In Be a thermostat, not a thermometer Lara Hogan provides a helpful analogy for leaders on what to do when meetings go off the rails…
Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use “be the thermostat, not the thermometer” for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature.
Elena Verna has a great summary of leading metrics for B2B SaaS companies, including some really useful benchmarks. Also a good reminder that revenue is a lagging metric:
Many leaders obsess over revenue. And rightfully so, because revenue is the outcome of any business. But revenue is a lousy metric to goal the team against because it assesses past performance instead of predicting the future.
If you want to dig a little deeper on the best metrics to choose for SaaS companies, here are a few more resources:
No image posts today, but it’s a blockbuster edition of the link roundup this week! I hope you find something interesting in here…
LinkedIn remains a complete mystery to me.
“It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages for 12 LinkedIn posts for anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000.
It’s worth reading this fascinating interview with a curious mind. Especially if you, like me, are “of a certain age” and feel like you just don’t get it…
Influencers are neither ‘a flash in the pan’ nor ‘a bubble about to burst,’ but indicators of a paradigm shift in the way we think about each other and ourselves.
This is a lovely, rich essay on the difference between “destination” and “place” when we travel, how digital nomadism displaces locals, the pursuit of a “decent meal” abroad, and more.
Continued economic dependence upon tourism leads inevitably to brain drain, when a labor force no longer wishes to work only service jobs. What does ‘local’ as an experience mean when it’s not in service to those who are literally local?
This short essay from Amanda Knox packs a huge punch and really got to me. All we have is now…
No matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.
There is just so much wrong with the music streaming industry.
Artists aren’t allowed to see the deals that set their streaming payment rates; indie labels aren’t allowed to see the deals distributors cut with labels on their behalf . And in many cases, artists aren’t even allowed to compare notes and talk about their own contracts.
I have no pithy comment for this one.
“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?'” Mr. Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”
A top-to-bottom excellent post about Twitter from Ed Zitron. Read the whole thing!
Twitter can create an incredible sense of both intellectual invincibility and vulnerability that can drive someone quite mad.
This is an insightful post on the leader qualities that really build trust. In short, it’s about showing that you really, truly care.
Studies indicate that conveying benevolence is much more likely to earn you trust than conveying how competent you are. […] That’s why all things being equal, a person who is charismatic and kind will gain more trust than a person who is seen has having good ability.
I agree with this take from Clive. It’s like we’ve learned nothing from social media.
The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms.
This is a wonderful essay about the things that ensure happy and enduring families.
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
At Postmark we’ve long been fans of the “Entrepreneurial Operating System” (EOS) as presented in the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. We also love the “W Framework” as outlined in the article The Secret to a Great Planning Process—Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite by Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth. Both resources are excellent and highly recommended for the thesis and theory behind each of these frameworks.
In this post I’d like to describe how we combined these methods to set goals and run our business and product delivery process. I’ll start with a short summary of each method, and then go into specifics on how we used them together to ensure our teams are aligned on the same goals and have all the context they need to work autonomously on projects.
I promise I’m not here to start an argument about what is the best way to set goals. Instead, I hope this could be useful to folks who have tried a bunch of different frameworks—including OKRs—and found that nothing quite worked for them. Maybe this is a good alternative to try…
I enjoyed Bill Gates’s post The Age of AI has begun, right until he got to this bit:
When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.
The idea that increased productivity gives people more time to do other things that are more useful and fulfilling is a thoroughly-debunked theory. First, there’s the question of what we even mean by “productivity”, especially in the context of the Productivity Paradox:
The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the peculiar observation made in business process analysis that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up.
But even if we can get to a point where we agree on how to define the word, we have known for a long time that the only thing that increased productivity does is create more work:
The usual first response to encountering the Productivity Paradox is disbelief: “If I have to write a few emails so that I don’t have to use a carrier pigeon, sign me up!”
But in a bureaucracy, the story of those few emails usually doesn’t end there. So, you send your few emails, and then you soon get email replies and comments. Now, you have to write more emails in reply to those emails, which are then sent up the hierarchy and to a chain of full-time reviewers, who each make a comment to show that they are useful.
So when we get more productive the time we “save” on one type of task just gets filled with a different, not necessarily more valuable task. But what about “at home”, you ask? Nope. We have also known for a very long time that instead of giving us more time for hobbies and hanging out, technology is killing leisure time:
The very tools that were supposed to liberate us have bound us to our work (and schools) in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Almost all of us have less leisure time than ever. We work harder, take fewer vacations for shorter periods of time, report more stress than almost any other demographic group and find the boundaries between work and play increasingly blurred. Computing and communications technologies are destroying the idea of privacy and leisure.
So anyway, Bill Gates wrote a pretty insightful take on AI, in my opinion. But the idea that generative AI will free up our time to do more valuable and fun things is not backed up by history at all. Or to put it slightly differently:
This is such a great post by Will Larson about onboarding executives into a new role. His recommendations for topics to cover in the first two weeks are especially good. Like this:
Where can the new executive find real data to inform themselves, rather than relying on existing narratives? The best executives will listen to you, but won’t fully believe anything until they’re able to find data to substantiate your perspective. That’s not because they don’t trust you, but because any seasoned executive has been burned by trusting someone who fervently believed something that ultimately wasn’t true.”
And this:
Who do they need to spend time with to understand the current state and the company’s implicit power structure? Especially the longest tenured employees who uniquely hold parts of the business in their heads, and individuals who have significant influence over the executive team that wouldn’t be obvious from the reporting hierarchy.
Turns out there’s a Donella Meadows quote for everything:
Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.
In What we’ve learned from our users about designing for accessibility Andrew Gosine describes how their team lived out one of Slack’s primary design principles, which is to design with users, not just for them:
In another proposed update, we tried to get clever about where we placed a user’s focus when they opened a thread. If there was an unread message, we’d drop them into that first message in the thread. If there were no unread messages, we’d move focus to the message input. We believed this would increase efficiency for screen-reader users. Our feedback group reacted strongly to this. We’d unintentionally deteriorated the reliability of knowing exactly where you would be when you open a thread, and, as a result, we broke the way-finding our users relied on in Slack. Thanks to our group, we reverted that change.
This is a great read with lots of examples from the project.
The Beauty of Earth From Orbit.
Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow. This is fine. “If you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.”
One hundred drones now used across IKEA retail for stock inventory. “One hundred busy drones are now at work during non-operational hours to improve stock accuracy and secure availability of products for online or physical retailing. This solution supports a more ergonomic workplace for IKEA co-workers as they no longer need to manually confirm each pallet.”
Is Blockbuster video about to make a comeback? I didn’t realize how many chances Blockbuster had to not die. “In 1997, Warner Bros approached Blockbuster with an exclusive DVD rental deal that would have split revenue 60-40 in favour of the studio. Blockbuster rejected it, and the studio retaliated by dropping its DVD retail prices to undermine the rental industry. And then in 2000, Blockbuster made two even more fatal decisions. First, Blockbuster turned down the opportunity to purchase the then-fledgling Netflix. Second, it chose instead to partner with Enron. Within a year, Enron filed for bankruptcy. Within five years, Netflix was shipping out a million DVDs every day. Suddenly, Blockbuster was yesterday’s news.”
Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”
Swimming outside the lanes. Tracy Durnell talks about leaving her day job and going out on her own. “People complain that no one wants to work anymore. And it’s true to an extent: no one wants to work in a job where they are underpaid, unfairly treated, unappreciated, and constrained. I like my work, but so far dislike jobs.”
Shiny Happy People, Being Chased By Monsters. Are we in the midst of a vibe shift back to the days of whimsy? “FreakyLinks may have been on my mind lately because I think we’re in another moment of cultural shift from seriousness to whimsy; if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why Everything Everywhere All At Once so thoroughly kicked the ass of that movie about the mean conductor lady at the Oscars. We’re at a similar moment to where we were in the early 2000s — where people are shrieking ‘I want to be happy!’ and ‘I’m tired of thinking! Give me some baggy orange leather pants instead!’”
Songs are what we carry, even when we have nothing else. On the B-Sides I talk about the latest U2 album a little bit. “It’s the sound of a band that has been together for close to 50 years starting to wind things down the only way they know how: they sing the songs they carry, even when they don’t have a whole lot left.”