I’ve got more to say about the New Year, but let’s start with data around the year in Rands.

The top 5 articles published in 2013 by traffic:

1. The Process Myth
2. Regular Audio Human
3. Full of Interesting Strangers
4. Entropy Crushers
5. Titles are Toxic

All of these articles fall under the “decent amount of work” category so it’s satisfying that they generated good traffic.

Article count by category for long form pieces:

1. Tech Life 8
2. Management 6
3. Tools 2
4. Apple 2
5. Writing 1 / Rands 1

So, yeah, I write about nerd stuff and leadership. Not a ton of news there. There is more to be said about writing, but I feel I’ve said in prior years.

Other interesting facts:

• The #1 article in 2013 based on traffic was The Nerd Handbook which was written in 2007. Bored People Quit was also in the top 10 and that was written in 2011.
• Since the redesign two months ago, traffic has almost doubled. I’d like say this due to the design, but I have been posting more long form and excerpt pieces which confirms the rule: post more = more traffic.
• Since the redesign, pages per visit are up 17%, visit duration is up 30%, and new visits are up 5%. So, more people are finding this place, they’re reading more, and staying longer. Welcome.

Aimee Groth on Quartz:

In its highest-functioning form, he says, the system is “politics-free, quickly evolving to define and operate the purpose of the organization, responding to market and real-world conditions in real time. It’s creating a structure in which people have flexibility to pursue what they’re passionate about.”

Reads delicious and the Wikipedia page on Holacracy is also worth a read. Per that page, most of the adopters who are using Holacracy in practice read to be smaller companies. I think communication, roles, and responsibilities are much more fluid and easy to discern at this size which makes these organizations great test beds.

What happens at 150+ employees is a different situation. Communication becomes fundamentally more expensive and that’s when we inflict all sorts of new structures, roles, and responsibilities on our teams. It’s also when such cancerous growths as politics starts to take root and because the team has become so large, it becomes harder to inoculate against these culture killing developments.

If ever there was a company to give Holacracy a legitimate chance, it’s Zappos, but I’d like to see a report card in a year.

John D. Cook on The Endeavour:

If something saps your energy and puts you in a bad mood, delegate it even if you have to pay someone more to do it than it would cost you do to yourself. And if something gives you energy, maybe you should do it yourself even if someone else could do it cheaper.

A good breakdown of the different variables to consider when decided whether to delegate or not. You’re probably delegating by gut right now and it might be worth taking apart the decision. Wish I wrote this.

Christopher Mims for Quartz:

All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled…

As I read this, all I kept thinking was Christopher Mims didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas.

Update: here’s a grumpy chaser.

My friend Kevin Simler on Quora:

In other words, the selfishness of neurons incentivizes them to be useful — to hook up with the right network of their fellow neurons, which is itself hooked up with other networks (both ‘up’ and ‘downstream’), all so they can keep earning their share of life-sustaining energy and raw materials.

From Simone Stolzoff on Medium:

According to a recent study by Copyblogger, on average 8/10 people will read headline copy, but only 2/10 will read the rest. We have all become headline hunters.

Been spending a good chunk of the break so far tidying up the archives. Some articles need sub-headings, others need a revised URL, and a few simply had to be deleted. It’s been cathartic.

As I reread articles, I can watch as parts of my leadership religion has changed. I now firmly believe that an engineering lead needs to keep coding. I also see remote workers as an inevitability.

In my bones, I know that teams that stare each other in the face are more productive. Decision cycle-time is shorter because communications are more fluid. There is also inevitably more context gathered when you sit there and see Phil uncomfortably and poorly explain his design. This is discomfort that you’d likely not see in an email.

Is totally remote the future? Nope. But it’s certainly gaining steam.

Via The Onion:

It could be anything—music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching—it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.

As I mention in this talk, I’ve been attempting to write a talk on performance management for years. Each time I start, I realize the complexity of the topic. It’s not a 2000 word essay, it’s a book. It’s also a topic that when executed poorly results in a variety of leadership disasters that while educational are also avoidable.

When the folks at First Round asked if I had any thoughts on the topic, I produced the following talk which is a small step in educating folks on the complexities of dealing with performance issues.

Great crowd, hard topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjczN5_bmnA

Good managers act like servants to their team but far too many like the power and let it go to their heads.

Treehouse removed all their managers back in September – the whole series of posts is worth a read. I am avidly watching the no manager movement. Current thoughts are:

• This type of horizontality only works for certain type of business. Software in particular can support this model because healthy organizations have tools which effectively do the work of managers around communications and knowledge management.
• This type of model does not scale. My opinion is that somewhere around 200+ folks some type of manager/leader/conductor steps up to act in a management capacity. Happy to be proven wrong here.
• In these #NoManager organizations, there are still managers. They don’t have the title, but the instinctively do the work because they’re good at it.