On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard. The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in… more
In Silicon Valley, you burn a lot of calories. It’s not just the daily burn of your gig, it’s everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine “Does this matter?” You surf the web,… more
The brother-in-law lives in the ‘burbs and needed five trees removed. Not big trees — 10 to 15 feet tall, six-inch trunks. Not a problem. I live on the edge of a redwood forest in Northern California. There are sturdy oaks, playful maples, lovely madrones, weed-like bay laurels, and, of course, giant redwoods. But the… more
On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the… more
Most interesting ideas come to me between 8am and 10am. This is sacred time. The day is young, I am rested, and the coffee is fresh. I spend most of this time in the car driving to work. The music is providing a creative, catalyzing ambiance to structure my thinking. I create two or three… more
If you polled my team about my daily agenda, they’d say, “He’s either running to meetings or in meetings.” Glancing at my calendar confirms this: 14 meetings this coming Monday – double-booked for five of them. Sweet. Yes, I go to meetings all day, but it’s more than that. I’m also managing a constant distracting… more
In your career as a geek, there’s a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddeningly difficult to measure. There is no direct correlation between completing these activities and a raise. It’s unlikely that accomplishing these indefinite tasks will end up… more
At the end of each fiscal year, companies take stock of their performance. How’d we do? Better or worse? This is a natural time to reflect upon individual performance — this is when your boss writes your review. In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over… more
This creepy incident involving Amazon remotely removing purchased content from the Kindle has me back on the fence regarding purchasing one. There are contradictory forces at work here. First, as a geek, I’m unable to sleep when I do not own the latest cool. The first Kindle’s industrial design was intriguing, but the second version nailed… more
In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means. Every group in the company has their own unique set of words and every group uses these words to verbally define who they are,… more