Brendan's Reflections

  • 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 business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to…

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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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  • 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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  • 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.  As part of the project they ranked the factors (behaviors): Lots of good stuff in…

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  • 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 calling this my new years resolution: To accomplish one painful task each day. What is…

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  • 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 come up in these systems is whether the goals should be achievable or not.  SMART…

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