I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts: When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that […]
Authority
My last post on advice for managers stirred up a great comment thread, so go read those comments first. The main subject of contention was my third point where I said “There is no such thing as authority”. What was interesting was that every commenter had a different way of interpreting the word authority. Jessie […]
Advice for managers
A friend of mine just asked if I had any advice for a person who’s just starting his first management position at a startup. Even though I have minimal management experience myself, I’ve been in all sorts of work environments, including a startup that grew from 40 people to 150 people and went bankrupt a […]
Remixing fields
I liked the career advice from Scott Adams last week (also seen at Seppo’s blog), where he points out: …if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point […]
Welcome to Brazen Careerist readers
Thanks to Penelope Trunk linking to me from her most recent Yahoo column about productivity, it looks like I’m going to have a lot of traffic today. For you readers that are curious, the quote she mentions (“The particular goals aren’t as important as the process of setting goals and working to meet them.”) was […]
Busy!
I’ve been meaning to post, but can’t quite put together anything coherent right now. Things are hopping at work as we beta test the new release of our software, so that’s been keeping me busy. Speaking of work, if you want to see where I spend all day, stop by the Fog Creek Open House […]
Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, by Robert D. Austin
Amazon link This book is recommended by Joel (mentioned in his post on “Econ 101 Management”) so we read it recently in our book club at work. The premise is that measuring employee performance is guaranteed to distort an organization’s desired results. This assertion contradicts management mantras everywhere, such as “You can’t improve what you […]
The Social Atom, by Mark Buchanan
Amazon link This book is based on the idea that complex organized behavior can emerge out of simple atomic behavior. In physics, simple atoms interact with each other and generate complex behavior like temperature. Such models were never thought to be applicable to humans because people are too complicated and have free will. Buchanan collects […]
Designing your social network
My social network would be considered poor by traditional standards, where more connections are better. Yet my network is powerful because I know connectors. I only know a few people in nextNY, but I know Charlie O’Donnell who knows everybody else. I’ve met a few people through likemind, but I’m friends with Noah Brier, one […]
Networking
I went to the nextNY happy hour last week, which got me thinking about the different ways in which people network. There’s the “agenda” networker, who wants something, whether it be funding for his startup, a new job, or an introduction to a VC, and he’s at the event to find it. He’ll talk to […]
