By far the best paragraph that I read this week came from Paul Ford: How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over […]
A document-based culture is only as good as its documents. Here are a few tips to improve your docs.
Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget: And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a […]
Greek mythology teaches a great lesson on focus and the perils of distraction
Working together across multiple teams is hard. Figuring our what people are incentivized to achieve and how they can influence that outcome is a great shortcut to work better together.
Earlier this year, Adam Grant hit the Zeitgeist with the word “languishing” (There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing). The word describes the feeling of being joyless and aimless that most of have been experiencing over the past 18 months. I remember receiving links to the article from all over the world – typically with all caps and exclamation marks (“THAT!!!”, “ME!”, “Must read!”). I’m glad that he followed his discovery […]
The Wall Street Journal recently had a story on Netflix' corporate culture. It reads similar to the 2015 New York Times piece on Amazon's culture or going way back to the late 1980ies piece on Microsoft's culture. There are probably a lot of pieces about other high performing companies that hit a similar note: high performance comes at the expense of a humane culture. I'm not sure whether I agree with that. An anecdote between Steve […]
Webstock turned ten last week. It is a conference that celebrates the web and its makers – the creativity, the magic, the craft and everything in between. Although Webstock is hosted in Wellington, they have an excellent reputation and attract great speakers from all over the world. It has been on my radar for a couple of years and this year I finally managed to go to Wellington. It was an amazing experience, an emotionally exhausting […]