Business
The Challenge of Rebuilding U.S. Domestic Supply Chains (via HBR)
“We don’t recommend that the United States or any country try to be self-sufficient in everything; there are too many benefits to be derived from global sourcing. But in preparing for the next crisis, it is worth understanding why a country as well-resourced as the United States was slow and, in many cases, unable to respond to basic and critical needs.” (From me: Seems pretty simple — crisis management isn’t profitable, so it never gets the attention it needs.)
Research: Dispersed Teams Succeed Fast, Fail Slow (via HBR)
“We found that dispersed teams were more efficient than non-dispersed teams, but only when the outcome of the project was successful. Conversely, co-located teams were quicker to abandon failing projects but were less efficient in working on projects that did succeed.” (1) Dispersed teams may need support to ensure that they commit to projects that are really more likely to succeed. (2) Dispersed teams may therefore need to put in place mechanisms whereby work is done on the projects with some overlap in time to allow for synchronous conversations. (3) Managers need to follow up more closely with dispersed teams than with co-located ones in order to ensure that progress is made and to look for indicators of when projects start to fail.
Why your huge tech team isn’t delivering (via Software Lead Weekly)
- Minimize your product feature set. The size and complexity of your application makes your teams struggle to deliver.
- Allow your delivery teams (implementers) to control their own backlogs, on the proviso they are responsible for understanding the business success factors for the work by drawing from the specialists’ expertise.
- When a team becomes too large to be efficient, split it into two standalone products and give the new teams autonomy over their product.
- Build a focused, clear company strategy, and make sure every single person in the company lives and breathes it.
Culture
To Make Real Progress on D&I, Move Past Vanity Metrics (via HBR)
- Identify data gaps
- Track leading indicators on inclusion
- Arm you experts with a single source of truth
- Confront the brutal facts and share them transparently
Don’t Let Employees Pick Their WFH Days (via HBR)
A hybrid team (some in the office, some WFH) can generate an in-group and an out-group. Another concern is that working mothers face a career risk of not being seen as much, and thus not promoted. I understand these, and I wonder how companies with employees that cannot come into to the office (because they’re so geographically dispersed) would be impacted by this advice.
Stop Sabotaging Your Workforce (via HBR)
- Asynchronous communication — outcomes > responsiveness, batch communication to allow blocks of focus time, prefer quality written communication
- Minimum viable processes — empower employees to make decisions on their own, processes should only support innovation and risk management, simplify or automate
- Self development — let people learn things that help them today (not just check boxes for CEUs), let people pick things to learn that aren’t directly related to their role
- Values alignment — don’t have vanity values, hire people that share them
- Strengths alignment — hire people that can apply their strengths, automate things to allow people to do their best work
- Implementing change — get buy-in from decision makers (cost savings, retention, etc.), test small changes as proof points, build momentum by sharing learnings with others
How to Do Hybrid Right (via HBR)
This article has a set of plays for finding the right balance of constraints for the jobs/tasks, employee preferences, projects/workflows, and inclusion/fairness. I’d argue this playbook is useful regardless of a pandemic — build an environment that works best for your people.
Leadership
Transform Your Technical Expertise into Leadership (via HBR)
I saved this for my “emerging leaders” file, as technical folks often don’t get adequate training in leadership. New leaders can struggle to inspire, coach, co-create, build commitment to a shared vision, and strengthen accountability. Orgs rarely communicate what effective leadership looks like. (1) Identify a leadership competency you’d like to build. (2) Reflect and seek input to better understand your gap (just like you would for a technical issue). (3) Identify behaviors you’d like to change or implement.
Sociology
Is the US Really a Meritocracy?
- The board game Monopoly was created as a critique of the capitalist system; one player monopolizes the board by extracting wealth from others, while the others are stuck in an endless cycle of poverty. In a study where players were given more starting money and more property, they believed their success was because of strategy and that they earned it (rather than they had an unfair advantage from the start).
- Generational wealth and privilege… Successful people tend to feel they earned/deserved it (if hard work + talent, then success), and that the contrapositive is also true (if not success, you didn’t work hard enough or have the talent).
- False assumption of meritocracy in the US… Everyone starts on equal footing, and those that come out ahead must have worked hard and/or were clever. Modern capitalism is not fair: see https://www.opportunityatlas.org/. Most people brush this off as bell-curve stats; however, if you look at children adopted from poor conditions by parents that provide for them, their outcomes are significantly better.
- We rarely discuss luck. I’ve blogged about this. “Making your own luck is becoming much more difficult under rapidly spiraling capitalism.” The video author recognized that it was dumb luck that YouTube promoted his video enough that he could have a viral feedback effect. There are many other channels (with better content) that never get picked up.
- Instead of structuring society toward winners and losers, why not align it so that everyone can have a decent quality of life (collaboration instead of competition). The meritocracy is a relic of feudal times and doesn’t really fit modern societal needs.