M-A-O-L

Breaking through:

Building your brand: If you are in the start-up world, either as an employee, founder, investor or aspiring to do any of the three, it is important to thoughtfully build your online and offline identity. The beauty is that these efforts are valuable for anything you might want to do, and, in fact, is great practice for what you’ll do when you land your dream role. Develop a thesis and take a stand. How can you add value to the community discussion? Start writing, but with a purpose. It forces clarity of thought, opens up your mind and lets people get to know you better. Create opportunities for speaking in public and sharing your ideas with others. This will help bridge the online/offline gap and build a more personal identity, as well as providing a forum for feedback and debate instead of living inside your head.

Well said, and equally important also in corporate land; the laws of success are similar.

How Dave Goldberg of SurveyMonkey Built a Billion-Dollar Business and Still Gets Home By 5:30 PM:

Meetings. Who Needs ‘Em? Partly in reaction to his experience at Yahoo!, Goldberg only attends “two and a half” regular scheduled meetings every week. Goldberg said, “I’m probably more anti-meeting than most people in my job. It’s just in my nature.

Talking about corporate culture and setting priorities.

Management Myth 15: I Need People to Work Overtime:

When a manager wants people to work overtime, to feel invested in an organization, what’s the real issue behind the words? It might be that the manager wants people to have the same sense of investment in the organization as the manager does. In that case, it’s useful to ask, am I creating an environment where people feel autonomous? Do they have purpose? Are they mastering their craft?

It might not be that at all. It could be an issue of project portfolio management, where people are spread so thinly around so many projects that they don’t have time for any single project. If so, see if your manager is caught up in the myth of 100 percent utilization.

Sometimes, managers think they can measure people by the time they spend at work. Wanting people to work overtime is related to that myth. When you force people to timebox their work to just the workday, they start making choices about the work they do and don’t do. They stop doing time-wasting work. They start doing useful work, and they start collaborating. But, only if you stop interfering.

A new angle to the old story.

The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational:

The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn’t mean our brains don’t have major limitations.

Some more to think about… or just a good reference of the cognitive biases anyway.

The Project Saboteur’s Handbook:

There are many ways to sabotage a project. Recognizing them is the first crucial step to counter them. In this brief handbook I will present a number of ways of sabotage that I have encountered in various projects. This post is the saboteur’s handbook.

Tongue in cheek…

Stables and Volatiles:

I believe a healthy company that wants to continue to grow and invent needs to equally invest in both their Stables and their Volatiles.

Your Stables are there to remind you about reality and to define process whereby large groups of people can be coordinated to actually get work done. Your Stables bring predictability, repeatability, credibility to your execution, and you need to build a world where they can thrive.

Your Volatiles are there to remind you that nothing lasts, and that the world is full of Volatiles who consider it their mission in life to replace the inefficient, boring, and uninspired. You can’t actually build them a world because they’ll think you’re up to something Stable, so you need to create a corner of the building where they can disrupt.

Excellent tale, I see this fight at work all the time.

The Internet’s Best Terrible Person Goes to Jail: Can a Reviled Master Troll Become a Geek Hero?:

On a gray Wednesday morning in October, the car headed west on the Lincoln Highway Bridge hit 100 miles per hour and I started to worry it might hurtle off into the tangle of rusted-out warehouses and smoke stacks that pass for a landscape in northeastern New Jersey.

Added via Pocket.

“Gun” “Control”:

Please note that this is a post about technology, not politics. The tech industry cheerleads the displacement and reconfiguration of huge institutions like the music industry and telecoms.

Added via Pocket.

Following up on A Players – if you do happen to have some of them, here’s how to treat them: What Programmers Want. And why it’s all going to be better soon anyway: The end of management.

A series of articles about A players in IT. I guess in Enterprise IT, we can be glad if we see B players at least from remote 😉

We all talk about recruiting “A Players,” but that’s not how the Valley actually works.

Why Zuckerberg was Right.

The Coming Collapse of Average.