Dates covered: May 27-June 2, 2019 (week 22 of 52)
NOTE: A bit lighter this week, as I’m on vacation.
Business
Don’t Break Up Facebook — Treat It Like a Utility (via Harvard Business Review)
The big tech companies like Facebook are harder to categorize as monopolies in the traditional sense as they have their fingers in so many pies (social media, chat, image sharing). However, it may make more sense to treat them like utilities as the cost of another player entering the market — think for example what it would take for a new mobile phone carrier to start up — is too great.
Culture
The Little Things That Affect Our Work Relationships (via Harvard Business Review)
“Micromoves are small actions or behaviors that seem inconsequential in the moment but affect how we relate to one another.” How we respond can keep relationships healthy. This article has some helpful hints to that end. Empathy, open communication, and willingness to address things that aren’t working are key.
Why Self-Awareness Isn’t Doing More to Help Women’s Careers (via Harvard Business Review)
- Women underestimate themselves because they don’t want to validate negative stereotypes; they may hold themselves back
- Women aren’t getting good (accurate) feedback; “benevolent sexism” is someone withholding critical feedback from a woman
- Women tend to take feedback to heart by putting more importance on evaluations from others
Making Empathy Central to Your Company Culture (via Harvard Business Review)
“When norms and ideals clash, people gravitate towards what others do, not what they’re told to do. What’s worse, people who adhered to the previous culture might feel betrayed or see leadership as hypocritical and out of touch.” (1) Acknowledge the potential for growth (not a fixed mindset), (2) highlight the right norms, (3) find culture leaders and co-create with them.
Leadership
What Mindfulness Can Do for a Team (via Harvard Business Review)
This is slightly different than the mindfulness training bandwagon some other companies are trying to jump on… “it’s the collective awareness of what a team is experiencing at a given moment, without the prejudgements that come at the individual level.” There’s no formal playbook for this yet, but to start, “encourage present-focused attention, non-judgmental processing, and respectful communication, as well as an openness to collecting and understanding information before processing it.”
What great managers do: Prune (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Make small adjustments
- Encourage healthy growth
- Prune only when needed; don’t over-coach
Process
Four Magic Numbers for Measuring Software Delivery (via Software Lead Weekly)
This post goes into four metrics outlined in the book Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble and Kim.
- Lead Time — The time it takes to validate, design, implement and ship a new valuable thing
- Deployment Frequency — The number of times per developer per day we ship to production
- Change Failure Percentage — When you deploy to production so regularly, do you keep breaking it? Signs of change failure could be red deployments, bugs, alerts etc…
- Mean Time to Recovery / Resolution — If there is a failure during a change, how long does it take you on average to recover?
Psychology
Work-Related Burnout Has a New Official Definition (via Lifehacker)
There’s now an ICD-11 code for burn-out. “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy. Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”