This is another amazing AHP essay, this time about the critiques of Gen Z employees:

I’ve long argued that the critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable. But that sort of introspection requires, well, work.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I also wanted to highlight the recommendations for what we (Gen X, etc.) can do about this:

So how do we break this cycle? If, upon encountering or even considering the attitude, ambition, or “work ethic” of a younger generation, your impulse begins to drift towards they don’t work like we do, my hope is we consider the following:

• How have we, as a society — and how have I, as a leader — helped foster the conditions that encourage someone to work a certain way, with certain habits, or attitudes, or ambitions?
• How much of my reaction is to the fact that someone is not working exactly the way I did at that point in my life — even though my circumstances were almost certainly wildly different?
• How has our society — or our industry — tacitly agreed on an understanding of excellence that has little room for different ways of navigating the world, of making space to care for others, or collectivism just generally?
• What if working differently is also an attempt to keep people in the industry for longer — and make the industry as a whole more sustainable?
• What can I learn from the way they’re approaching work?

Robin Sloan often seems to speak the words that are in my soul, and this time he really got to me. He bought a cassette tape of the new album by the band OOF and then wrote about the experience of albums vs. playlists:

I bought the cassette tape to play in my car and I’m glad, because it prompted me to listen to the album straight through, which, if I’m being honest, I might never have done on my laptop.

What happened (and this always presages a good experience with art) was that I surrendered to the strangeness, and the strangeness started to make sense. I entered OOF’s world, rather than insisting the band fit into mine, which is, of course, the demand of the Spotify playlist.

You’ve got to give things a chance. You’ve got to let them seep into your brain. […] OOF does not seem, to me, a band made for Spotify playlists. It seems a band made for cassette tapes in the car — for the decision, snap-thunk-whir, to give them a chance, and the slow but sure surrender to the dream of their world.

To be fair, not all albums are worth it—and that’s fine. But giving every album a chance to be worth it is something I think we should all do more of.

Oh my, Justin (from my favorite newsletter platform Buttondown) nails it here:

Customers make for good historians but poor futurists, and certainly they won’t do the hardest and most important job of identifying your leverage points for you.

That was your shot. Here’s your chaser:

None of this is to say you shouldn’t talk to customers: you should! But it should be neither the first nor the last step in your process: if someone needs to talk with people to figure out what to build next, it means they have insufficient vision; if someone needs to talk with people to figure out if something is truly ready for GA it means your org has insufficient conviction and process.

This post about news feeds by Lauren Goode at Wired resonated with me a lot:

For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.

I just can’t get comfortable with algorithmic feeds. I know it’s likely a me problem and I need to get with the times, but that’s the curse of (some of) my generation, I guess. I just want to choose what I want to see online—even if it’s way more work—because I don’t to be told who I am by a social media company.

Péter Szász has some good tips in How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire. The article is about managing a team while a company is in “war time” , but many of these are just universally good practices—such as this one:

Protect the team’s focus time. The chaos and uncertainties of wartime can be incredibly distracting. Set up processes to shield the team from constant interruptions so they can have deep, creative work sessions. Remove them from low-value meetings and relieve them from monotonous administrative duties. One effective technique is to establish a rotating “firefighter” role to singlehandedly deal with any incoming requests, represent the team in meetings, and handle the necessary amount of bureaucracy, allowing the rest to stay heads-down on the critical priorities.