August 2012
23 posts
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Reconsidering the Startup Open Floor Plan Office
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s plans for a new campus, a 420,000 square foot single-story warehouse made to look like “a hill in nature,” one giant room fitting thousands of people. He described their aspiration as wanting to build “the perfect engineering space.”
I admit that Zuck’s statement caught me off guard because I dislike the...
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“In the workplace, we rarely share what’s going on beneath the surface. At...”
– Tony Schwartz, in an HBR blog post, Seeing Through Your Blind Spots, talks about how acknowledging and understanding our emotions in the workplace are important to how well we work.
Paying attention to feelings, of others and of ourselves, and improving our communication regarding these emotions...
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Cheers to mistakes! Here’s the full quote about making mistakes from the excellent Neil Gaiman’s blog, totally worth reading before you get back to doing:
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more...
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NEWS FLASH: Everybody does not hate Mondays!
A recent Gallup poll found that workers who are engaged feel almost as good on the weekdays as they do on the weekends! Plus, learning and interestingness peaks for these happy, engaged workers during the workweek. In turn, they are more likely to be productive.
The bad news? Only 30% of U.S. workers were engaged in the first part of 2012.
How do...
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Have a lovely weekend folks!
And here’s a round-up of the best stuff we’ve shared on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook:
17 women startup leaders name their role models.
The significance of company culture.
What do successful people do the first hour of their day?
Spend more time in the bathroom.
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“You also have to have perseverance – and maybe that’s the hardest thing, to...”
– Maira Kalman talks to 99u about work and overcoming the challenges of the creative process. Her daily routine expressly involves avoiding work: “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Kalman’s wisdom is endless.
from Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty
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The Freedom Experiment lists 55 ways to take care of yourself when the going gets busy. There are many gems but we especially liked this one about remembering to schedule me-time and honoring it:
To make your life less chaotic, it’s a good practice to keep a planner. Make sure you write down every single appointment, to save yourself from unwanted surprises and missed meetings. Just remember...
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“We forget that mastery is something human beings seek because we’re human...”
– Daniel Pink, writing for the Washington Post, argues that we need more renewable motivation. How do we create this? Engage your employees, not by managing them but granting them autonomy.
We’re not mice on treadmills with little carrots being dangled in front of us all the time. Sometimes we...
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17 Women Startup Leaders Name Their Modern Day...
A lot has been said about the scarcity of women leaders in the tech startup world. As the lone woman in a tech startup company, it’s a subject that fascinates me both personally and professionally.
Working with iDoneThis, I have long noticed that there are vastly more men than women in the startup world. Often, the individuals who can exert great influence over your startup’s future are men....
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“I learned that sharks sleep parts of their brain, like rolling blackouts; they...”
– Louis C.K., on how he manages his crazy busy life, in an interview with the A.V. Club. Shark-y brain sleep it is!
photo: Wes Bryant
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Here’s to moving forward day by day!
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Teresa Norton writes at HBR about how a simple exercise called the story spine can help you get unstuck and make change while “living truthfully” at work.
The story spine is a narrative tool created by playwright, improviser, and theater educator Kenn Adams used to craft well-structured stories. As Norton’s post shows, the story spine can be used as a personal narrative tool to...
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“[T]he really important thing about being alive is how you relate to other people...”
– Some lovely words from Andrew O’Hehir’s review of the Korean documentary, Planet of Snail.
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Visit Your Musers
It’s hard to build great technology products without a muser. The muser not only adds emotional motivation to the developer’s work ethic; she serves a cognitive function of focusing his mind on the one thing that truly matters: what using the thing is like. Without her, projects disintegrate into scattered bundles of individual features, appealing to the intellect but not the heart.
- Jakob...
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