Agile
The Five P’s of Agility (via SWLW)
- People — they come first
- Principles — what we believe
- Protocols — how we behave
- Practices — what we do
- Patterns — how we choose
Leadership
How to Be a Good Leader in a Bad Economy (via HBR)
“The potential of a recession on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic means that the usual strategies for managing in a downturn may no longer work — and make the situation worse. To get the most out of their teams without creating a destructive spiral, leaders must understand how to balance their desire to move the business along quickly with their employees’ psychological needs. In particular, there are three balances leaders need to get right: moving closer without suffocating others; moving faster without turning frantic; and taking on or assigning a bigger workload without sacrificing relationships.”
To Retain Your Best Employees, Invest in Your Best Managers (via HBR)
- Elevate the importance of connecting with those they manage
- Give them training on how to coach and mentor, as most managers are promoted because they were good at their previous job
- Provide peer-to-peer support for them
When Leaders Struggle with Collaboration (via HBR)
- Reasons collaboration doesn’t come easy… fear of being overshadowed, reliance on hierarchy to get things done, results over relationships, difficulty trusting, lack of knowledge for how to collaborate well.
- Be open to change and new ideas, value others equally, become someone others can rely on, create moments of generosity, share the spotlight and give credit, and ask for advice.
Meetings
The Seven Circles of Meeting Hell (via Rands in Repose)
- Sloppy and unprepared — meeting is spent time answering questions already answered elsewhere
- Distracted — not paying attention
- One more thinger — raising trivial issue after the meeting is over
- Relitigator — debate instead of forward progress
- Explainer — lecture more than listen
- All the timer — believes meeting is the only way to make progress
- Forever endless emptiness eternal — endless debate with no decisions
Metrics
No wait, of course THAT is the single most important SaaS metric (via A Smart Bear)
Companies often try to pick a single metric — retention, top-line growth, net profit growth, sales efficiency, LTV, NPS. None of these are wrong or right. It depends on what’s important to you right now, and perhaps it’s a combination of metrics (and perhaps not ones listed previously).
Process
The Angel’s in the Details (via SWLW)
The author purports that if one focuses on the little things, the big things will go better. There are some good examples of that being true, however if you focus only on the minutia, you can get stuck in local optima.