Here’s an interesting take by Sheril Mathews on why people often don’t trust their managers, or find them inauthentic:

Managers don’t come across as authentic because more often than not they don’t have an intimate understanding of the day to day realities of how their teams actually get work done.

Sheril goes on to discuss some some great advice on how to show up for our teams in authentic ways (spoiler: it’s about getting our hands dirty in the trenches). But I also wanted to share this 1973 (!!!) quote from Henry Mintzberg in The Nature of Managerial Work, because it really stopped me in my tracks:

The prime occupational hazard of the manager is superficiality. Because of the open-ended nature of the job and because of the responsibility for information processing and strategy-making, the manager is induced to take on a heavy load of work, and to do much of it superficially.

Hence the job of managing does not develop reflective planners; rather it breeds adaptive information manipulators who prefer a stimulus-response milieu.

Sheril’s article—and that quote—is inspiring me to take a real hard look at my own work, and where there could be opportunities to weed out the “superficiality”.

This is a bit of an addendum that I think is valuable enough to add here. I shared the above Mintzberg quote among some friends and the discussion ended up being really interesting. Vince pointed out that as for the assertion that superficiality is an inevitable outcome of management, he prefers Russell Ackoff’s take from 6 years later. Here’s what he said in 1979:

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consists of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts … Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Pete (who I’ve been begging to start a blog, please go yell at him as well) also went the less cynical route with his comments:

As you move up the levels of a company, you move to higher levels of abstraction. Every level takes the output of the level below, and distills and summarises it, passing it up. It also takes direction from above and tries to nudge the processes below in that direction.

I think that’s the just way it is, the way it has to be. I can’t think of any examples where a different model has been applied successfully at scale.

The key to this working successfully though is to make sure that information is correctly analysed, distilled, summarised and communicated at every level.

The problem with superficiality is not abstraction. It’s dillution. If you throw away the good parts and keep the wrong parts when summarising, the system starts fraying. And you’re setting those above you up for making the wrong decisions, and thus setting up those below you for failure.

In the latest Platformer piece Meta doubles down on layoffs we see a perfect example of why stable software development teams are more effective than “agile teams” where people are seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. When leaders think that people can be moved around between projects and “initiatives” at will and without knock-on effects, they run headlong into the basics of systems thinking, as shown here by Mark Zuckerberg’s realization:

In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects. It’s tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. […] Indirect costs compound and it’s easy to underestimate them.

As a side note, this is honestly a pretty frustrating thing to read. It seems like such a basic software development concept—was there no one in Mark’s orbit that could tell him about the indirect costs of building VR headsets? And now that epiphany is costing Meta another 10,000 jobs. Ugh.

From How to Be a PM That Engineers Don’t Hate:

You see it everywhere: Engineers complaining about the product managers that they work with. Hating on PMs is kind of like complaining about your utility provider or the TSA—so universal that it’s always good for a light chuckle in the right circles. The PMs don’t know how the technology works. All they do is send emails and take credit. They’re meeting generation machines.

When I interview engineers my first question is always, “Tell me about your experience working with PMs.” I do it to calibrate what kind of PMs they are used to working with, or to put it another way, how much I should apologize for our profession before we continue…

Anyway, the linked post is less about that, and more about some things PMs can do to work more collaboratively with other teams—not just engineering. Lots of good, practical tips and examples here.

Some fairly standard advice here from Peter Yang on How to Run Meetings That Don’t Suck, but this point in particular is so important:

Try not to cancel or move 1-on-1s. If you’re a manager, it’s easy to move or cancel your 1-on-1s for other “important” meetings. This is disrespectful to your direct reports. Even if you see them everyday, nothing beats a private half-hour conversation where they can be open about real issues.

How we show up in meetings as leaders is very telling about how we view our team’s time. The most important rule is this: do not be late. I know this is hard to do in our culture of back-to-back meetings, but nothing says “I don’t respect your time” like consistently showing up 5 minutes late to meetings with no explanation. Here’s a quick tip: if you need a minute to go to the bathroom and/or get some more tea or whatever, make sure you join the meeting first and tell the person/people that you just got out of another meeting and you will be right back. Oh, and do not forget to mute when you leave…

In This will only take a minute the Raw Signal team shares some much-needed advice for leaders who feel like they never have time to think and reflect. This state of constant hypervigilance is not a sustainable lifestyle because:

On one level, you’re a human being. Regardless of your title or role, you are worthy of work that doesn’t wreck your health, or your happiness, or your ability to enjoy lunch away from your webcam. On another, if you’re a manager, you’re responsible for the work of a team of other human beings. If you don’t have the time to be thoughtful about your own work, the odds are very high that your team doesn’t either.

They go on to share some ideas for how to make this time to step back a priority, once you are “past the point where working a little bit more is going to clear your plate”.

The African Bricks 3. Mosaic artworks inspired by the culture and beauty of Africa, by Charis Tsevis.

The Cello in Soho Square. I like this description by Michael Lopp of the difference between “dabblers” and “S-tier” people (who are the absolute best at something): “There is an infinite list of exciting things to learn, but the Dabbler knows they have finite time, so they dabble. They get 80% of the juice, and they move on. Respect. S-Tier knows the last 10% of the challenge is the hardest, but it also teaches you the most.”

Physicists Say Aliens May Be Using Black Holes as Quantum Computers. This is fine. “In a recent study, a German-Georgian team of researchers proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) could use black holes as quantum computers. This makes sense from a computing standpoint and offers an explanation for the apparent lack of activity we see when we look at the cosmos.”

Honestly, it’s probably the phones. Don’t dismiss this argument just from the headline, like I almost did. There’s some solid evidence presented here. “If we’re looking for one big ‘silver bullet’ or ‘grand unified theory’ of modern teenage unhappiness, phones are probably the place to start looking.”

Papercraft Models by Rocky Bergen. “Construct the computer from your childhood or build an entire computer museum at home with these paper models, free to download and share. Print, Cut, Score, Fold and Glue.”

In an Uncertain Job Market, How Can Companies Retain Workers? The conventional wisdom that people tend to hunker down when there are layoffs around them might not be accurate: “Layoffs ‘create an environment where people worry it might happen to them next,’ said Laszlo Bock, who was Google’s SVP for people operations. Poorly handled reductions may ‘degrade trust in management as people start hearing rumors of further cuts, and that in turn raises anxiety, which causes more people to quit.’” (NYT gift article)

How the Phonograph Created the 3-Minute Pop Song. I can’t resist a good “technologies people thought would ruin everything” article, and this is another fascinating one: “Plenty of folks worried that records would destroy musical culture. John Philip figured it would demotivate anyone from learning to play an instrument themselves. Why bother, when you could just put on music by a true virtuoso? ‘When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study,’ he fretted in a 1906 article, ‘it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely.’”

The Case for Hanging Out. I love this essay. “Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit.”

Explore. I think it’s probably too late for a viable LinkedIn alternative, but this site would be a great contendor.

I’m sure every generation writes lots of articles like Freddie deBoer’s It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive. But hear me out. This is the impassioned, forceful, yet balanced Gen X take I wish I had the skill and wherewithal to write. It is a balm to the nostalgic soul in a way that somehow doesn’t feel like cringey old-person fanfic.

Here he is on the experience of visiting a record store:

When you were there you were Doing Music. Now we’re never doing anything—we’re always getting through something to get to something else to get through, using various time-saving techniques that maximize the amount of time we have to get through things while keeping our attention divided into a thousand things we then get through. When you went to a record store you were intent on music, and sometimes, you’d care enough about a particular artist that you paid for their album, real money, so that the artist got a cut that was more than the .002 cents they get per stream now.

This reminds me of the question Alan Jacobs asks: What exactly are we’re rushing towards with all our 2x listening and cliff notes skim-reading?

My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you—and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing. 

But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?

Maybe the 90s have a thing or two to teach us yet.

In You can’t stand under my umbrella the Raw Signal team makes the case for when it’s not appropriate for managers to be “sh*t umbrellas” for their teams:

When things are steady, and people know the right things to work on, teams are constrained by velocity. We know the course we’re racing, the question is just how fast we can go. In that context, it makes sense for a manager to clear every obstacle out of our way. But during times of significant change, teams are constrained by agility. It’s not that velocity doesn’t matter, it still does. But when everything has changed about the race, we need the ability to steer. A manager who tries to preserve velocity at all costs risks running us into a wall.

They go on to talk about how to Accept, Adapt, and Act in such moments of significant change.

Underwater Photographer of the Year—2023 Winners. These are so great.

Impostered. Great post from Mandy Brown about the need to reframe how we think about imposter syndrome. “I’ve started to think less about imposter syndrome (a description of a person’s experience with it) and more about being impostered (a framing that draws attention to the systems and structures that lead people to believe they are imposters). While the former framing remains useful in many contexts, the latter creates space to consider not only the symptoms but the root cause of the phenomena.” [everythingchanges.us]

What’s So Funny? Very good essay about the current state of stand-up comedy, and what makes something funny. “The audience whooping and applauding Roseanne’s ‘anti-woke’ comedy is not reacting with laughter at a previously un-acknowledged truth, but instead expressing approval for the point of view that they already knew they agreed with. This is not the same thing as laughter in response to a joke.” [biblioracle.substack.com]

Why Are You Seeing So Many Bad Digital Ads Now? “Social media advertising, once a niche art practiced by specialist agencies, is now easily available to anyone. Many of them are eschewing targeted ads — placements intended to reach specific audiences, usually at a higher cost — in favor of a cheaper spray-and-pray approach online, hoping to catch the attention of gullible or bored shoppers.” [NYT gift link]

Traffic Lights Need a Fourth Color, Study Says: Here’s Why. Yeah what could possibly go wrong. “For the dawning age of the self-driving car, transportation engineers from North Carolina State University are proposing the addition of a fourth ‘white light’ whose function would be to alert humans to simply ‘follow the car in front of them.’” [popularmechanics.com]

The people who live inside airplanes. Ok I kind of like this idea. “By the end, she had a fully functional home, with over 1,500 square feet of living space, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and even a hot tub — where the cockpit used to be. All for less than $30,000, or about $60,000 in today’s money.” [cnn.com]