-
Join 500 other subscribers
Top Posts
- Amazon Product Management, Working Backwards
- To solve real business problems, know how their kids are doing.
- Recommended Reading: The Log, what every software engineer should know
- Do the right thing, Wait to get fired
- About
- Getting Actionable Manager Feedback
- "Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves" by Carol A. Walker
- Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact
-
Recent Posts
- Naming things clearly
- Inconvenient Truths about Operating Mechanisms
- Successful Second Products are Rare
- How Can I Help?
- Gmail wasn’t really a 20%-time project
- Criteria for continued funding of new products
- Seeds, Pods and Big Bets
- Technical Risk vs Market Risk, Part II
- Technical Risk vs Market Risk, Part I
- Inside Amazon.com, what’s the culture really like these days?
Archives
- June 2019
- April 2019
- May 2018
- January 2018
- December 2016
- October 2015
- August 2015
- June 2015
- April 2015
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
Brendan on the web
Tag Archives: management
The Automattic Creed
I’m a sucker for a good creed. Check out Automattic’s: I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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, … Continue reading
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, … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
“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, … Continue reading
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), … Continue reading
Google’s Project Oxygen
Today slate had an excellent article on Google’s management: The Happiness Machine: How Google became such a great place to work. One thing they mention is Project Oxygen, a data-analytics based approach to examining the management factors that improve performance. … Continue reading
New Year Resolution: One Painful Task Each Day
I’m not usually one for New Year Resolutions – mostly because I’m happy to try out new resolutions (and build new habits) any time of the year. But the timing for my lastest resolution happens to be now, so I’m … Continue reading
Achieving Your Way to Mediocrity
(Photo: PublicDomainPictures) I’ve been thinking about goal setting recently. Bazaarvoice is in the process of rolling out a goal process – a variation of Management By Objectives (MBO) and Objectives and Key Results (OKR). One dilemma that always seems to … Continue reading
Brendan Sterne 