Dates covered: September 2-8, 2019 (week 36 of 52)
Business
6 Ways CEOs Can Prove They Care About More Than Shareholder Value (via Harvard Business Review)
- Address CEO pay and incentives relative to their company’s employees
- Make employees owners (i.e., shareholders)
- Get out of lobbies to break up oligarchies
- Work with communities for procurement
- Invest in things like energy efficiency instead of stock buybacks
- Have products and pricing that benefits more than just the shareholders
How Business Schools Can Help Restore Trust in Capitalism (via Harvard Business Review)
Articles like these are why I subscribe to HBR; they expose me to areas I’m unfamiliar with, and they challenge the status quo (e.g., shareholders are the most important thing). Business schools play a role in creating the next generations of business leadership. There’s mistrust everywhere… in big capitalist companies and in government. “This means embracing civic-minded leadership, a way of conducting business and citizenship based on a holistic understanding of how individuals, corporations, and governments interact, one that emphasizes the importance of good governance mechanisms and seeks to create a system in which capitalism and the market economy can deliver on their promises.”
It’s Time for a C-Level Role Dedicated to Reskilling Workers (via Harvard Business Review)
- Link the jobs and individuals int he organization today to the roles needed in the future
- Decide how to deliver the training
- Have dedicated leadership to sustain the effort
Career
Developer on Fire #439: Leading as Yourself
Dave Rael and I had a conversation about leadership, career, failure, books, and many other topics. My first podcast interview!
Are You at Risk of a Mid-Career Rut? (via Harvard Business Review)
Once we get into middle career, we tend to play it safe, which can lead to being stuck or passed over for opportunities. The best advice is to get a mentor to help you navigate and get feedback on your actions. There some diagnostic questions near the end to help you determine if it’s time to get help in that regard.
Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Reason about business value
- Unblock yourself
- Take initiative
- Improve your writing
- Own your project management
- Own your education
- Master your tools
- Communicate proactively
- Find opportunities to collaborate
- Be professional and reliable
Communication
Research: Being Nice in a Negotiation Can Backfire (via Harvard Business Review)
In zero-sum negotiations (i.e., ones where you’re not making the pie bigger or continuing a relationship with the seller), being tough/firm can get you better results than being warm/friendly.
Culture
What People Hate About Being Managed by Algorithms, According to a Study of Uber Drivers (via Harvard Business Review)
- Constant surveillance
- Little transparency
- Dehumanization
Inside the Bizarre World of Internet Trolls and Propagandists (via TED)
A journalist studied how propagandists use social media to incite people. Takeaways… 1) Emotion gets more engagement than reason; 2) social media, and by extension, learning algorithms, amplify negative human aspects (e.g., racism, sexism) because it gets engagement and revenue.
The #MeToo Backlash (via Harvard Business Review)
Men and women for the most part understand what is and what is not sexual harassment. An interesting side effect of the #MeToo movement is that men are more cautious and are possibly closing down opportunities to women for fear of reprisal.
Management
Experience Doesn’t Predict a New Hire’s Success (via Harvard Business Review)
This is a Q&A article about a recent study about how a candidates prior experience doesn’t correlate with success in the next position. Just because someone has X years of experience doesn’t indicate how well they do something; however, experience is extremely easy to measure (i.e., length of time based on a resume). Interviewers can ask STAR questions… situation/task/action/result; “Tell me about a specific time when you handled an upset customer, the action you took, and what resulted from it.”
Process
The conclusion to our book club’s read of The Phoenix Project. The last section is the first four chapters of The DevOps Handbook.
How to Motivate Yourself When You Don’t Have a Deadline (via Harvard Business Review)
- Make a deadline yourself — pick a date, spend a certain time-boxed amount of time per week, or take one step per day toward completion
- Enlist positive peer pressure — ask someone to keep you accountable, or find someone to work on the project with you
- Incentivize yourself — alternatively, create penalties for missing goals
Technology
Will We Realize Blockchain’s Promise of Decentralization? (via Harvard Business Review)
Blockchain is a recent buzzword and not everyone exactly agrees on how it should function. This article looks at some of the attributes that blockchain should have brought to Bitcoin, and how some of those have not worked as expected.