We have a joke amongst my college friends. After a rough comment, night, weekend, or just overall performance you’d like to have back we’ll say “I need a rebrand”. Rebrands are all the rage these days. Whether it’s Facebook’s transition to Meta, Microsoft branding itself a metaverse company, the explosion of web3 vocabulary, or even Adam Neumann (!) reappearing this week to announce WeWork’s rapid rise “went to my head” it is undoubtedly rebrand season.
I met up with a bunch of old coworkers last night for drinks. Which admittedly is making it hard to churn out these words. So I’m going to keep it brief. It feels good to catch up with the people you’ve fought battles with in those early messy startup days. Recounting funny stories and hearing […]
There’s nothing like that first day of school feeling. Or you know, as an adult, the first day of a new job. New surroundings, new people you’re excited to work with, and new problems to solve. It’s pretty easy to be enthusiastic and hit the ground running with all that newness. You make all sorts of promises to yourself about your preparation and new ideas!
It is the trials, tribulations, and just plain stupid mistakes we go through as managers that create indelible lessons in leadership. The “how could I possibly be that dumb” moments we all share. Publicly and privately. To set the stage, I bring you two tweetstorms from Ali Partovi who had startup twitter madly liking and retweeting these last couple weeks with a couple painful career memories:
A healthy employee – manager relationship wants a thousand things, a sick employee – manager relationship only wants one. Or so the saying approximately goes. In conversations with many of you over these past few weeks it’s clear that we learn from our all our managers, both good and bad.
Dark clouds have rolled back in over Menlo Park and Facebook is in the eye of the storm of the tech universe yet again. Frances Haugen, a former Product Manager who worked for the company for ~2 years, had also been working alongside the WSJ & SEC to leak thousands of pages of internal documents dubbed The Facebook Files. She went public with her identity and complaints Sunday night on 60 Minutes. And then, as further proof of the simulation we live in, Facebook’s family of apps disappeared from the Internet Tuesday morning.
Some weeks you need to wind back the clock to business school academics from the 1980’s in order to understand startup challenges of the present. Bear with me, we’re going to land this plane! Famed Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter is well known for his book Competitive Strategy and the “Five Forces” analysis. His writing is just as relevant today in analyzing modern business strategy & competition across industries. Oft-cited, stolen, repurposed, and even thrown into “original” blog posts…for decades now!
It feels like we are in the midst of an interesting time of this Internet super cycle. Some people are beginning to lose their heads. Whether it’s the NFTs, SPACs, BTC, ETH, or FAANGs there are $$$s everywhere. And at time likes these the most important leadership trait might just be steadiness. Keeping your head while all others are losing theirs. Sound familiar?
Ah, exceptions. Like tiny ripples on a pond that radiate outward they’ll affect you and your organization in different ways. One important part of running a team is understanding when to maintain the status quo (precedent) and when to deviate (make an exception).
How do you know if someone is telling you the truth? How do you know if the person sitting across from you in a meeting or an interview or whatever is a superhero or a super villain? I know, kind of a strange way to start here but really think about it. Before we begin please click on this Twitter thread below from Jon Wu. Read it all the way to the end and then come back: