meet them first; make sure they’ll represent your company well
- Community outreach — this is a long game; you can start small by sponsoring food at meetups
- Referrals — high-quality people wouldn’t recommend people they wouldn’t want to work with; have an incentive program; can decrease diversity and create cliques of friends though
Process
How to Embrace Change Using Emotional Intelligence (via Harvard Business Review)
- Identify the source of your resistance; this involves self-awareness and can help you pinpoint the root of the problem
- Question the basis of your emotional response; ask yourself whether your “stories” are true
- Own your part in the situation; how does your attitude and behavior contribute to your experience of the change?
- Turn up your positive outlook; where are the opportunities with this change, and how will they help me and others?
How Mindfulness Can Help Engineers Solve Problems (via Harvard Business Review)
Having taken an 8-week course on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), this article piqued my interest. The premise on engineering is that it requires divergent (instead of linear) thinking, and that being receptive to new ideas and having less judgment will result in more creative solutions. This study showed that mindfulness increased the originality of ideas, but not the number. It was noted that the mindfulness training was limited, though; anecdotally and personally I don’t believe meditation is something you can do successfully after a brief training session. It’s difficult for me to tell whether the increased attention on mindfulness (many Fortune 100 companies are integrating it into the workplace) is warranted or just a trend.
Security
Privacy and Cybersecurity Are Converging. Here’s Why That Matters for People and for Companies. (via Harvard Business Review)
Unauthorized access is a big threat, but the biggest risk is unintended inferences. 2018 was an interesting year with the Cambridge Analytica / Facebook scandal and GDPR being put into effect. Mishandling privacy can seriously impact a company’s bottom line, regulations will have to be better defined (or created), and companies/employees will need better awareness.
Technology
DevOps: The Big Picture (via Understanding DevOps skills path)
Short, technology-agnostic introduction to what DevOps is and the problems (especially types of waste) it aims to address. I liked that it addressed the company culture aspect — i.e., DevOps isn’t something you hire for or buy; you need to understand where you are now and what could work better. The course also addresses common objections to DevOps and how to approach those. The last module covers a broad suite of tools that help with collaboration, planning, issue tracking, monitoring, configuration management, source control, development environments, continuous integration, and deployment.