rands

Stimulus Driven Creatures

My favorite VC and I were talking about motivating humans over drinks at Mars Bar. She explained, “Rands, each person needs to hear the same message in a different way. Did you read the language of love piece that stormed around the Internet? It describes the five different ways we might like to receive love:… more

January 17, 2016 5 Comments

Shields Down

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because you’ve been raving about it for a year, but would you like to… more

January 1, 2016 128 Comments

Managing Humans v3

Next summer, the third edition of Managing Humans will be published. Like the prior edition, I’ll be nuking some chapters, adding new ones, and editing the current ones. I’m also thinking about going full Catcher in the Rye for the cover. Stay tuned.

Long ago, there was a Glossary that captured the terms I used both in the blog and in the books. This Glossary did not make the transition to the new version of the site until this morning. I’ve done a lightweight editing pass on this current version, but would love your suggestions for additions/edits to the current version which will be published along with v3 of the book.

Happy Merry.

December 27, 2015 5 Comments

Why I Slack

Earlier this year, I ran a survey to get ideas about how leaders could mobilize. 1311 of you filled out the survey which mean I’m certain the results are full of good ideas and inspiration. It also means I have to mine them. An obvious mobilization tactic was a mailing list. Sure, it’s old school,… more

December 13, 2015 14 Comments

Holy Shit Moments

I showed up late to drones. A few weeks ago it was my father’s birthday. The reason I am an engineer is that my father is an engineer. (Aside: The reason I am a leader is that I watched all of my mother’s moves as she wrangled my father the engineer.) For the 4th of… more

November 2, 2015 10 Comments

Light-based computers?

Via Quartz:

“The phase speed is infinite—much larger, infinitely larger than the speed of light,” Mazur tells Quartz.

This doesn’t mean light itself is traveling faster than the speed of light, which would violate the laws of relativity. “Phase velocity” refers to the speed of the crest of waves that ripple out when light strikes a material. The Harvard scientists created a material that allows these wave crests to move infinitely fast. This is a strange thought to wrap your head around, and means the crests of the waves are oscillating through time, but not space. Under these peculiar conditions, the Harvard scientists found that it’s easy to manipulate the photons, squeezing them down to the microscopic scale and turning them around. In other words, we can treat photons in the same way we currently manipulate electrons.

October 25, 2015

A Destiny Public Service Announcement

Slack is fully integrated into my life. Over the course of the last six months, it’s become a rarefied default application for me. It’s still early in the day and the coffee hasn’t kicked, but I can’t think of the last application that became default. Probably Twitter? The communication gap that Slack is filling is… more

October 19, 2015 5 Comments

A Small Grey Leaf

At the bottom of an individual post on this site, you might notice there is a small grey leaf. No one has ever commented about this leaf. No one has ever asked about its significance. It’s a pleasant quiet ending to a post. There was a time when this version of the site was being… more

October 14, 2015 7 Comments

On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage

Steve Cheney:

The truth is the best people in chip design no longer want to work at Intel or Qualcomm. They want to work at Apple. I have plenty of friends in the Valley who affirm this. Sure Apple products are cooler. But Apple has also surpassed Intel in performance. This is insane. A device company – which makes CPUs for internal use – surpassing Intel, the world’s largest chip maker which practically invented the CPU and has thousands of customers.

October 12, 2015