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
Management
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
Spidey-Sense
You see James on the 8th-floor cafeteria. You haven’t seen him in weeks which is fine because while you’ve worked together for years, your paths are currently not intersecting. “Hey, James.” “Hey! Long-time, I was just thinking about you.” “Really, why?” “Randy just called you out in the launch meeting. He said the project was… More
Meetings Are Not For You
One of the challenges with writing a blog for a long time is it possible to repeat yourself. I’m not talking repetitious themes; I’m talking word for word writing pretty much the same article. Again. Meetings are on the brain again, so I quickly checked the Rands archives to make sure that I hadn’t already… More
How It’s Worked So Far
First job. Scotts Valley, California. Zero clarity what a manager did, but Rick seemed like a nice guy and he pointed me in the right direction. Mostly. Rick was demoted after we didn’t ship for three years and Linda showed up and OH MY a solid opening lesson in credible and effective leadership. Thanks Linda.… More
Everything Breaks
We’re going to play a really simple and really dumb game. I’ll explain the setup and the rules: Two one-person ‘teams.’ On a flat, boring surface, you draw two parallel three feet long white lines which are fifty feet apart. Teams choose one home baseline. The other line marks the opposing team’s home base. Team… More
