Our new book club choice (recommended by Jamie) is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. This week we focused on the preface, introduction, and Chapter 1. Preface to the Revised Edition “The Silicon Valley episode taught me something important: some people…
All posts by “Geoff”
Professional Development – 2020 – Week 25
Business Are Our Management Theories Outdated? (via Harvard Business Review) This essay describes our society being at an inflection point where we try to maximize efficiency (Taylorism) and profit (capitalism) over the people in the system. People need a broader…
An Elegant Puzzle – Part 14
This week we finished the final main chapter, Chapter 6. We decided not to discuss Chapter 7 as it’s more of a reference. Section 6.7 — Creating Special Roles, Like SRE to TPMs SRE = site reliability engineer TPM =…
Professional Development – 2020 – Week 24
Business 3 Things You’re Getting Wrong About Organizational Change (via Harvard Business Review) “Follow best practices” becomes “share your failures” “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” becomes “fix it anyway” “Control your assets” becomes “share your assets” Run Your…
Revell F-4G Phantom II: Part 8
The eighth step in the build is the main prep work before painting. This step took 6 hrs 31 mins. So far this was my least favorite activity. The purposes of this step are to (1) correct areas of the…
An Elegant Puzzle – Part 13
This week we discussed sections 6.5 and 6.6. Section 6.5 — Performance Management Systems “A good [career] ladder allows individuals to accurately self-assess…” Geoff agreed 100% — you should be able to know where you are relatively to the positions…
Professional Development – 2020 – Week 23
Agile Can a Team Vote Someone Off the Team? (via Mountain Goat Software) There are four types of team authority: manager-led, self-managing, self-designing, self-governing. You also need some kind of management for alignment and standards. The author gave an example…
An Elegant Puzzle – Part 12
This week we discussed sections 6.3 and 6.4. Section 6.3 — Cold Sourcing: Hire Someone You Don’t Know We all found this part more technically dry; most of us hadn’t really done much work on hiring funnels. Hiring bias: “The…
Professional Development – 2020 – Week 22
Agile The Agile C-Suite (via Harvard Business Review) Interesting piece about how a company used Agile principles all the way to the top. It’s about striking a balance between standardizing operations and pursuing innovations. The CEO, CFO, CHRO, CIO, COO,…
An Elegant Puzzle – Part 11
This week we discussed sections 6.1 and 6.2. Section 6.1: Roles over rocket ships, and why hypergrowth is a weak predictor of personal growth It’s been the norm in tech to stay someplace for two years and move on. Jamie…