Manager at the first start-up. Solid guy. Significant experience. I know that I can learn from him. No doubt. All the correct operational 1:1 hygiene is there. We meet every week like clockwork; we fill the time, and I often leave with a healthy sense of productivity. But sometimes… he talks. And wanders. He’s a… more
In the hallway, late on Thursday, someone tells a bit of information about your product that is 100% provably not true. You laugh, wink at the person, and say, “That’s goofy. What reasonable human would believe that?” And that conversation moves on. Two hours later, different locations, different humans, and different contexts. Same exact piece… more
It starts easy. The stakes are low. There is a legion of leaders around you who understand you’ve just begun, so when they see the decision in front of you, they proactively offer helpful advice. If the decision appears too complicated, excessively risky, or obviously high stakes, your manager raises her and helpfully suggests, “I got this one.”
The Old Guard is a set of humans who inhabit the early days of a start-up. As I’ve written about before, they define the culture in both obvious and non-obvious ways. Simply: the way they act and how they treat each other disproportionately affects the values of the company. The Old Guard gets to be… more
Despite the growing reliance on “big data” to game out every decision, it’s clear to anyone with a glimmer of self-awareness that humans are incapable of constantly rational thought. We simply don’t have the time or capacity to calculate the statistical probabilities and potential risks that come with every choice.
I feel I’ve spent 22.3% of my last four years of my life arguing with data-minded engineers about this topic.
“The number of objective facts deserving of that term is extremely low and almost negligible in everyday life,” he says. “The whole idea of using logic to make decisions in the world is to me a fairly peculiar one, given that we live in a world of high uncertainty which is precisely the conditions in which logic is not the appropriate framework for thinking about decision-making.”
Preach it.
(Via Quartz)
The starting gun fires and when the starting gun fires, you run. You’re a new manager, and while the sound of gun firing is startling, you run because this is finally your chance. You’ve been promoted to the role of manager, you want this gig, and this is your chance to shine, so you run.… more
It’s a definitive characteristic of the people I work with that they sign up for too much. They’re optimists. They believe they can do anything. They’re eternally growing. That’s the poetry, here’s the reality. There are two paths for these eager optimists. The first path is the individual who is capable of both signing up… more
If you don’t care about the FriendDA you should stop reading this now. The FriendDA was written in late 2008 and it was intended as an experiment to place a smidge of formality on the discussion of perceived precious ideas. Happily, the FriendDA has legs. Since the original publication there has a small, but steady… more
My management team was bickering. Two managers in particular: Leo and Vincent. Both of their projects were fine. Both of their teams were producing, but in any meeting where they were both representing their teams, they just started pushing each other’s buttons. Every meeting on some trivial topic: Leo: “Vincent, are you on track to… more
Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here’s the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computing: “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks,… more
