Tag: leadership
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How can you be a good leader in a bad market?
A few weeks ago everyone was arguing about “founder mode”, but before it came the idea of “Peace time CEO/War time CEO”. The removal of the unnecessary violence in the metaphor is an improvement, but the content of peacetime/wartime is actually better. It’s more specific, and more about operating with focus and efficiency. Founder mode…
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Sometimes you have to choose between being right and being effective
My latest in Quartz… My partner and I had a hellish move recently. We were lucky in that our landlords are nice, reasonable people, and unlucky in that they were quite disorganized and hadn’t done everything they needed to, like ordering furniture and thoroughly cleaning up after the last tenant. So as this played out,…
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Leadership Podcast with John Maeda!
My colleague John and I recorded a little podcast together, and you can listen to it here. We talked about listen-first leadership, being judged on performance vs potential, and how I think of a senior engineer as “making the whole team better”. There’s also a transcript available for those of you (like me!) who hate…
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Learning What Not To Do Doesn’t Teach You All That Much
Early on in my career, I worked on something that shipped without tests. And I learned something important: That’s a bad idea. To frame it positively, I learned that any tests were better than no tests. And so I went away and read things, talked to people, and experimented. And over time I’ve learned a lot…
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GHC: Leadership Workshop with Patty Azzarello
I was interested in this workshop, because I had read Azzarello’s book, Rise: How to Be Really Successful and Like Your Life. “Your job description is not a life sentence.” “You have more control than you think.” These quotes set the stage for a really helpful presentation about how we see our jobs, and how…
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Achieving the Quasi-Possible, Just About On Time
This Thursday, it will be two months since I arrived in Sydney. I came to work on a specific project, and that project came with a pretty ambitious deadline. I don’t know if anyone, including the person who thought this deadline up, really believed we would make it. But we did, just about. We as a team,…
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12 Angry Men
As part of the course I’m taking, we watched 12 Angry Men. I don’t watch many movies in general, and I’ve barely seen any black-and-white ones so it was weird. The whole movie was set in one room, and they showed the heat by having the men sweat copiously (like, wet faces, one guys shirt…
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Trust and Team Dysfunction
I’m taking a leadership course at work at the moment, and this week we spent time discussing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon). I’d recently read Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon) so it was interesting to hear what other people thought of the concepts. There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results,…
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Strengthsfinder 2.0
I’m taking a leadership course at work just now, and one of the exercises was to take the StrengthsFinder (Amazon) test. At first I took the test and thought it was a bit rubbish. I didn’t really have strong preferences for a lot of things (much of which came from me being very ambivert) and so…