Dates covered: January 28-February 3, 2019 (week 5 of 52)
Business
Pricing Needs to Reflect Who People Want to Be, Not Just What They Want (via Harvard Business Review)
The author cites some examples of non-luxury goods (i.e., magazine subscriptions) where the identity of the customers influences what they’ll be willing to pay. HBR is also in this category; readers don’t mind paying for quality content that also allows them to consider themselves as intellectual business people.
It’s Time to Stop Treating R&D as a Discretionary Expenditure (via Harvard Business Review)
R&D is a bigger component of digital companies than for the manufacture of physical goods. It requires employee cost of engineering, management, and IT personnel, which are difficult to rehire after furloughs due to cost cuts. Digital companies must innovate to survive, and R&D is what drives that innovation.
Retailers Are Squandering Their Most Potent Weapons (via Harvard Business Review)
Brick-and-mortar stores typically cut labor and training, as they’re the most variable costs. However, if you have knowledgeable salespeople, that gives you an advantage over e-tailers and other physical stores. This article lays out an experimentation approach to determine the right number of employees and ways of tracking training to performance.
McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here’s Why It No Longer Applies. (via Harvard Business Review)
The McKinsey model basically has three simultaneous timelines that vary in scale — 1 year, 2-3 years, 4-7 years. The issue is that we’re seeing disruption of the 4-7-year category much faster (e.g., Uber, SpaceX, AirBnB). Most slower-moving businesses treat these as minimum viable products; the problem is that speed gets these disruptive companies out there and then they scale.
Career
How to Make Friends in a New City (via Harvard Business Review)
- Rediscover weak or dormant ties that may be in your new city
- Ask existing friends and colleagues for help (e.g., Who do you know in ___?)
- Seek out shared activities, preferably ones where you have to interact with others, not just be physically in the same space
- Don’t stop connecting; see who you can introduce to your new connections
- Get to know the whole person
How to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss (via Signal v Noise)
This excellent post gets back to a core tenet of managing expectations. Managers (rarely) do this intentionally; it’s often because they don’t know if you’ll get the work done, their reputation is at stake, it’s the only management style they know, they’ve been burned before, or you’re bringing this on yourself.
If You’re About to Take a New Job, Should You Consider Your Boss’s Counteroffer? (via Harvard Business Review)
The author asked some industry experts when counteroffers are useful to the employee. One said, “You should never stay just for money and you should never leave just for money.” (My caveat is that you shouldn’t stay if you’re underpaid.) Consider the possible repercussions of accepting; you’re now a flight risk, and most people that take the counteroffer leave within 1-2 years anyway. In the counteroffer is there a genuine opportunity for new responsibilities? Ideally, you should have a “pre-quit” conversation with a mentor or your boss to try and work things out before you go looking for another job in the first place.
Culture
What PwC Learned from Its Policy of Flexible Work for Everyone (via Harvard Business Review)
- Toss out the rule book; formality/process can work against you
- Everyone deserves the same degree of flexibility; not based on title or tenure
- When it comes to flexibility, trust is not earned; assume you hired people you can trust
- Flexibility is a two-way street; it works top-down and bottom-up
The Backlash to Larry Fink’s Letter Shows How Far Business Has to Go on Social Responsibility (via Harvard Business Review)
Larry Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, with $6 trillion under management. His recent letter says that his company will change its practices to be more diverse and socially responsible, which angered many conservative business people. “Classical economics taught business leaders that social and environmental issues were externalities that had no effect on the business, but the evidence all around us shows that this is wrong. Today’s most successful companies have learned that the social impact of their business is a critical factor in their competitive strategy and operational effectiveness.”
Your Company Needs a Better Retention Plan for Working Parents (via Harvard Business Review)
- Because the demographic is huge (25-54 demo has about 52 million)
- The struggle today is tougher than in past decades (we now have two working parents)
- Working parents may vote with their feet
- How you treat working parents now is noticed by others
- The issue is getting more attention in public dialogue
- Legislation (if any) to help parents will take time
Leadership
How to Decide Whether to Fire Someone (via Harvard Business Review)
- Reflect; if they were leaving would you fight to keep them? Would you hire them now?
- Consider the root cause; maybe you hired the wrong person, maybe their expectations are unclear
- Seek input from others
- Be transparent with the employee
- Consult with HR early in the process
- Gather more data; there are other tools beyond the PIP (performance improvement plan)
- Once you’ve decided, don’t procrastinate
To Improve Your Team, First Work on Yourself (via Harvard Business Review)
“Teams are complex systems of individuals with different preferences, skills, experiences, perspectives, and habits.” To improve your team, you’ll need to work on internal self-awareness (e.g., what emotions you experience, what are your core values), external self-awareness (e.g., what are you doing that’s helpful or harmful to your team), and personal accountability (i.e., recognize the problem, accept you play a role, take responsibility for solving it, stick with it until solved).
Process
Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things (via The Software Mentor)
It’s a safety technique of verbal and physical rituals to indicate what actions are being taken. I believe there’s an aviation equivalent of this where you state what you’re about to do before you do it, similar to the repeat-to-confirm of submarine orders.
The myth of passive income (via The Software Mentor)
Nothing is free/passive. You had to do some kind of work to get a product that delivers you passive income.
How to Unlock Your Team’s Creativity (via Harvard Business Review)
The phrase that came to mind about why creativity is important is “what got us here won’t keep us here.” Look for ways that process is limiting you, facilitate “spaghetti throwing” where you try things and see what works, reveal “sticky floors” (opposite of glass ceilings) that prevent you from trying new things, and encourage a growth mindset along with mindfulness.
How I Choose What to Read (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Trust recommendations, but not too much (if you read what everyone else is reading, you miss out on old books, or end up having the same thoughts everyone else does)
- Tame the thrillers (in 20 years would you be proud to have read that book?)
- Blend a bizarre bowl (counterintuitive, uncomfortable, orthogonal to something you already know, different or tangential)
- Trust the Lindy Effect (“Time is like a filter for quality. The older the problem, the older the solution. Read books that’ve stood the test of time.”)
- Favor biographies over self-help (people have messy lives, and learning about the whole picture can provide prospective)
Security
Kerberos – CompTIA Security+ SY0-401: 5.1
The Kerberos protocol is one of those topics that’s fundamental to security, yet happens auto-magically under the hood, so I need a refresher every so often. The video explains the details of how a client and server can communicate using time-based tickets.
Improving Cybersecurity Means Taking More Care with What We Digitize (via Harvard Business Review)
We had 100 years to adopt the telephone; but within 10 years, 4 in 5 Americans have a mobile phone. The rate of innovation and expansion is outpacing the ability to secure it all. Most of the rules about liability are superficial (e.g., penalties only if a company fails to report an issue after it occurs). We’ve chosen connectivity and convenience over security and privacy; most of the time if the user doesn’t consent, they have to go without.
Software development
Some thoughts on anti-patterns (via The Software Mentor)
Mark Seemann describes why he’s changed his stance on the “ambient context” pattern, thus considering it an anti-pattern. If Solution B has fewer disadvantages than Solution A, Solution B may be an anti-pattern because of Pareto efficiency. Falsifiability is another aspect — if an anti-pattern has no counterexample that is better (or has fewer disadvantages), it’s still an anti-pattern.
Why Do We Need Architectural Diagrams? (via The Software Mentor)
It’s a balance of not enough documentation and too much (brittle) documentation. Again, it’s about the audience — who needs these diagrams and to what level of detail? “The architectural diagrams in particular and the documentation, in general, should be primarily used for collaboration, communication, vision and guidance inside the team and across teams. It must also include the significant design decisions in the project (taken at a certain moment of time), but nothing more.”
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: The Big Picture (via Understanding DevOps skill path)
This course does exactly what the title says. It describes CI and CD and the benefits they provide, such as reducing errors, increasing reliability, and delivering value to your customers faster.
Orchestration and Automation: The Big Picture (via Understanding DevOps skill path)
Automation is how you make things predictable, repeatable, and traceable. This course talks about manual, scheduled, event-based, and self-service automation. To tie automated tasks together, the common types of orchestration are covered: OS task scheduler, runbook orchestration, cloud-based automation, configuration management, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.
Technology
What Will Software Look Like Once Anyone Can Create It? (via Harvard Business Review)
The author makes an analogy between software being made by the limited pool of engineers to that of having three TV broadcast networks. Those networks were replaced by cable (3 became 300), and now there’s YouTube where anyone can make content. Think about universities vs. Khan Academy. Eventually we may get to the point where companies (probably small business at first) can make their own software as the interface for facilitating that process changes.
The Cost of Self-Driving Cars Will Be the Biggest Barrier to Their Adoption (via Harvard Business Review)
A study found that replacing taxis in the San Francisco area with highly-automated vehicles (HAVs) would cost the consumer almost three times as much as owning an older, less safe vehicle. The purpose was to prove that although HAVs are safer, the cost may have to be offset by subsidies, which many consider unpopular.