Brendan's Reflections

  • Georgia Tech Offers Credentialing for Online MOOC CS Masters

    I’ve seen lots of press about the Udacity + Georgia Tech = Credentialed Online CS Masters announcement.  The thing that excites me is that we now have a top-10 computer science university leveraging their reputation to get into credentialing. As I’ve said before, online learning is the easy part, getting recognized (credentialed) is the missing piece.…

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  • Fooled By Randomness

    “I think the market is going to go up today, but I’m betting against it.” You might think that statement is a little contradictory, but as Nassim Taleb explains, in Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, that it is perfectly reasonable to expect that on most days the…

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  • What Great Managers Do

    There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. So says Marcus Buckingham in the fifth article in Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People. Three paragraphs in and I was immediately struck by the parallels…

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  • On Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”

    You can’t win talking about gender.  Sheryl Sandberg acknowledges as much in “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.”   So I give her credit for stirring up this hornet’s nest knowingly. Before the publication of this book, I knew very little about Ms Sandberg.  I knew she was very senior at Facebook…

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  • Avoiding Innovation Debt

    Peter Bell wrote an interesting blog entry on Avoiding Innovation Debt.  What he is calling Innovation Debt is the stagnation that follows long periods of failing to invest in the technical skills of engineers. Innovation debt is the cost that companies incur when they don’t invest in their developers. It happens when the team is…

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  • Reading it Again, Backwards, With a Highlighter

    I’m working with my team to implement lean product development practices (see Eric Ries, Marty Cagan, Steve Blank).  So I’ve proposed that we do some reading homework assignments, then gather to discuss.  First up: The Lean Startup. [Source: tutorialchip.com] Backwards This is my second reading the book.  Normally I’m not a fan of re-reading a book…

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  • The Virtues of Giving Your Best to B- Environments

    A friend sent me a link to a blog post by David Heinemeier Hansson titled B- Environments Merit B- Effort, and asked me what I thought. The Advice I agree wholeheartedly with this: A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in…

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  • Please, speak to me like I’m stupid

    I feel like I’m getting dementia.  My colleagues communicate with me, in meetings, in emailed reports, in presentations, and I don’t know what they’re talking about – again. [Source: morethandodgeball.com] Part of the problem is that I’m in London, and they’re in Austin (or New York or San Francisco).  It’s morning for them, and evening for…

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  • “Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves” by Carol A. Walker

    Not many of the HBR articles speak so clearly to the challenges I experienced as a new manager (and still experience) as this one. (photo: community-manager by Enrique Martinez Bermej In the fourth entry in HBR’s Must Reads on Managing People, “Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves”, Carol A. Walker identifies several areas likely to be…

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  • A review of “The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome” by Jean-Francois Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux

    Sometimes, it’s the manager’s fault.  That’s the core idea in the third article in the volume “On Managing People” in Harvard Business Review’s collection of Must Reads. This 1998 article (followed up in a book with the same title in 2002), describes “a dynamic in which employees perceived to be mediocre or weak performers live down…

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