Agile
Creating the Right Conditions for Stable Teams (via Leading Agile)
- Don’t time-slice people across multiple teams. How do they figure out which team gets the work done and who gets starved? Solution: someone has to orchestrate their work.
- Prefer encapsulation so teams can work independently. Otherwise your time is spent orchestrating. (No perfect solution; there are tradeoffs.)
- Unmanaged dependencies between teams is something to look out for.
Communication
How to Brief a Senior Executive (via Harvard Business Review)
- Before you walk in the room…
- Identify the person that will give non-verbal cues to confirm agreement with what you’re saying
- Know you’re bosses tells (e.g., speed up, go deeper)
- Find out how the boss engages with the material
- Plan for non-binary versions of success or failure
- When you’re in the room…
- Read the room, not your notes
- Stay focused on your task and watch for distractions
- Practice the art of staying silent; know when to chime in
Culture
Stay Friends with Your Work BFF — Even After One of You Leaves (via Harvard Business Review)
I’ve found this to be rare because it takes energy to keep something going without momentum of being employed together. Often I’ll try to keep it going, but it ends up being one-sided (i.e., I’m doing all the giving), so I drop it. Another rub is that the number of people you meet continually goes up; eventually you don’t have time for all your old work friends because of your new work friends.
Ethics
Ethical Frameworks for AI Aren’t Enough (via Harvard Business Review)
“Many organizations have adopted a set of high-level principles to ensure that their AI makes decisions in an ethical fashion and causes no harm. But to give the principles teeth, organizations need to have an implementation strategy that includes concrete metrics that can be measured and monitored by engineers, data scientists, and legal personnel. Because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to quantifying potential harms created by AI, metrics are likely to vary across organizations, use cases, and regulatory jurisdictions. But that need not discourage organizations; they can draw from a combination of existing research, legal precedents, and technical best practices.”
Managing
Turn Your Team’s Frustration into Motivation (via Harvard Business Review)
- Label the negative emotion
- Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic (e.g., “how can I learn” instead of “how am I this stupid”)
- Channel energy into action (e.g., how will I feel in 90 days if I’ve done nothing about this)
You’re Delegating. It’s Not Working. Here’s Why. (via Harvard Business Review)
- If you jump in and do it, people never learn how to do what you do.
- If there’s no follow-up, ownership can become hollow.
- If you fix people’s mistakes, they (1) never learn when good/bad looks like for you, (2) never get to be responsible for fixing things themselves.
Software Development
A Common-sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms (Part 3)
Our book club covered the three primary quadratic sorts: insertion, bubble, and selection.