Dates covered: November 5-11, 2018 (week 45 of 52)
Business
Research: Self-Disruption Can Hurt the Companies That Need It the Most (via Harvard Business Review)
The companies that need innovation (disruption) the most are in a very competitive industries and have assets (e.g., factories) that are more traditional. Those companies also have the most to lose by getting innovation wrong.
Career
What to Do If Your Career Is Stalled and You Don’t Know Why (via Harvard Business Review)
1) Executive presence — seemingly trivial but important things such as body odor, perceived confidence; 2) communication style — e.g., academic and fact-heavy when story-telling and memorable results would be more effective, I vs. we, strong accent; 3) negative feedback from peers, despite positive feedback from reports or managers.
Communication
To Give a Great Presentation, Distill Your Message to Just 15 Words (via Harvard Business Review)
As the title says, have your idea pared down to a tight thesis. Also, 1) don’t pitch your business/company, pitch your idea; 2) know your audience; 3) what do you want from your audience and how do you get it?; 4) learn the difference between good and bad talks (e.g., a good talk has a linear path from start to finish).
How to Help Your Employees Learn from Each Other (via Harvard Business Review)
Unlike some learning methods – like tests or exams, or high-pressure demonstrations of skills – peer-to-peer learning creates a space where the learner can feel safe taking these risks without a sense that their boss is evaluating their performance while they are learning. 1) Appoint a facilitator, 2) build a safe environment, 3) focus on real-world scenarios, 4) encourage networking.
Culture
Empowered Product Teams (via Software Lead Weekly)
1) Great teams serve the customers, not the business. 2) Problems arise when leaders don’t trust teams (i.e., use command and control). Trust comes from competence and character. 3) “Agile” doesn’t mean fewer managers/leaders, it means stronger ones to provide vision, strategy, principles, priorities, and evangelism.
How Masculinity Contests Undermine Organizations, and What to Do About It (via Harvard Business Review)
Masculinity contest culture “endorses winner-take-all competition, where winners demonstrate stereotypically masculine traits such as emotional toughness, physical stamina, and ruthlessness. It produces organizational dysfunction, as employees become hyper competitive to win.” Companies thrive when people work together (win-win) instead of competitively within (zero-sum). Focus on what success looks like (rather than how not to behave) and dispel misconceptions that bad behavior is acceptable.
Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do (via Harvard Business Review)
“Many a tech titan, critics contend, would have been helped by an extra humanities class, say, or social science course…” “We need the humanities again, it seems, or the digital revolution will turn into a Taylorist reformation.” We get caught up in efficiency and profit at the expense of how processes and behaviors impact real people.
9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work (via Harvard Business Review)
80% of workers in a survey would rather have a boss who cared about helping them find meaning in work than have a 20% pay increase. The people closest to the work have the best view to improve it — make them knowledge workers. The author states that perhaps the idea of exchanging labor for money is fading; meaningful work is a win-win.
It’s Time to Stop Using Myers-Briggs at Work (via Lifehacker)
This personality assessment definitely has its critics. It’s not useful for making meaningful hiring decisions, as it doesn’t assess skills or capabilities, just personality preferences.
If Your Employees Aren’t Speaking Up, Blame Company Culture (via Harvard Business Review)
If you want employees to speak up, the work environment and the team’s social norms matter. If reliability is critical to your business, create an environment for people to easily voice risks/threats. If innovation is critical, empower people to voice opportunities. These situational perspectives are stronger than personality perspectives (someone likely to speak up regardless of culture).
We need to shift our focus from competencies to agency (via Software Lead Weekly)
This one required more than one read, as there’s quite a bit to unpack. If I understand it correctly, we need to move away from the industrial era mindset of hierarchy, skills, and praising individuals toward collaboration, empathy, cooperative performance.
Leadership
You’re Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You’re Managing a Team of Writers (via Software Lead Weekly)
“Building a great piece of software is a constant balancing act of creativity, structure, improvisation and deliberation.” 1) Prefer guidance over control; 2) always be communicating the goals (intent); 3) use just enough process to provide structure without being stifling; 4) remember that every individual works differently and has different strengths – understand them.
Letting Go (via Software Lead Weekly)
Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager is about transitioning form “me” to “you”. It’s less about what you can do, and more about caring about others and helping them do well.
The Fundamentals of Leadership Still Haven’t Changed (via Harvard Business Review)
1) Unite people around a vision; 2) build a strategy for achieving the vision by making choices about what to do and what not to do; 3) attract and develop the best possible talent to implement the strategy; 4) relentlessly focus on results in the context of the strategy; 5) create ongoing innovation that will help reinvent the vision and strategy; 6) “lead yourself”: know and grow yourself so that you can most effectively lead others and carry out these practices.
Ego Is the Enemy of Good Leadership (via Harvard Business Review)
I can definitely relate to this quotation, as I’ve recently moved my office to be closer to my reports: “If I don’t meet people, I won’t get to know what they think. And if I don’t have a finger on the pulse of the organization, I can’t lead effectively.” Having an inflated ego 1) makes it easier for people to exploit you (stroke your ego), 2) corrupts your behavior, and 3) narrows your vision. Remember you alone are not the cause of your success: Multiple things/people combine to help you do what you do.
Under-Management Is the Flip Side of Micromanagement — and It’s a Problem Too (via Harvard Business Review)
You can know your business well, be a good collaborator, and be well-liked; however, if you neglect problems, don’t help people focus with clear goals, or hold people accountable, you’re likely under-managing.
High Output Management (via Software Lead Weekly)
This post was a summary of a book with the same name. Those who are new to management will find several helpful concepts — delegation, performance reviews, helping others, being a role model, setting goals for reports, etc.
Organizations
The End of Bureaucracy (via Harvard Business Review)
This post describes how Haier, a large Chinese consumer electronics company, has been able to be successful while avoiding common bureaucratic structures. 1) microenterprises that focus on transforming, incubating, and support; 2) setting specific targets instead of incremental goals; 3) instead of monopolistic departments (HR, R&D), have internal contracts/agreements that tie revenue for those departments to their customers, which a) discourages mediocrity, b) unites everyone around a goal of great experience, c) maximizes flexibility; 4) use voluntary collaboration instead of top-down coordination; 5) favor open innovation instead of rigid boundaries; 6) bureaucracy is conservative by default, so make innovation easier; 7) have owners instead of employees, which gives people authority and responsibility.
Process
(Deliberate) practice makes perfect: how to become an expert in anything (via The Software Mentor)
Repeating a skill is maintaining it, not building it. 1) Set small goals, 2) be consistent, 3) track and measure your performance, 4) recharge.
If Your Innovation Effort Isn’t Working, Look at Who’s on the Team (via Harvard Business Review)
1) “Negative capability” — being comfortable with uncertainty; 2) “chaos pilots” who can navigate uncertainty and create structure within chaos to take action; 3) “divergent thinking” — taking ideas that are usually far apart and bringing them together; 4) “convergent action” — execute on new ideas to create something tangible; 5) “influential communication” — the ability to communicate things in a compelling, influential way.
If You Want to Get Better at Something, Ask Yourself These Two Questions (via Harvard Business Review)
1) Do you want to do better? 2) Are you willing to feel the discomfort of putting in more effort and trying new things that will feel weird and different and won’t work right away?
Software development
Do your commits pass this simple test? (via The Software Mentor)
Frequent, descriptive, atomic, decentralized, immutable
Are There Actually Companies out There That Write Good Code? (via The Software Mentor)
All code bases rot. Keep your eye out for companies that employ developers with similar coding values to yours.
Technology
Can AI Address Health Care’s Red-Tape Problem? (via Harvard Business Review)
Three areas of high impact: 1) bed assignment, 2) documentation, 3) fraud detection. To prepare for this healthcare organizations need, 1) simpler ways to represent and exchange information, 2) fewer barriers between systems and departments, 3) reduce staff that add no value.