Dates covered: April 15-21, 2019 (week 16 of 52)
Business
What the Grocery Stores Holding Their Own Against Amazon Are Doing Right (via Harvard Business Review)
As we march into the future, gone are the days of going to a single, local store for groceries. This article reports that stores should offer flexibility, proactively communicate about order status and other details, and build emotional connections with shoppers. Some stores (Walmart for example) are partnering with Postmates, DoorDash, and Uber for last-mile delivery. Customers are expecting more frequent updates about the status of their order (which I find odd they don’t already have considering this concept is several decades old). An example of a store that builds emotional connections is Trader Joe’s.
What Makes People Upgrade Products? Thinking About Self-Improvement (via Harvard Business Review)
Getting people thinking about how they’ve improved is correlated with likelihood for upgrading a product (even stronger if the target strongly identifies with the brand). One approach is to tie marketing to major life events such as graduation and job promotions.
5 Myths About Strategy (via Harvard Business Review)
- Strategy is about the long-term. It isn’t about length of time but the fundamentals of how the business works (value, drivers, costs, competition).
- Disruptors change strategy all the time. The fundamentals haven’t changed — cut price and add capacity. We see this now with “give it away and add users.”
- Competitive advantage is dead. You now need more than one advantage (i.e., more eggs in more baskets).
- You don’t really need a strategy; you just need to be agile. Agile isn’t a strategy, it’s a capability. Just because you can turn quickly doesn’t mean you turn in the right direction.
- You need a digital strategy. Maximizing “digital” suboptimizes the whole; focus on the entire business.
Raising Wages Is the Right Thing to Do, and Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Your Bottom Line (via Harvard Business Review)
This article has a few examples of companies that have made wage increases a priority, for example, not having employees on government assistance because they make so little money. One of the business sectors that is hardest hit is retail, where margins are low and labor costs are significant. The key there is letting people bring more to the job than their labor, especially where customer service is involved.
Career
Facing Your Mid-Career Crisis (via Harvard Business Review)
Our lives and careers seem to follow a U-shape — highs in youth and in later adulthood, making a dip in the middle. At mid-career, maybe we need to change because the job isn’t a good fit, or your interests have shifts, or maybe you can’t go any further up the ladder. But that anxiety could be caused by regret, self-subversion of projects, or reflecting on failures. There are some interesting philosophical bits the article unpacks; new to me was the idea of telic (with closure) vs. atelic (ongoing) activites, for example writing a report (telic) vs. taking feedback from colleagues (atelic).
Communication
Meetings Are Not for You (via Michael Lopp)
Everyone in a meeting experiences things differently. Having a note-taker, going over open issues, tasking people with specific next actions, and sharing those notes with others help make meetings more productive.
Research Confirms: When Receiving Bad News, We Shoot the Messenger (via Harvard Business Review)
People have an inherent and powerful need to understand and make sense of events that happen to them. To address the situation…
- Explicitly convey the benevolence of your motives
- Preface the bad news with positive feedback
- Delegate the messenger task to someone else
The five types of communication problems that destroy company morale (via Software Lead Weekly)
“…it often seems like all problems are eventually communication problems, because communication is the way we interface with each other—and the way most problems surface.”
- Lack of depth; for example, describing the way forward but not how you’ll get there
- Conflicting context; what’s important to one team not be important to another
- Missing empathy; for example, when shuttering projects and reshuffling people, only describing the business impact instead of considering the people involved
- Triggering anxiety
- Assuming unearned trust
Culture
Quality of Code is Quality of Life (via The Software Mentor)
Having a “hero” sacrifice his/her quality of life to work long hours to solve a problem isn’t sustainable. “Good engineering teams understand that just solving the problem is usually the easy part, solving the problem in a way that someone else can learn, tend and fix it is the bar for professional code today.” This involves an understandable design and structure, good documentation, and automated tests.
Preventing Busyness from Becoming Burnout (via Harvard Business Review)
- Everyone thinks work-life balance is good, but we wear overwork like a badge of honor
- Mission-driven non-profits have it even worse; “If we all hated our jobs, it would be much easier to create work-life balance.”
- Busyness is focusing on the short-term tasks that are easy to check off (because that’s all you have bandwidth for) — putting out fires, running from one meeting to the next, chewing through email — instead of making strategic plans.
- Busyness has become the way to signal dedication and leadership potential. This is compounded by the problem that we can’t accurately measure productivity for knowledge workers.
- Our mental model of an ideal worker is “someone who comes in early, eats lunch at their desk, stays late, emails at all hours, is always busy and always available to put work first”
- Leaders can…
- Recognize the power of social signals — “…be more open about: taking lunch breaks, leaving the office on time, working flexibly, going on vacation, talking about life outside of work or care responsibilities, and more demonstrably encouraging others to do the same”
- Build in slack for important work — we suck at planning (see the planning fallacy), so leave buffers of time, or transition periods before/after vacation. Things will always pop up, and things will always take longer.
- Increase transparency in workloads — schedule time to work on important things (and put it on your calendar) to help people determine whether scheduling a meeting with you is higher priority (i.e., meetings aren’t free)
How Coworking Spaces Affect Employees’ Professional Identities (via Harvard Business Review)
- Coworking spaces give some members a sense of professionalism and credibility that traditional remote working does not.
- Workers with company-subsidized memberships feel that their employers take their needs seriously — regardless of where they are located.
- Coworking spaces help new businesses make a positive impression on potential clientele.
Ethics
One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It? (via The Software Mentor)
A hormone named Klotho has been linked to reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. Could taking a supplement provide a cognitive boost, and if it were available, would it be the equivalent of doping in the Tour de France?
Leadership
The 9 mistakes you don’t know you’re making as a new manager (via Signal v Noise)
- Building trust is about team building
- Your team members generally know what’s going on
- Busy = good
- Barely preparing for 1:1s
- Solving the problem yourself
- 100% transparency is good
- You think you communication vision well
- You think you’re giving enough feedback
- You’re nice
Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive (via Harvard Business Review)
We are of two selves at work — the first is deliberate, measured, and rational (prefrontal cortex); the second is reactive and impulsive (amygdala). When you feel strong emotions arise, you’re slipping into the second self — start with being aware of these feelings. Watch for when you’re digging in your heels; this often means you’re feeling threatened. Ask yourself, “What else could be true here?” and “What is my responsibility in this?”
Process
To Change the Way You Think, Change the Way You See (via Harvard Business Review)
De-familiarization is a way of looking at what’s in front of us, but in a way that’s different — e.g., burrs getting caught on clothing led to Velcro, puddles of ooze under soap bars led to liquid soap dispensers. Our brains can sometimes impede this effort through habituation (e.g., the Troxler effect where if you stare at something long enough, it “disappears”).
The Ultimate Productivity Hack is Saying No (via James Clear)
- “Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
- “No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.”
- “Once you know what matters, you should increasingly say no to anything that doesn’t.”
Software development
Don’t Create Objects That End With -ER (via The Software Mentor)
I always enjoy reading these posts that challenge common practices to help me confirm or deny my state of the world. This one I don’t particularly agree with; there are plenty of arguments to support my case in the comments of the post. In short, it seems to solve one problem, and create another.
6 types of code you shouldn’t have inside your .NET controllers (via The Software Mentor)
- DTO mappers
- Validation
- Business logic
- Authorization
- Error handling
- Data storage/retrieval
Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model (via Software Lead Weekly)
People tend to estimate the median better than the mean, and that (in the data presented in this article), the task time is log-normal. This means that when things are off, they’re exponentially off.