December 2012
21 posts
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Peter Thiel’s Unorthodox Management Philosophy of...
“What are your top five priorities for this week?” “What are the top three objectives and key results you’re using to measure how you’re doing for the quarter?”
These are questions that get thrown around by managers at work to help their teams prioritize and focus on achieving the most important accomplishments.
In Peter Thiel’s view, this doesn’t go far enough. As the founder of PayPal, Thiel...
November 2012
22 posts
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Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for...
The modern workplace’s vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. The office setup for a meet-cute of ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren’t flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting.
Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management far from that...
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10 Socially Conscious Startups on How They Find...
What’s the secret to happiness at work? Recent studies show that it’s not how much money you make, but how much progress.
We’ve written before about the progress principle, an idea developed by Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, who found that the greatest indicator of happiness and motivation at work is incremental progress toward a meaningful goal.
...
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“‘The longer you work, the less efficient you are,’ said Bob Kustka,...”
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Lisa Belkin explores how we are both working harder and wasting more time. Whether you consider it wasting time, or productive “jell time”, she concludes that it’s the end result that matters.
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The noted quote by Jack London is actually, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Stop waiting. Play offense. Go do stuff!
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Getting in the Writing Place Every Day
By now, participants of NaNoWriMo are more than halfway through writing 50,000 words. That’s about 1,667 words a day. Not necessarily that many good words. But the point of it is to get you to start, so that by the end of November, there’s a novel. A whole novel!
I’ve never been able to do NaNoWriMo. The thought of all those words the first day — 1,667 probably pretty stinky...
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The Sprawling Guide to Content Marketing that Made...
We’ve experienced modest success with our content, to the point where people ask me for tips on content marketing. We went from $0 to generating $10,000 in revenue almost purely with content marketing. With what I’ve learned along the way, I’ve boiled how I think about content marketing down to one key approach.
Think distribution first.
What’s true for your product is...
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Delusions of Bosslessness
This guest article is from Caleb Vognsen, a builder, gamer, and thinker. For more on Caleb, read to the bottom.
Bossless is bunk.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this “Bosslessness,” the latest pre-existing corporate substructure The Internet has now decided is trending. Perhaps you’ve heard it mostly involves de-titling everyone, then allowing intra-office relative strengths to...
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“As the Romans are supposed to have said: solvitas perambulum - ‘solve it while...”
– Harry Brennan, who found that a good walk turned on his mind’s light bulb when it came to his game development project:
You never know what you can come up with - and it may even help you avoid some deep technical problems altogether and save large amounts of time, simply by allowing you to...
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The Manager's Oath
“First, do no harm”—it’s a fundamental principle of medical ethics and constant reminder to every medical professional that intervention carries risks just as inaction does. In Latin, it’s Primum non nocere:
Another way to state it is that, “given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than...
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“Culture has become the defining issue that will distinguish the most successful...”
– — Ginny Rometty, CEO of IBM, who also notes that company culture has to be organic and come “from the bottom up.”
Check out our photo safari of 10 awesome startups and their defining work culture.
Shoplocket’s tight-knit, ping-pong culture
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The Awkward Leader
Being a manager is difficult because it feels unnatural. Your job isn’t actually to get work done. You’re doing your job as a manager when what you’re doing doesn’t resemble work at all.
To Andy Grove, legendary CEO of Intel, a manager’s fundamental work of information gathering can be among the most unnatural and that awkwardness is a necessary part of being a...
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Ah, perhaps the secret to not procrastinating is … saving it for later!
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[A]fter a year of practice in my parents garage I came to suck a lot less, and by the time I gave up the instrument I had risen to the ranks of the “Merely OK.” But I didn’t feel “Merely OK.” I felt like a king, because I knew from whence I came. I knew that great distance (and it is great) between “Utter Suckage” and “Merely OK.”
—...
