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: management
Conversations for Action and Collected Essays, by Fernando Flores
Amazon link “Conversation is not merely a prelude to action, it is its very essence. … People don’t merely use language to communicate their desires about the future; they create the future in language together by making commitments to each other.” Reading The Unaccountability Machine reminded me of this book of essays by Fernando Flores, […]
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 […]
Be a Revolution, by Ijeoma Oluo
Amazon link This book, a follow-up from the author of So You Want To Talk About Race, is exactly what the subtitle describes: “How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can, Too”. While the book was well-written and easy to read, Oluo challenged me with stories that showed […]
Creating Collective Intelligence
Several years ago, Google ran a study to determine what made teams effective, and later published the results, including sharing a summary in a New York Times article. While one might think that an effective team depends on having the most capable individuals, Google’s researchers discovered that the members of the team mattered far less […]
Organizational Cognition Revisited
[n.b. This post got completely out of control (2200 words!) as I tied together way too many ideas with too little explanation as I relied on heavy hyperlinking. Skip to the end for a couple actionable takeaways.] I recently read Jeff Hawkins’s book A Thousand Brains after Ben Thompson referenced it in a Stratechery update […]
Practicing Celebration
Celebration is really hard for me. I used to feel that celebration is only for achieving something you didn’t expect to achieve, but after I’ve done something, I was clearly expected to have done it, so what is there to celebrate? Instead, I historically have pushed on to the next challenge. Yet researchers like BJ […]
DEI Deconstructed, by Lily Zheng
Amazon link I’ve been following Lily Zheng (they/them pronouns) for years on LinkedIn to get their DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) insights, and their book is even better. They call out the DEI industry for failing to live up to their own saying that “intentions do not equal impact”, because despite the best of intentions, […]
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Amazon link This book is an excellent primer on its full title: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference, and Why It Matters. As somebody who generally had an intuitive feel for strategy throughout my career, and has had difficulty trying to explain how to see what I see, I appreciated Rumelt’s systematic explanation, and will […]
You don’t have the answer
One of my pet peeves is when people tell me what I should do. Normally, this is because they did something that worked for them, and they want to tell me I should also do it. I generally don’t want such advice for a variety of reasons: I don’t want the same thing that they […]
