I read about Zach Braff and His All-Star Benefit Concert for the 20th Anniversary of ‘Garden State’, and it reminded me how much I loved the movie despite all the hate it gets.

“Back in this era, the Virgin Megastore was around the corner from a movie theater in [New York City’s] Union Square,” Braff recalls in a phone interview. “And so many people were going directly from the movie theater to the Virgin Megastore to buy the soundtrack that Virgin had to put a sign in the CD slot that said, ‘We are out of the Garden State soundtrack. Please stop asking.’ The thing just caught fire.”

The Shins’ frontman, James Mercer, credits the soundtrack with transforming his career. “We have a lot of young people in our audience still, and I think it’s probably because of Garden State,” he tells Rolling Stone.

I always think of Spoon’s song Outlier as the hate example that cuts the deepest:

And I remember when you walked out of Garden State ‘Cause you had taste, you had taste You had no time to waste

Rude.

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?

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.

This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:

Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager.

The article goes on to talk about the well-known Peter Principle, which states that “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent”:

One of the core mechanisms behind the Peter Principle is the gap between the skills needed in junior technical roles and those newly and additionally required in senior and managerial positions. To improve the promotion system, especially for significant promotions for team leader or line manager roles, it’s essential to consider a person’s past performance or technical expertise and leadership potential, such as collaboration experience or services to the team. Organizations can counteract the Peter Principle through comprehensive training programs that equip employees with necessary competencies, such as people management skills, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence before promoting them to managerial roles.

It’s mind-boggling how often organizations promote individual contributors into manager roles without any training at all. This is a major contributing factor to the Director problem so many orgs are battling with right now:

Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer. And in most organizations, that layer is a mess right now.

I love this sentiment from Austin Kleon:

I am big on being a “curious elder”—and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.

I’ll go ahead and keep sharing the things I like, and I hope everyone else does too.

I loved the story of the honking Waymos when it came out, and I’m glad it got the classic “but what does it all mean!?” treatment from The Atlantic:

Watching the Waymos circle the lot under the cover of darkness—and occasionally getting stuck in an endless loop—scratches a childish itch, akin to the fantasy of watching one’s toys come alive at night. In one video, the cars, bathed in taillight red and trying to exit, give off an aggressive vibe. In others, they seem clumsy. What do robots do when we can’t see them? Tung’s webcam answers the question. The stream makes it easy to spin up fictionalized, anthropomorphized yarns about the cars, because it feels like we’ve caught them in a private moment.

This whole story reminds me of scene from I, Robot where Will Smith’s character discovers a bunch of decommissioned robots in a junkyard just… standing around doing nothing. Well, until they don’t… But no spoilers.

I am a big believer in “moving at the speed of trust” with teams. You cannot shortcut the work to build strong relationships—and I’m afraid there is no roadmap or deadline for that. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it takes longer. But don’t skip this work. Move at the speed of trust.

Ben Kuhn shares some good tips around this in Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly. I particularly like these two:

• Overcommunicate status. This helps in two ways: first, it gives stakeholders more confidence that if something goes off the rails they’ll know quickly. And second, it gives them more data and helps them build a higher-fidelity model of how you operate.
• Proactively own up when something isn’t going well. Arguably a special case of overcommunicating, but one that’s especially important to get right: if you can be relied on to ask for help when you need it, it’s a lot less risky for people to “try you out” on stuff at the edge of what they trust you on.

And speaking of communication… Also see Arne Kittler’s Part 4: Clear Communication, part of a series on “Clarity for Product Managers”:

Lengthy texts dilute your message or even discourage your counterparts to deal with them in the first place. Focus on the main points you want to make and provide the context that’s necessary to understand them as quickly as possible. When asking for information or a decision, be clear about what’s unclear.

Lorin Hochstein shares a characteristically solid systems-thinking take in CrowdStrike: how did we get here?:

Systems reach the current state that they’re in because, in the past, people within the system made rational decisions based on the information they had at the time, and the constraints that they were operating under. The only way to understand how incidents happen is to try and reconstruct the path that the system took to get here, and that means trying to as best as you can to recreate the context that people were operating under when they made those decisions.

The “no root cause” concept is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’m working on a particularly complex project at work. Somehow we constantly forget that things usually are the way they are not because of a single “mistake”, but because of a the culmination of a bunch of legitimate reasons.

Systems get the way they are because of decisions made in good faith based on the data available at the time. And the worst thing you can do as a new person coming in to improve things is to hunt for a single “root cause” to fix. That’s just not how software (or people!) work. So take the time to understand Chesterson’s fence. Go ahead and draw boxes and arrows until no one disagrees any more about how the system works. And then figure out which parts can be improved, and in which order.

PS. Also see How Complex Systems Fail:

Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessarily insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident. Thus, no isolation of the ‘root cause’ of an accident is possible. The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.