An inability to ask for help is not the domain of introverts. We certainly make it a more laborious mental process, but in any group of humans where there are those who know and those who are learning, the latter population is hesitant to ask for help because they don’t want to appear dumb to those who have clearly figured it out.
Management
The Hotel Giraffe
The 9th floor of The Standard located in Greenwich Village of New York City. Pre-pandemic. I wake up mid-day and a full-sized giraffe stands in the corner of my hotel room. The view of mid-day downtown Manhattan is obscured by a full-sized living breathing giraffe. This animal is staring at me. Blink. This situation makes… More
Going Full Pascal
First-year of college at UCSC. First computer science class. Introduction to Programming. The language: Pascal. Failed it. Failed it badly. Knew I was going to fail it halfway through the class. This was my chosen profession. I’d been a grocery store clerk, a butcher, a video store clerk, the guy who backs up the system… More
Feedback is a Mirror
You have an internal storyteller, and they are always telling you a story. Today the story is, “Almost done with all of my bugs. There were ten at the beginning of the week, but now I have two. One of them is hard, but I’ll figure it out. The other, I’m sure, will be a… More
You are Going on a Quest
The most common conversation I’ve had during the last three start-ups was the growth conversation. Some version of: “Rands. I am here. How do I get there?” For leadership-minded engineers, there are four career paths available to you. I will describe three briefly, and then I’ll talk about the fourth one a lot. The first… More
The Metronome
Tick tock. Morning. Sit down at the desk. Hit the spacebar and wake up the displays. Calendar first. What is happening today, and how do I need to prepare? Any last-minute edits? Conflicts? New meeting additions to the day? Ok, which meetings are unfamiliar? Look at attendees—map names to the organizational chart. Assess political machinations.… More
Your Mid-Year Leadership Check-in
A satisfying aspect of the new book was I achieved the intended goal of providing actionable advice. After a brief introduction, I list the 30 specific practices you can start with today to improve different aspects of leadership. I then go onto to tell the story of how I discovered or refined that practice. The… More
Management via Worry and Crisis
Your manager has a default management mantra. You see it when they are not paying attention and a problem – large or small – presents itself. It’s the sound and shape of their first reaction. Their default reaction. And after a few months, everyone knows their mantra. Here are a couple of my least favorite… More
A Distributed Meeting Primer
As a leader who primarily values team health, I place great value on the weekly 1:1 because it’s where I assess health. It’s my highest bandwidth meeting, and historically the slight to significant lag omnipresent in video conferencing impeded that bandwidth. It stilted the conversation. The micro-second of lag was an omnipresent reminder of the… More
The Blue Tape List
We remodeled the downstairs of the house several years ago. Two rooms had walls moved to make way for additional rooms. Deep construction. Months of noise, plastic tarps, dust, and decisions. When they start applying the drywall, it starts to look like your house again, and you begin to hope for dustless silence. Drywall is… More
