I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about what we thrived on in a job, and it was interesting to see how our perspectives differed. She talked about the thrill of fixing a problem, of figuring out what was happening, and designing a process or system to solve the problem forever. […]
The value of finance teams
When I was considering whether to take a job in Google’s finance department, a successful entrepreneur friend of mine told me I was making a mistake. He felt that designers and engineers added value to the world by creating new products, but the only thing finance people did was to say no. Given the pride […]
Action despite uncertainty
Scott Berkun just posted about situations in life where good data is impossible, which reminded me of a quote I’ve been meaning to share. I once went to a talk by Bob Sutton where he cited a quote by Andy Grove, CEO of Intel: “I think it is very important for you to do two […]
The Master Switch, by Tim Wu
Amazon link Subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, Wu has no lack of ambition as he addresses how information and communication companies such as AT&T, Paramount Studios, NBC, and CBS have dominated our discourse over the past century. The title comes from a quote illustrating the perils of such domination: “At stake is […]
Call your shot
Babe Ruth pointing to the stands, and then hitting a home run. Joe Namath guaranteeing a Super Bowl victory despite being an 18-point underdog, and then going out and winning it. There’s something magical about calling your shot – telling people you’re going to do something impressive and then doing it. Even in the workplace, […]
Influential media
Inspired by a mailing list discussion and Scott Berkun’s recent tweet of his favorite books post, I decided to put together a post of my own on the subject of media that changed the way I think, with lots of links to other times I have written about these influences. Ender’s Game and Speaker for […]
Who is your audience?
One of the broader points that I don’t know if I made clearly in my last post is that effective communication depends not only on the message you are delivering, but also on the audience which the message is targeting. In the case of writing a resume, you have to remember that you are targeting […]
How to write a resume
I’ve written the same email five times in the last several months giving friends advice on how to write their resume, so I figured it was time for me to package it into a blog post that I could then just link to when needed. Assume this is my response to somebody with a few […]
Incremental steps towards uselessness
Last night, I attended the Mountain View Linchpin Meetup, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post (speaking of which, I need to review Godin’s book Linchpin at some point). Spending an evening with a group of people following their passion inspired me to take a swing at restarting this blog yet again. Today’s topic – the […]
Management Innovation Exchange
The Management Innovation Exchange (aka MIX) looks like an interesting project. It’s a collaboration between McKinsey, London Business School and a couple companies like Dell, with the idea being to open source ideas about management. It’s unclear yet whether it will attract a critical mass of community to discuss ideas (so far, the curation looks […]
