Spectrums of Rule: Benevolence or Tyranny
You accept a big new role at a fast growing company in desperate need of your expertise. For a brief moment you’ll be given the opportunity to redefine yourself.
Tag: management
10 Trends That Remain Intact Post Election
In the midst of this ongoing presidential election, now stretching into the third day of vote counting, there is a lot of uncertainty about the political future of this country at the executive level. Change is in the air, it’s anxiety inducing, and the unknowns stretch from coast to coast. For distraction sake, let’s play […]
Politics at Work – Election Season
Corporations and politics have two very interesting common characteristics. They are both systems that help organize real people within business and government. And they are both completely imaginary systems made up in our collective minds. As companies prepare for the most charged election in a generation the question most leaders are asking of themselves and […]
Communication and Coinbase
Peter Drucker, famed management consultant and apparent inventor of the moniker knowledge worker, once said “the most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said”. With that backdrop, Coinbase’s Founder & CEO Brian Armstrong lit a fire in the startup community after publishing a post about narrowing the focus of the company’s […]
Leverage: Esteem as a Fulcrum
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” said Archimedes of Ancient Greece. Maybe. A Greek titan of knowledge may have been taken out of context through centuries of telephone & translations. Not to mention the reliability of records. Nevertheless, the idea that Archimedes might […]
Personal Investing: Time & Resources
When you think about your own investing what do you picture? You might imagine a highway. Driving in a car down the road. There are a lot of things you’ve read about these roads and the environment on the highway. You’ve heard about the different vehicles on the road. The road conditions change, frequently. There’s […]
Management Investing: Spend Once, Earn Twice
Spending time with engineers will teach you a lot about how to better understand the concept of time and its value. In technical parlance, projects are either “cheap” or “expensive”. Meetings with a lot of engineers? Expensive. Meetings in general? Probably expensive too.
Fibbing or Fraud: Where’s the Line?
What is a lie? “A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In the technology industry, statements are derived from the capabilities of living, changing products. The promises that these products […]
2021 Planning: Bits and Pieces
Last week we talked about motivating people behind the vision of wanting to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Which is all well and good. Very important stuff. It’s got to be done to get the people excited. Yet, the real work has just begun. Big bold journeys don’t just take off themselves. You’ve […]
Planning in the Dark. You Can’t Start a Fire Without a Spark
Planning is an exercise often done in the dark with incomplete information. Today, in the Bay Area, all planning that was done was literally done in the dark. The sun never came out on September 9th, 2020. A socially distant summer has passed and it appears daylight is missing too as wildfires rage around us. […]