Paul Graham’s essay on founder mode has gone viral this weekend, with people I follow sharing their takes like Shreyas Doshi and Cedric Chin and Ed Batista. I felt like chiming in as well, as it draws together several threads of thinking I’ve had over the years, and ties into my current thinking about the […]
Category: alignmentpractices
The Unaccountability Machine, by Dan Davies
Amazon link I read an online excerpt of this book and was immediately intrigued by the idea of an “accountability sink”, which is a mechanism by which “The communication between the decision-maker and the decided-upon has been broken – they have created a handy sink into which negative feedback can be poured without any danger […]
Getting unstuck in your life and career
[11/20/22: Thanks for the feedback! The current version is in this Google doc, so please comment there moving forward] [11/9/22: This is a rough draft of what I hope will be the first chapter of the book I am writing. A lot of this material will be familiar to long-time blog readers, and I’ve linked […]
Radical Friendship, by Kate Johnson
Amazon link Radical Friendship book site I learned of this book from listening to this podcast episode where Layla Saad, author of Me and White Supremacy (which I found valuable and challenging), interviewed the author Kate Johnson about her new book. Johnson, a multiracial Buddhist practitioner and teacher, based the book around the Mitta Sutta, […]
The New Psychology of Leadership, by Haslam, Reicher and Platow
Amazon link Reading this book articulated concepts that changed how I view and talk about leadership. The authors start the book by debunking several conventional theories of leadership (e.g. the “Great Man” theory where it’s about the leader’s innate qualities, or a transactional or power approach where people follow leaders in exchange for something) and […]
How to retrain your brain
I was talking to a friend about how to change our view of the world, and found myself coming up with a theory of how mystical woo woo advice like “be the change you want to see” or “manifest what you desire” actually might be scientifically explainable. Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist, and have […]
Building a Community of Alignment
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead In my first post on alignment, I wrote “Alignment is the art and craft of creating or identifying a unifying purpose and a set of elements or parts, and then […]
100 Hours
Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you what you value. Our most precious and irreplaceable resource is time. We have approximately 100 hours each week to spend after sleep and basic self-care. How we spend those 100 hours is an observable expression of our values and priorities that can often be at odds with […]
Creating Alignment with Others
I’ve described leadership as the art of identifying gaps between what is and what could be, and mobilizing others to address them. In the alignment series thus far, I have been addressing the identifying gaps part of leadership in identifying your own gaps for personal development, identifying an aspiration to orient your actions, and identifying […]
Alignment to Reality
“Are you able to be with this exactly the way it is with no agenda to change it?” I learned this powerful question in Steve March’s Aletheia Coaching training, and it continues to knock my socks off as a tool to help me discover when I am not fully present and accepting of reality as […]
