Dates covered: July 22-28, 2019 (week 30 of 52)
Business
Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t (via Harvard Business Review)
- Lack of alignment with the business — you need some separation, but also direction for vision, growth, and people
- Lack of metrics to track success
- Lack of balance in the team — one side has too much company and not enough innovation (you get one-off improvements), the other has disruption mindset but no guidance on how to fold it into the company
Your Organization Needs a Learning Ecosystem (via Harvard Business Review)
- “High-growth individuals who embrace new learning make the organization smarter and contribute to its growth, but they can’t do it alone. They need their managers to have a reciprocal interest in individual growth and create a learning ecosystem to foster it.”
- “When they’re no longer stimulated and engaged by their work, their benefit to the organization is diminished. At that point, an employee may be left to languish in place or forced to leave. Their accumulated expertise and institutional memory is lost in the process. Worse, they may take their learning to a competitor — a potentially exponential loss.”
The Debate Over How to Classify Gig Workers Is Missing the Bigger Picture (via Harvard Business Review)
- Rights should be expanded to gig workers (e.g., discrimination protection)
- Create rules that are specific to gig workers
- Provide welfare rights (e.g., unemployment insurance)
- Consider the motivations about why people get gigs
Communication
Writing Well (via Software Lead Weekly)
This series of posts describes the process for improving your writing, whether it’s an article, conference talk, essay, or anything else. The guide provides a thorough explanation of how to get started, the process of writing, how to aggressively edit, and how to improve. It may be too much for one sitting; I’ve definitely saved this one for reference.
Culture
Why Employees Don’t Share Knowledge with Each Other (via Harvard Business Review)
“First, people share and hide knowledge for different reasons. Second, as we stated above, they are more motivated to share when they work in a cognitively demanding job and have a lot of autonomy. Third, they are more likely to hide knowledge if they think colleagues rely on them too much.”
Try This Popular Japanese Morning Routine For A Better Workday (via The Software Mentor)
This was my cultural education post for the week… I learned about how Japanese businesses use a Chorei meeting to start the day, thus setting the tone for what’s to follow; on its surface it looks like a cultural daily standup. There are also some YouTube videos near the bottom with examples.
What to do When Your Boss Betrays You (via Harvard Business Review)
“Your boss’s choice to hurt others, consciously or not, is theirs. The choice to allow their betrayal to negatively alter who you are is always yours.”
- Hold fast to your values
- Pay attention to patterns of betrayal
- Remember: not everyone will betray you
- Practice forgiveness, not retaliation
- Don’t bury your negative emotions
- Let gratitude and purpose offset entitlement and apathy
Generative Team Design (via Software Lead Weekly)
This post has a generous helping of word salad; however, the diagram near the top of the post was worthwhile — it’s almost a positive five whys about how good culture works.
Leadership
The 4 Things Resilient Teams Do (via Harvard Business Review)
- Believe they can effectively complete tasks together
- Share a common mental model of teamwork
- Are able to improvise
- Trust one another and feel safe
What great managers do: Prune (via Signal v. Noise)
- Pruning is about small changes in the right places (not big sweeping moves)
- Pruning removes dead leaves to encourage healthy growth
- Pruning is done when appropriate; not too much
What to Do about Mediocrity on Your Team (via Software Lead Weekly)
“Chronic mediocrity is a symptom of ineffective leadership, not anemic personnel.” I agree with the following leadership practices; although they are easier to bring about if the leader has agency to do these things:
- Show the consequences of mediocrity
- Use concrete measures as influence
- Establish peer accountability
- Speak up; people look to you in ambiguous situations
Positive attention is 30x more powerful than negative (via Software Lead Weekly)
With the citation mentioning Gallup, I’d gather the quotation relates to CliftonStrengths (a.k.a. StrengthsFinder). Amplify people’s strengths instead of fixing their weaknesses.
Process
Notes from chapters 11-15 for our book club.
How to motivate yourself to change your behavior (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Social incentives
- Immediate rewards
- Progress monitoring
Software development
Yes silver bullet (via The Software Mentor)
This article is a recontextualization of Fred Brooks’s 1986 essay No Silver Bullet. Mark argues that there have been several technological changes that have had orders of magnitude of impact: the Internet, automated testing, Git, garbage collection, Agile, statically typed functional programming.
Practices and Tools that Make for a Good Project. (via The Software Mentor)
- Development and production environment parity
- Dependency management
- Environment configuration
- Development environment setup
- Formatting
- Testing
- Commit history
- Continuous integration/deployment