dexterbt1/management-leadership.md

## management-leadership.md

      
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    Personal Principles and Process

On Culture and Environment


Some good values to promulgate: truth, caring for one another, radical candor, working hard, shipping.
A corporate culture is indispensable. “Someone adhering to the values of of the corporate culture—an intelligent corporate citizen—will behave consistently under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations that are sometimes used to get the same result.” ~ High Output Management
"Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier." ~ Creativity, Inc.
Set a clear vision for the team. (From Google's Project Oxygen)
Building a culture of continuous shipping can create a flywheel effect (from Good to Great). You can promote this by demoing new work frequently. (Peopleware)
Give programmers a quiet, distraction-free environment to work in. According to research by PdK consulting, this can increase the chance of zero-defect programming work by one-third.
"Give people slightly more trust, freedom and authority than you are comfortable giving. If you are not nervous, you haven’t given them enough." ~ Work Rules
Create an idea meritocracy (Principles by Ray Dalio). Be radically transparent with information and ideas, and let the best ideas rise to the top.
“…progress toward more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The thoughtful manager doesn’t want to stop the trend, but may nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder. Once the idea is stated so baldly, it’s simple enough to compile a list of ways to implement this policy: pilot projects; war games; brainstorming; provocative training experiences; training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats” ~ Peopleware
Winners act like winners before they are (from The Score Takes Care of Itself). Respect the "jersey," whatever that is in your company.
It takes about 7 good interactions to counteract one bad interaction.
“It’s supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn’t then there’s nothing else worth concentrating on. Choose your terrain carefully, assemble your facts, and speak up.” ~ Peopleware

On Decisions


When a decision is required, schedule a longer debate meeting with the whole team, where people keep an open mind and debate both sides together, and then schedule a shorter decision meeting where a decision is made. (Radical Candor).
Use believability-weighted decision making (à la Ray Dalio), or, weigh input from team members based on how “believable” they are, based on their past successes.
In the end, the manager should make the decision, especially if there isn’t consensus. (High Output Management)
This doesn't mean people shouldn't be able to make their own decisions on the ground level. "The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line." ~ Creativity, Inc.
“Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization." ~ High Output Management. If you are too centralized and the manager makes all the decisions, you will lose out on the creativity and genius of the individual contributors. If you are too decentralized, everyone is an island, and you don't utilize the company's or manager's experience, and mistakes are more likely. A general principle might be: lean towards centralization during wartime, and decentralization during peacetime.
Good managers exercise natural authority rather than positional authority. (Peopleware)

On Hiring


Research by the APA indicates that general mental ability (GMA) tests have a high r-value (.54) in predicting job success. GMA tests are regulated in the US and must be relevant to the job. It indicates that additional metrics can increase the validity of the GMA test: work sample tests (r = .54 alone, .12 gain in validity), integrity tests (r = .41 alone, .14 gain in validity), conscientiousness tests (r = .31 alone, .09 gain in validity), and structured interviews (r = 0.51 alone, 0.12 gain in validity) are all methods of increasing hiring success. Age had an r value of -0.01.
So, for hiring, use:

GMA test if you can
A work sample test
An integrity test, or interview questions that assess integrity
Conscientiousness test, or interview questions that assess conscientiousness
Structured interview questions, using performance-based interview (PBI) questions, possibly taken from the Department of Veteran Affairs’ list of PBI questions


The researchers in the APA study, by combining general-mental-ability tests and one other factor, were only able to achieve an r value of 0.65, which means, possibly by combining many measures instead of just 2, you can probably only hope to assess factors that account for ~50% of the variability in hiring decisions. Assessing candidates is very difficult. Running contract-to-hire is a good strategy to try candidates out before hiring, and expect many will not work out.
Don’t compromise on hiring, no matter how long it’s taking. This is said over and over in management & leadership books.
Companies can only expand at the rate they’re able to hire good people. (Good to Great)
Front-load training by paying “unfairly” for the best people. Training programs are exceptionally expensive, and according to research done at the University of Central Florida, 90% of skills from training programs are forgotten within a year if not reinforced in their daily work. Additionally, performance follows a power-law or Pareto distribution, with top-performers being vastly (1.2x, 10x, 100x) more effective than the lowest performers. (Work Rules)
Create a standardized list of dimensions to assess candidates on. These should be the same dimensions used for your “standard of performance.” (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
If the company is large enough, to reduce bias, hire by a committee that doesn’t include the manager. (Work Rules)
Hire for strength, rather than lack of weakness. (The Hard Thing About Hard Things)
“You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. If your staff isn’t up to the job at hand, you will fail.” ~ Peopleware
“A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.” ~ Peopleware
“…managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don’t stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn’t have enough leverage to make a difference in their nature. So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.” ~ Peopleware
“Retraining is not the cheapest way to fill a new slot. It’s always cheaper in the short run to fire the person who needs retraining and hire someone else who already has the required skills. Most organizations do just that. The best organizations do not. They realize that retraining helps to build the mentality of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong sense of community. They realize that it more than justifies the cost.” ~ Peopleware

On the Team


“…management is a team activity. But no matter how well a team is put together, no matter how well it is directed, the team will perform only as well as the individuals on it." ~ High Output Management
"Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right." ~ Creativity, Inc.
“Getting the system built was an arbitrary goal, but the team had accepted it. It was what they had formed around. From the time of jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, any goal, together. Refocusing their attention on the company’s interest in the project didn’t help. It just made success seem trivial and meaningless.” ~ Peopleware
From Peopleware: a strategy for “teamicide,” or ways to prevent a team from “jelling:”

Defensive management (trying to protect against your people’s incompetence)
Bureaucracy
Physical separation
Fragmentation of people’s time
Quality reduction of the product
Phony deadlines
Clique control


“Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding together and liking it. This is part of the mechanism by which the team builds momentum. The chemistry-building manager takes pains to divide the work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has some substantive demonstration of its own completion. Such a manager may contrive to deliver a product in twenty versions, even though two are sufficient for upper management and the user." ~ Peopleware

On Quality


“Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.” ~ Peopleware. The customers probably don’t care about quality as much as you do. The reason for quality is that it leads to greater efficiency, so much so that the efficiency gains likely outweigh the costs.
Being committed to quality is one of Gallup’s Q12 factors that leads to job satisfaction.
Personally, I’ve created cultures of high-quality that consistently produced remarkable results. The speed and efficiency gains are very noticeable when quality is a priority.
“The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline.” ~ Mythical Man Month

On Company Structure


Aim for 6-8 subordinates. Any less promotes meddling, any more and managerial leverage is reduced. (High Output Management)
In an organization with multiple teams, use a hybrid-organization approach. Create a corporate, staff-level “brain trust” that gives notes on the individual, line-level teams. (High Output Management)
Lines of information to the manager should be redundant. Information should flow from all levels of the hierarchy. (High Output Management)
"A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody." ~ Creativity, Inc.
"The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose." ~ Creativity, Inc.
Have well-defined roles. In addition to promoting employee engagement (one of Gallup's Q12 is "I know what is expected of me at work"), having well-defined roles improves team performance. Teams without well-defined roles end up acting like kids in a little-league soccer game. No one plays offense or defense, and every kid on both teams just gloms onto the ball. (Radical Candor)

On Deadlines


“In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and a lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals. In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much.” ~Peopleware
“In the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study [from the University of New South Wales]…they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others…Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (‘Just wake me up when you’re done.’) had the highest productivity of all.” ~ Peopleware
From Peopleware, a variation on Parkinson’s Law: “Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.”
“Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have the same choices. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part, raw in another.” ~ Mythical Man Month
If there is schedule pressure, consider whether the project is an economic loser and should be cut entirely. People want to deliver results. Something is amiss besides needing pressure, and it needs to be looked into. (Peopleware)

On Errors


Build a culture where a reasonable amount of mistakes are tolerated; where there’s slack in the system.
"The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems." ~ Creativity, Inc.
"Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past." ~ Creativity, Inc.
"Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them." ~ Creativity, Inc.
"Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new." ~ Creativity, Inc.
When someone makes a mistake, they need to add it to the error log. If they don't, they should be reprimanded. If mistakes are hidden, that’s a serious problem. (Ray Dalio)
When the system goes down, write a postmortem, using Google’s template from their SRE handbook. Create a collection of postmortems, to be used in training new employees.

On Prototypes and the Lifecycle of a Project


"Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be." ~ Creativity, Inc.
You’re going to throw away the code anyways—piece-by-piece, or altogether—so it can be helpful to acknowledge this and build a quick prototype to facilitate learning, and throw it away. Pixar does this by storyboarding the entire film first, with a small team around the director. (Mythical Man Month)
Adding people to a late software project will make it later, because many tasks in software development are not partitionable. (Mythical Man Month)
Start projects with a small core team, or even one person, and refine the prototype, when costs of changing are much lower. Once the prototype has been validated, move the prototype to production and expand the team. (Creativity, Inc.)
Validate hypotheses with the build-measure-learn feedback loop. (The Lean Startup)

On Antifragility


Something is likely to exist the amount of time it has already existed. (Antifragile)
Favor the old, which does not need to be replaced often (e.g. classical literature vs the latest novel). (Antifragile)
From Antifragile: things can be described as either fragile, robust, or antifragile:

Fragile things break as soon as they’re put under stress
Robust things are built to withstand a lot of stress, but when it becomes too much, they break as well
Antifragile things are strengthened by stress, disorder, and chaos. They naturally add capacity when stressed.


"Dig for gold in the supertexts while your competition stays mired down in trade publications and other ephemera; you can depend on your lieutenants to give you any current news that really matters." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership. By "supertexts" he means classics and textbooks. He argues that classics have been around for centuries and thus must hit upon some important human truth.

On Planning, Management by Objective ("OKRs"), and Performance Evaluation


Assess environmental demand and what your present activities will yield. (High Output Management)
Ask “What do you need to close the gap? What can you do to close the gap?” (High Output Management)
Management-by-objective: Where do I want to go? (the objective) How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (milestones or key results). (High Output Management)
MBO is a stopwatch to gauge performance, not a rigid legal document. “If the supervisor mechanically relies on the MBO system to evaluate his subordinate’s performance, or if the subordinate uses it rigidly and forgoes taking advantage of an emerging opportunity because it was not a specified objective or key result, then both are behaving in a petty and unprofessional fashion.” ~ High Output Management
"Don’t confuse development with managing performance...If you marry criticism with consequence, if people feel that a miss means that they will be hurt professionally or economically, they will argue instead of being open to learning and growing." ~ Work Rules
“Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for it’s accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result.” ~ High Output Management
Indicators guide your activities, so have counterbalanced indicators. (High Output Management)
Effective indicators cover output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. (High Output Management)
Measure productivity in terms of validated learning, not in terms of production of new features. (The Lean Startup)
"The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving." ~ Creativity, Inc.
Use compensation as task-relevant feedback. It satisfies all levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. (High Output Management)
“Work measurement can be a useful tool for method improvement, motivation, and enhanced job satisfaction, but it is almost never used for these purposes. Measurement schemes tend to become threatening and burdensome.” ~ Peopleware
Be wary of the McNamara fallacy: your metrics can be great, but you can still lose. Seek the truth underlying the metrics, and highly value the subjective.
Know that some people are going to be “rock stars”—rock-solid, dependable performers—and “superstars”—excellent performers, headed for promotions—depending on their personal circumstances. Not everyone has to be a superstar all the time. (Radical Candor)

On Feedback


One-on-ones are critical. This is said over and over again in management and leadership books.
Be radically candid without being an asshole. (Radical Candor + The No Asshole Rule)
Separate the three types of feedback: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation, and give all three. (Thanks for the Feedback)
Seek feedback from your team. (Thanks for the Feedback)
“The score takes care of itself.” ~ Bill Walsh. Create a list of metrics important for performance with standards for each: the “standard of performance.” Create exercises to improve those metrics, and if you’re not winning as much as you’d like, increase the standards on those metrics until you are.
Everyone has blindspots, so you should try to seek yours out by asking others. (Thanks for the Feedback)
From Thanks for the Feedback: if you're having an argument, take three steps back:

One step back: you & me intersections. What differences between us are causing a clash?
Two steps back: role clashes. Are the roles we’re playing naturally antagonistic towards eachother?
Three steps back: the big picture. Are there issues within the system itself causing problems that need to be addressed? Are there problems with the rules themselves that govern the workplace or system we’re working in?


Use a set of principles to guide your actions, so you don’t make emotional decisions in the moment not consistent with your values. (Principles by Ray Dalio)
Raise arguments to the level of principle to resolve them more quickly. (Principles by Ray Dalio)

On Communication and Documentation


Occasionally take a “mock” vacation, where you’re not available for a period of time, except in extraordinary circumstances. This is especially useful if you’d actually like to take a vacation in the future. Prepare your team to be able to function without you, especially in the case of emergencies. New pathways of information will develop, people will rise to the occasion, and overall your team will be strengthened.
Try to have self-documenting code, then minimal docs to fill in the gaps. Assess whether the overhead of maintaining docs is worth it’s benefit. Docs can have extraordinary positive leverage, so long as the team is large enough.
It can be a useful strategy for a new hire to write documentation as you train him on the system. They’ll have a fresh perspective on the system.
"Task-related communication increases with each person at a rate of n(n-1)/2. A team of 3 requires 3 times the communication of a team of 2, and a team of 4 requires 6 times the communication of a team of 2. Gains in task completion are offset by increases in communication overhead." ~ Mythical Man Month

On Momentum and Learning


Hedgehog concept: Jim Collin's research showed that good-to-great companies found one thing and did it well, like hedgehogs' only way of defending themselves is to curl into a ball. The comparison companies acted more like foxes, trying many things, most of them failing, and never gaining momentum. So find what you or your company:

Is deeply passionate about
Is the best in the world at
Drives your economic engine


Use the hedgehog concept to build momentum. If you try to act like a fox, trying out many different strategies and tactics, you will never build momentum, and in fact, can go into what Jim Collin's calls a "doom loop," or a reinforcing cycle of defeat. (Good to Great)
The fundamentals are crucial, even for the most senior players. (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
“Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people. When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can’t take place at all.” ~ Peopleware

On Code


Refactoring for conceptual integrity is important. “I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.” ~ Mythical Man Month. This also mirrors the "hedgehog concept"--if there are many disparate features in your system, are you acting like a fox and creating a doom loop?
“There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.” ~ Mythical Man Month

On Productivity


A manager should have raw material in the form of discretionary projects that increase the groups’ productivity over the long term. Otherwise, he is likely to spend his free time meddling. (High Output Management)
Provide the necessary tools for people to get their work done. (Gallup's Q12)
It is counterintuitively faster to build things one at a time, than by trying to make an assembly line. This is because the learnings applied when building the first thing can be applied to the next, and mistakes will only have to be re-done once. (The Lean Startup)

On Leading


Nothing leads as well as leading by example. “Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly.” ~ High Output Management
Role of supervisor in a staff meeting: “leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker.” ~ High Output Managment. Not lecturer.

On Strategy


Conventional wisdom yields conventional results. (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
Success does not care which road you choose. Most solutions the lead to victory are temporary, until the competitor finds a way to circumvent. (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
Desperation should not drive innovation. Always be thinking of what assets you’re not using now that you could be. (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
You rise to the level of your preparation, so be prepared. (The Score Takes Care of Itself)
"You can’t copy your way to excellence; rather, true excellence can only be achieved through original thinking and unconventional approaches." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership

On State of Mind


"Think grey: try not to form firm opinions about ideas or people unless and until you have to." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
"Think free: train yourself to move several steps beyond traditional brainstorming by considering really outrageous solutions and approaches." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
"Beware of pseudoscience masquerading as incontrovertible fact or unassailable wisdom; it typically will do nothing to serve your interests or those of the organization you are leading." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
"Don’t delude yourself into thinking that people are intrinsically better or worse than they really are; instead, work to bring out the best in your followers (and yourself) while minimizing the worst." ~ The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership
Look for skin in the game. Never ask someone their opinion. Just ask them what they have or don’t have in their portfolio. (Antifragile)

On Task-Relevant Maturity


Task-relevant maturity (TRM) is a large factor in determining the performance of an individual. (High Output Management)
TRM can be high with low-levels of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and TRM can drop for the same person when those things increase. (High Output Management)
Precise, detailed instructions are more effective for subordinates with low-TRM, and emotional support is more effective for subordinates with high-TRM. (High Output Management)
It’s a manager’s job to train the subordinate. If he doesn’t, and he’s allowed to “make his own mistakes,” his tuition is paid for by the customer, which is wrong. The organization should be paying for his training, through training from his supervisor. (High Output Management)
The purpose of performance reviews is to increase the subordinate’s performance. (High Output Management)
Evaluate performance, not potential. (High Output Management)
Try to improve the performance of your stars, rather than spending too much time on the low performers. (High Output Management)
Send a written review before the face-to-face discussion. (High Output Management)

On Training


Insufficiently trained employees can cause large amounts of problems for an organization. (High Output Management)
It’s the manager’s job to train. (High Output Management)
Training is one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. (High Output Management)
Training needs to be tied to how things are actually done in the organization. It can’t be a canned course. (High Output Management)
Training should be consistent and systematic. It shouldn’t be a rescue effort to solve the problem of the moment. (High Output Management)

On the Manager’s Job:


“…it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.” ~ Creativity, Inc.
“The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.” ~ Peopleware
“Training is the boss’s job.” ~ High Output Management
“The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance.” ~ High Output Management

Misc


"Use survey's and checklists to nudge people to improve." ~ Work Rules
“The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it.”
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
Create records of every meeting, even so far as filming each meeting. Ray Dalio does this at Bridgewater, and there it has the effect of increasing transparency and reducing politics.

Process


Have a weekly meeting on Monday.

Have a retrospective on the previous week.
Demo any new work.
Set goals for the following week.


All code goes through PRs to staging, with occasional merges from staging into master.

When a team member has low task-relevant maturity, use gate-like inspections. Once a team member is more senior, move to monitoring-like inspections, and allow them to merge their own code, with random inspections. Maturity can vary depending on what part of the codebase they’re working on.


Pair-program at some regular interval, roughly weekly or as-needed, dependent on task-relevant maturity, mostly to set an example and communicate values and decision-making process. Senior engineers may resist this, but it is critical to communicate company values.
Have a time daily, usually in the morning, when people can be more “heads-up” and available to pair and work through difficult problems together.
Have one-on-ones with all team members, set up on a rolling basis so they always happen, roughly weekly, based on a collaborative doc that’s shared beforehand.

Doc doesn’t need to be completely rewritten every week—you can efficiently to use a single doc that can track changes.
Anything bothering the team member or manager.
Feedback going both ways:

Appreciation
Coaching
Evaluation

Use standard set of metrics used to evaluate all software engineers and managers (new hires and current employees).


Occasionally discuss team members' career progression (one of Google’s Project Oxygen’s factors).


Have occasional one-on-ones with people lateral to you in the hierarchy.


Google Project Oxygen

Google ran a survey to study their best managers, and found their best managers had these traits in common:


Is a good coach
Empowers team and does not micromanage
Creates an inclusive team environment, showing concern for success and well-being
Is productive and results-oriented
Is a good communicator — listens and shares information
Supports career development and discusses performance
Has a clear vision/strategy for the team
Has key technical skills to help advise the team
Collaborates across Google
Is a strong decision maker


Gallup Q12

From a study of over 2.7 million workers across 100k+ teams, these are 12 needs that are highly correlated with employee engagement:


I know what is expected of me at work.
I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
There is someone at work who encourages my development.
At work, my opinions seem to count.
The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
I have a best friend at work.
In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.


Department of Veteran Affairs performance-based interview questions

A list of performance-based interview questions, to help you standardize your interview questions.
The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology

These are the r values for various measures that can be used in hiring to predict candidate job performance:


General mental ability test - r = 0.51
Work sample test - r = 0.54
Integrity tests - r = 0.41
Conscientiousness tests - r = 0.31
Employment interviews (structured) - r = 0.51
Employment interviews (unstructured) - r = 0.38
Job knowledge tests - r = 0.48
Job tryout procedure - r = 0.44
Peer ratings - r = 0.49
T & E behavioral consistency method - r = 0.45
Reference checks - r = 0.26
Job experience (years) - r = 0.18
Biographical data measures - r = 0.35
Assessment centers - r = 0.38
T & E point method - r = 0.11
Years of education - r = 0.10
Interests - r = 0.10
Graphology - r = 0.02
Age - r = -0.01


It's worth noting that, by combining general-mental-ability tests and one other factor, the researchers were only able to achieve an r value of 0.65, which means, possibly by combining many measures instead of just 2, you can probably only hope to assess factors that account for ~50% of the variability in hiring decisions. So, hiring is hard :)
High Output Management, by Andy Grove (CEO of Intel)

Basics of Production


Identify the longest, rate-limiting step in a process, and work backwards.
In-process inspection is much lower cost than functional tests that can destroy a product.

Managing the Breakfast Factory


Indicators guide your activities, so have counterbalanced indicators.
Effective indicators cover output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.
Indicators should be a physical countable thing.
Have different departments create forecasts because a single manager will inadvertently try to line them up.
Build a reasonable amount of “slack” into the system.
We can never assess the consequences of an unreliable product, so we can’t make compromises when it comes to reliability.
Monitoring vs gates. Gates stop the line to inspect each product, monitoring doesn’t stop the line to inspect, but may let bad product through. Monitoring allows us to inspect much more product. Prefer monitoring.
Question why each step in a process is performed.

Managerial Leverage


Manager’s output = output of his organization + output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.
Individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as managers, because they exert great power within the organization.
The most useful information may come from quick, casual verbal exchanges. The more timely the the information, the more valuable.
Written reports are a way to discipline the thinking of the writer, rather than a way to convey information. Writing the report is important, reading it often is not.
Information lines should be redundant. Each level of the information hierarchy is important.
A very valuable practice is to walk around and observe what subordinates are doing, with no specific task in mind. If either the manager or the subordinate has a two-minute concern, they can quickly talk about it and be done with it.
Managers should not just impart facts, but also objectives, priorities, and preferences, so subordinates know how to make decisions that will be acceptable.
A corporate culture is indispensable. “Someone adhering to the values of of the corporate culture—an intelligent corporate citizen—will behave consistently under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations that are sometimes used to get the same result.”
Nothing leads as well as leading by example. “Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly.”
In principle, more capital can always be made available, but our own time is absolutely finite, so considerable care must be made to how we spend our own time.
On meetings: “which of the [managerial] activities—information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside of a meeting?” But ultimately you must choose the medium you deem most effective.
Focus on high-leverage activities that improve the performance of the team.
Three groups of high-leverage activities: “When many people are affected by one manager. When a person’s activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager’s brief, well-focused set of words or actions. When a large group’s work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of knowledge or information.
A depressed or waffling manager can have virtually unlimited negative leverage.
Meddling—when a supervisor takes over a subordinate’s task—is a negative leverage activity.
“Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for it’s accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result.”
A manager should have raw material in the form of discretionary projects that increase the groups’ productivity over the long term. Otherwise, he is likely to spend his free time meddling.
“As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few, and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half a day per week to each of his subordinates.
Regularity: do everything in your power to prevent interruptions and emergencies. Always be looking at indicators to seek out possible time bombs.

Meetings


The frequency of one-on-ones depends on the subordinate’s task relevant maturity.
The subordinate should prepare for the one-on-one.
Any issue that is preoccupying or nagging the subordinate should be discussed.
Schedule one-on-ones on a rolling basis to make sure they definitely take place.
Role of supervisor in a staff meeting: “leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker.” Not lecturer.
Be very mindful of the number of participants of a meeting and the length of a meeting: consider everyone’s hourly rates added together.

Decisions


When making a decision, everyone should freely voice their opinions first.
Not everyone has to agree with a decision, but all need to commit.
No one has ever died from making a wrong business decision.
The senior person should not wield position power until everyone has spoken.

Planning


Assess environmental demand and what your present activities will yield.
Ask “What do you need to close the gap? What can you do to close the gap?”
Management-by-objective: Where do I want to go? (the objective) How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (milestones or key results).
MBO is a stopwatch to gauge performance, not a rigid legal document. “If the supervisor mechanically relies on the MBO system to evaluate his subordinate’s performance, or if the subordinate uses it rigidly and forgoes taking advantage of an emerging opportunity because it was not a specified objective or key result, then both are behaving in a petty and unprofessional fashion.”

Hybrid Organizations


A hybrid organization is part mission-oriented groups (building product lines, individual stores, etc.) and part functional groups (centralized, corporate groups like finance, legal, etc).
“Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.”

Dual Reporting


In a hybrid organization, a single employee reports to two managers: a mission-oriented manager (e.g., the plant manager), and a functional manager (e.g., the corporate security manager).

The Sports Analogy


“…management is a team activity. But no matter how well a team is put together, no matter how well it is directed, the team will perform only as well as the individuals on it. In other words, everything we’ve considered so far is useless unless the members of our team will continually try to offer the best they can do.”
“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.”
Motivation has to come from within, so all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish.
Determine where the employee’s motivation may come from by looking at Maslow’s hierarchy.
Unlike the lower needs, self-actualization is limitless for motivating someone.
Set goals so that there is a 50-50 chance of making them, so people strive for a level of achievement beyond their immediate grasp (I actually disagree with this—personally, I’m a high-achiever and already very self motivated, and these impossible goals can put a lot of pressure on me and can burn me out. Also, it is very difficult to assess what I have a 50-50 shot of attaining. I tend to be operating near capacity, and if you extrapolate and say I should be achieving more, it can push me over the edge. In the past where these OKRs have been placed on me, I hate to say it, but the first quarter I do really well, then build resentment because I sacrificed some element of my personal life to achieve something for the company only to get a pat on the back, and then the next quarter set stronger boundaries and don’t pay too much attention to the OKRs, rendering them somewhat pointless. For the average person OKRs can work OK, but for high achievers—you are hiring high achievers, aren’t you?—you risk revving the engine for a few more MPHs and burning it out. I suspect there are more people like me).
Build a culture revering output, rather than abstract understanding. A junior engineer who produces results should be more highly esteemed than the PhD who understands in the abstract but can’t produce anything.
Money can obviously be motivating. “If the absolute sum of a raise in salary an individual receives is important to him, he is working mostly within the physiological or safety modes. If, however, what matters to him is how his raise stacks up against what other people got, he is motivated by esteem/recognition or self-actualization, because in this case money is clearly a measure.”

Task-relevant maturity


Task-relevant maturity (TRM) is a large factor in determining the performance of an individual.
TRM can be high with low-levels of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and TRM can drop for the same person when those things increase.
Precise, detailed instructions are more effective for subordinates with low-TRM, and emotional support is more effective for subordinates with high-TRM.
It’s a manager’s job to train the subordinate. If he doesn’t, and he’s allowed to “make his own mistakes,” his tuition is paid for by the customer, which is wrong. The organization should be paying for his training, through training from his supervisor.
The purpose of performance reviews is to increase the subordinate’s performance.
Evaluate performance, not potential.
Try to improve the performance of your stars, rather than spending too much time on the low performers.
Send a written review before the face-to-face discussion.

Two Difficult Tasks


Interviewing, and talking an employee out of quitting.
It is very difficult to impossible to determine how well someone is going to perform in an hour-long interview
In the interview, asses technical skills (describe some projects, what are your weaknesses), what they did with knowledge (past achievements, past failures), discrepancies (what did you learn from failure, problems in current position), and operational values (why are you ready for a new job, why should my company hire you.)
In talking an employee out of quitting, you have to address what is troubling him, and take it seriously.

Compensation as Task-Relevant Feedback


Use money to deliver task-relevant feedback.
Compensation should be tied to performance, but performance is very difficult to asses precisely.
A manager’s bonus should be split between his individual performance and his team’s performance.
If an employee is promoted too soon, demote him instead of firing him.

Why Training is the Boss’s Job


Insufficiently trained employees can cause large amounts of problems for an organization.
It’s the manager’s job to train.
Training is one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.
Training needs to be tied to how things are actually done in the organization. It can’t be a canned course.
Training should be consistent and systematic. It shouldn’t be a rescue effort to solve the problem of the moment.

The Score Takes Care of Itself, by Bill Walsh (Coach of San Francisco 49ers)


Bill Walsh was a legendary football coach who took over the worst team in the NFL at the time—the San Francisco 49ers—and completely turned the team around to winning 3 Superbowls within a decade.
He did this by instituting a “standard of performance” for every single person within the organization; he set standards not just for players but for marketing, personal assistants, and even janitors.
The standard of performance is a set of key metrics based on an individual’s performance. For players this would look like how close to the intended mark a receiver landed after a running play, or how quickly a lineman blocked after the play started.
He did not focus on winning, and didn’t set a specific timeline as to when the team would start winning.
If a team is losing, raise the individual, absolute metrics that constitute the standard of performance.
Create targeted training exercises to increase these individual metrics.
Winners act like winners before they are. Walsh would have people respect the field and the jersey, and respect new teammates instead of allowing hazing of them.
Hostile relations are toxic. Remove hostile and toxic players from the team, because they can do a lot of harm.
Stubborn know-it-alls are dangerous.
Conventional wisdom yields conventional results. Walsh completely changed the game of football to a modern, short-pass style. Before Walsh, the NFL was entirely built around running plays and long-bomb pass plays, and he was initially mocked and ridiculed for his “backyard-style” football.
Success does not care which road you choose. Most solutions the lead to victory are temporary, until the competitor finds a way to circumvent.
Desperation should not drive innovation. Always be thinking of what assets you’re not using now that you could be.
The fundamentals are crucial. Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, two of the greatest football players of all time, were practicing fundamentals on the field between practices even late into their careers.
You rise to the level of your preparation. Bill Walsh would plan out contingency plans for every possible scenario that could happen during a game (e.g., down 3 by second-half, run such-and-such plays; fourth quarter and ahead by 6, run such-and-such plays).

The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, by Steven Sample (President of USC)

A great summary from the conclusion of the book:


Think grey: try not to form firm opinions about ideas or people unless and until you have to.
Think free: train yourself to move several steps beyond traditional brainstorming by considering really outrageous solutions and approaches.
Listen first, talk later; and when you listen, do so artfully.
Experts can be helpful, but they’re no substitute for your own critical thinking and discernment.
Beware of pseudoscience masquerading as incontrovertible fact or unassailable wisdom; it typically will do nothing to serve your interests or those of the organization you are leading.
Dig for gold in the supertexts while your competition stays mired down in trade publications and other ephemera; you can depend on your lieutenants to give you any current news that really matters.
Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant; and never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow.
Ignore sunk costs and yesterday’s mistakes; the decisions you make as a leader can only affect the future, not the past.
Don’t unnecessarily humiliate a defeated opponent.
Know which hill you’re willing to die on, and realize that your choice may at some point require you to retreat from all the surrounding hills.
Work for those who work for you; recruit the best lieutenants available, and then spend most of your time and energy helping them to succeed.
Many people want to be leader, but few want to do leader; if you’re not in the latter group you should stay away from the leadership business altogether.
You as a leader can’t really run your organization; rather, you can only lead individual followers, who then collectively give motion and substance to the organization of which you are the head.
Don’t delude yourself into thinking that people are intrinsically better or worse than they really are; instead, work to bring out the best in your followers (and yourself) while minimizing the worst.
You can’t copy your way to excellence; rather, true excellence can only be achieved through original thinking and unconventional approaches.


Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmul (Founder of Pixar)

A great summary from the conclusion of the book:


Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.
When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.
Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.
It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.
There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.
Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.
Further, if there is fear in an organization, there is a reason for it—our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and (c) to try to root it out.
There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self-assessment that seek to uncover what’s real.
If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.
Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.
Careful “messaging” to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.
The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.
Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line.
The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal—it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.
Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.
A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.
Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.
Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.
An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.
The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose.
Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.
New crises are not always lamentable—they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present.
Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.
Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.
Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.


A few other insights from this book I gathered:

A saying (like, “trust the process”) is like a handle on a suitcase. The handle is easily grasped, and the suitcase represents all the experience and hard lessons learned. If the suitcase is old, the handle might get frayed and detach from the suitcase, and people will carry around the saying without knowing the real meaning.
The organizational structure and process within Pixar is great, and follows Andy Grove’s “hybrid organization” schema. The directors have full control over their movies, and will spend up to 3 years just working on a storyboard with rough audio. Every 3 months, the “Braintrust”—the most skilled storytellers within the company—will review the storyboard and identify problems and potential solutions. It’s up to the directors to solve them, taking the advice or not. That they are just working with storyboards with a small team dramatically reduces the cost of changing the film at this early stage. Once the storyboard is signed-off on, it goes into production, which is very expensive, and the film becomes very expensive to change.
Story is more important than graphics. In an early SIGGRAPH conference, Ed Catmul was preparing a graphics presentation. He’d enlisted John Lasseter to direct it, even though it was a very short clip. However, Catmul didn’t have the time to render the whole clip, so there where large sections of the clip that were just wireframes. He was really embarrassed, but afterwards, people congratulated him, and spoke a lot about the story, and said they didn’t even notice the wireframe parts.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz (Founder of Andreesen-Horrowitz)

This is an entertaining read, but, honestly mostly a watered-down version of High Output Management in the form of a story. There were a few unique gems:

Peacetime vs wartime CEOs. Peacetime CEOs can flourish and innovate in a culture without strong competitors. Wartime CEOs don’t care about your feelings, are “strong” leaders, make fast decisions, get things done, and thrive during times of crisis and intense competition.
Hire for strength, rather than lack of weakness. You want the best possible VP of Sales—it doesn’t matter much if he doesn’t know much else or has a prickly personality.
Asking a committee’s opinions about a new hire or a plan is likely to filter for lack of weakness rather than strength.
The importance of one-on-ones can’t be overstated.

Work Rules, by Laszlo Bock (Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google)


Bock believes that people are fundamentally good, and should be trusted.
High-freedom companies will outcompete low-freedom companies, because talented people will want to work for high-freedom companies, and the skills and intelligence of all those people will be allowed to flourish and create value.

Ten steps to creating a team based on the principals Google has used, from the conclusion of the book:


Give your work meaning.
Trust your people.
Hire only people who are better than you.

...Hire by committee, set objective standards in advance, never compromise, and periodically check if your new hires are better than your old ones


Don’t confuse development with managing performance.

...If you marry criticism with consequence, if people feel that a miss means that they will be hurt professionally or economically, they will argue instead of being open to learning and growing.
...Development conversations can more safely happen on the way to achieving a goal.
...Separate in space and time conversations about whether a goal has been achieved.
...For performance evaluation, require managers to sit together and calibrate their assessments as a group to guarantee fairness.


Focus on the two tails.

...Put your best people under a microscope…and then use them, not just as exemplars for others by building checklists around what they do, but also as teachers.
...Have compassion for your worst performers. If you’re getting hiring right, most of those who struggle do so because you put them in the wrong role, not because they are inept. Help them to learn or to find new roles, but if that fails, exit them immediately. It’s not mercy to keep them around. They’ll be happier in an environment where they aren’t the worst performers.


Be frugal and generous.
Pay unfairly.

...Performance follows a power-law distribution in most jobs….90% or more of the value of your teams comes from the top 10%. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50% more than your average people, or 50 times more, but they are absolutely worth more.


Nudge.

...We are all constantly nudged by our environment and nudging those around us. Use that fact to make yourself and your teams more productive.


Manage the rising expectations.
Enjoy.


A wonderful summary of all the work rules, from the conclusion of the book:

Work rules for becoming a Founder

Choose to think of yourself as a founder.
Now act like one.

Work rules for building a great culture:

Think of your work as a calling with a mission that matters.
Give people slightly more trust, freedom and authority than you are comfortable giving. If you are not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.

Work rules for hiring:

Given limited resources invest your HR dollars first in recruiting.
Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people that are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.

Work rules for finding exceptional candidates:

Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you are looking for.
Make recruiting part of everyone’s job.
Don’t be afraid to try crazy things to get the attention of the best people.

Work rules for selecting new employees:

Set a high bar for quality.
Find your own candidates.
Assess candidates objectively.
Give candidates a reason to join.

Work rules for mass empowerment:

Eliminate status symbols.
Make decisions based on data, not based on managers’ opinions.
Find ways for people to shape their work and the company.

Work rules for performance management:

Set goals correctly.
Gather peer feedback.
Use a calibration process to finalize ratings.
Split reward conversations from development conversations.

Work rules for managing your two tails:

Help those in need.
Put your best people under a microscope.
Use surveys and checklists to find the truth and nudge people to improve.
Set a personal example by sharing and acting on your own feedback.

Work rules for building a learning institution:

Engage in deliberate practice. Break lessons down into small digestible pieces with clear feedback, and do them again and again.
Have your best people teach.
Invest only in courses you can prove change people’s behavior.

Work rules for paying unfairly

Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay that reflect the power law distribution of performance.
Celebrate accomplishment not compensation.
Make it easy to spread the love.
Reward thoughtful failure.

Work rules for efficiency, community, and innovation:

Make life easier for employees.
Find ways to say yes.
The bad stuff in life happens rarely, be there for your people when it does.

Work rules for nudging towards health, wealth and happiness:

Recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be.
Run lots of small experiments.
Nudge, don’t shove.

Work rules for screwing up:

Admit your mistake, be transparent about it.
Take counsel from all directions.
Fix whatever broke.
Find the moral in the mistake and teach it.


The No Asshole Rule, by Bob Sutton (Professor at Stanford)

This is a pretty short book that contains pretty straightforward advice: people who act like assholes all the time are bad for companies. There are a few interesting gems in here:

It takes about 7 good interactions to counteract one bad interaction.
Having one asshole around that slipped through hiring isn’t bad, if leadership calls them out and makes an example of them. Sutton cites research that indicates if everyone is behaving, there’s more bad behavior in general, versus if there’s one bad actor, there is very little bad behavior because it calls into focus what bad behavior looks like.
If you find yourself in a work situation with assholes (or any bad situation at all), and you are unable to quit, here’s an analogy from the book that might help you. In whitewater rafting, if you get thrown from your raft, the best strategy is the hang onto your life vest, put your feet forward, relax, and kick off any rocks that come near you. The idea is to relax and float down through the turbulent parts until you reach a safe part of the river where you can just stand up and get out. In such a way you should deal with the assholes at work until you can leave.

Radical Candor, by Kim Scott (CEO Coach, faculty @ Google, Apple)

There’s one big idea in this book and a few gems.

The main idea is being candid in your interactions will be good for you, your relationships, and your company.
The main idea can be broken down into a graph where your personal interactions might fall. The X axis is “challenge directly,” and the Y axis is “care personally.” In the bottom left quadrant is “manipulative insincerity,” where the speaker doesn’t care about the other other person and doesn’t challenge them directly with what they actually think. In the top left quadrant is “ruinous empathy,” where you care a lot about the other person, but don’t tell them what you actually think, and thus lead them to ruin. The bottom right quadrant is an OK one to be in when you first practicing being candid. Here you challenge directly, but don’t care about the other person, and thus are “obnoxiously aggressive.” The final quadrant, the top right, is the goal: to challenge directly while also caring personally. This is the “radical candor” quadrant.
This book as well stressed the importance of one-on-ones.
One gem was the idea of “debate meetings” vs “decision meetings.” For any important decision, team members should have a debate meeting first. If anyone is holding too fast to their own ideas, the moderator should have both sides switch and argue for the other side. Once everyone has had an honest debate, a much shorter decision meeting is called, to make the final decision.
Another gem from the book that was thrown in offhand is that teams without well-defined roles end up acting like a bunch of 7-year olds playing soccer. No one plays offense or defense, and every kid on both teams just gloms onto the ball.
Another gem was the idea of “rock stars” vs “super stars.” Rock stars are the rock-steady players that aren’t on a steep career trajectory, but perform solid work day-in and day-out. Super stars are on a steep career trajectory, are very likely putting in extra hours, and are likely to be promoted many times over the coming years.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Principles from the book:

Six ways to make people like you

Principle 1 - Become genuinely interested in other people.
Principle 2 - Smile.
Principle 3 - Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
Principle 4 - Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
Principle 5 - Talk in terms of other person’s interests.
Principle 6 - Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.


Win people to your way of thinking

Principle 1 - The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
Principle 2 - Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, ‘You’re wrong.’
Principle 3 - If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Principle 4 - Begin in a friendly way.
Principle 5 - Get the other person saying ‘yes, yes’ immediately.
Principle 6 - Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
Principle 7 - Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
Principle 8 - Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
Principle 9 - Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
Principle 10 - Appeal to nobler motives.
Principle 11 - Dramatize your ideas.
Principle 12 - Throw down a challenge.


Be a leader

Principle 1 - Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Principle 2 - Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
Principle 3 - Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
Principle 4 - Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Principle 5 - Let the other person save face.
Principle 6 - Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be ‘Hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.’
Principle 7 - Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
Principle 8 - Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
Principle 9 - Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.


Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone (lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School) and Sheila Heen (Professor at Harvard Law School)


The opportunity for the most growth is in getting better at receiving feedback rather than giving feedback.
There are three triggers that block feedback:

Truth triggers: we believe the feedback is factually incorrect
Relationship triggers: we believe the person has no credibility in giving the feedback
Identity triggers: the feedback threatens our identity


We need to try to suppress our triggers and try to hear what is actually being said and determine if it’s factually correct.
There are three kinds of feedback:

Appreciation: how grateful someone is for you and your actions
Coaching: how to get better at a particular task
Evaluation: how good or bad your are doing a particular task


Sometimes we want a particular kind of feedback, but all we’re receiving is another. It can be important to tell the giver what we’re needing at the moment.
Disentangle data from interpretations. The data are the actual facts of what happened, and the interpretation is what the giver believes about the performance of the receiver, and what the giver thinks the receiver should do about it to improve. Interpretations come from someone’s entire personal history, and two people could see the same data and have totally different interpretations.
Everyone has blind spots. Ask others to tell you yours.
“Switchtracking” is when someone gives feedback, and the other then also gives feedback, and the two people are having a “fight” and two totally different conversations. It’s important in this case to address each piece of feedback separately.
There are relationship systems, and problems occur only as a result of two people’s otherwise-neutral tendencies starting to grate on one another. The authors suggest taking three steps back:

One step back: you & me intersections. What differences between us are causing a clash?
Two steps back: role clashes. Are the roles we’re playing naturally antagonistic towards eachother?
Three steps back: the big picture. Are there issues within the system itself causing problems that need to be addressed? Are there problems with the rules themselves that govern the workplace or system we’re working in?


People are wired and react to feedback differently.
There are three phases to a reaction: baseline, or your baseline mood; swing, or how far up and down you go after positive or negative feedback; and sustain and recover, or how long it takes you to get back to baseline.
View yourself, and people in general, as inherently complex. Your are neither all good or all bad, but a mix of both.
Shift to a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset crave feedback because they believe it will help them grow.
A feedback conversation can be divided into three parts:

Opening

Clarify purpose
Set the agenda


Body

Listen
Assert, or tell what you’re upset about.
Manage the process, or, be a referee of the conversation that notices what both people are doing or are arguing about, and suggest a new path forward. This is inherently awkward, but the best communicators do this.
Problem solve, or, suggest ways to improve moving forward.


Closing

Get an actual commitment for future action.


What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith (executive coach)


Successful people frequently mistakenly attribute their personality flaws to their success.
Successful people know what to do, but they don’t know what to stop doing.
Some actions are purely neutral, and you can have a very overall positive effect by just doing nothing instead of doing something negative. For example, if you want to be a nicer person, you don’t necessarily have to create a list of nice things to do, but rather, a list of mean things to stop doing so you can stop being a jerk. All you have to do is nothing, which is a lot more manageable.
The 20 habits that are holding you back:


Winning too much. The need to win at all costs and in all situations: when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
Adding too much value. The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
Passing judgement. The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
Making destructive comments. The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
Starting with no, but, or however. The overuse of these negative qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right, you’re wrong.”
Telling the world how smart we are. The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
Speaking when angry. Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
Negativity, or, ‘let me explain why that won’t work.’ The need to share our negative thoughts, even when we weren’t asked.
Withholding information. The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
Failing to give proper recognition. The inability to praise and reward.
Claiming credit that we don’t deserve. The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
Making excuses. The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture, so people excuse us for it.
Clinging to the past. The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past. A subset of blaming everyone else.
Playing favorites. Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
Refusing to express regret. The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
Not listening. The most passive aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
Failing to express gratitude. The most basic form of bad manners.
Punishing the messenger. The misguided need to attack the innocent, who are usually only trying to help us.
Passing the buck. The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
An excessive need to be me. Exalting our faults as virtues, simply because they are who we are.


When making a change, is very difficult to get people to change their perception of you. You could completely shift your personality, but people that you’ve been working with will still hold to their outdated perceptions of you. One simple tactic that Goldsmith recommends is to ask people how you are doing on a regular basis. This not only gives you feedback, but if the answer is “you’re doing well,” it can really help people change their perception of you.

Power: Why Some People Have It, and Some People Don’t, by Jeffrey Pfeffer (professor of organizational behavior at Stanford)

I don’t agree with everything in this book! But it is eye-opening nonetheless.

Power is good for your health. Pfeffer cites research indicating those lower in the power hierarchy suffer way more health problems than those near the top.
It’s impossible to create organizations free of power dynamics. Hierarchies are naturally formed and supported by people in organizations. Success in one hierarchy can translate into success in another.
Play for power, or lose by default. People are maneuvering around you, and may take you out of your position if you choose not to play.
Most leadership material is misleading, because it glosses over the power plays the executive writers actually used to get to the top.
Those who are more politically savvy tend to receive higher performance reviews and are rated as more effective leaders.
Performance doesn’t matter that much: “Not only doesn’t good performance guarantee you will maintain a position of power, poor performance doesn’t mean you will necessarily lose your job.”
To advance at work, get noticed. Don’t be the “foundation guy” that does important but invisible work.
Thinking “the world is a just place” can get in your way.
“Because power is likely to cause people to behave in a more confident fashion, observers will associate confident behavior with actually having power. Coming across as confident and knowledgeable helps you build influence.”
“If you want to move up quickly, go to underexploited niches where you can develop leverage with less resistance and build a power base in activities that are going to be more important in the near future than they are today.”
“If you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence.”
Use anger strategically. People expect high-status people to be more angry than sad or guilty when in negative situations, and low-status people to feel more sad or guilty in the same negative situations.
Network. Build and use internal and external contacts.
Having many good, shallow relationships is more effective than few, deep relationships.
Be at the center of your networks: “If virtually all information and communication flows through you, you will have more power. One source of your power will be your control over the flow of information, and another is that people attribute power to individuals who are central.”
Become a relationship broker: “The fundamental idea is deceptively simple: by connecting units that are tightly linked internally but socially isolated from each other, the person doing the connecting can profit by being the intermediary who facilitates interactions between the two groups”
“You should decide how much time to spend and your specific networking strategy based on the extent to which your job requires building social relationships”
Speak with power.
“Gary Loveman’s advice: after you reach a certain level, there comes a point in your career where you simply have to make critical relationships work. Your feelings, or for that matter, others’ feeling about you, don’t matter. To be successful, you have to get over resentments, jealousies, anger, or anything else that might get in the way of building a relationship where you can get the resources necessary for you to get the job done.”
“You need to continually ask yourself, “What would victory look like? If you had won the battle, what would you want that win to encompass?” People lose sight of what their highest priorities are and get diverted fighting other battles that then cause unnecessary problems”
Stay upbeat.
“Your path to power is going to be easier if you are aligned with a compelling, socially valuable objective.”
“Power produces overconfidence and risk taking, insensitivity to others, stereotyping, and a tendency to see other people as a means to the power holder’s gratification”
Make yourself unique. For example, it’s easier to rise to power as an MBA among CS students than as an MBA among other MBAs.
Ask for help and mentorship.
Pfeffer argues that organizations don’t care about you, so you shouldn’t care whether or not playing power games is good for the organization.

Mythical Man Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.


“Oversimplifying outrageously, we state Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Some tasks are not partitionable, and therefore won’t see speed gains by adding more people. In fact, progress will likely slow down.
Task-related communication increases with each person at a rate of n(n-1)/2. A team of 3 requires 3 times the communication of a team of 2, and a team of 4 requires 6 times the communication of a team of 2. Gains in task completion are offset by increases in communication overhead.
“Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have the same choices. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part, raw in another.
Brooks suggests a Surgeon pattern, in which one master programmer is surrounded by assistants that provide him what he needs and keep him as productive as possible.
“I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.”
The second system effect is when the progress of a second system is crushed under the weight of all the ideas that were cut from the first system.
Lack of communication can kill a project from within. Teams should communicate informally, in staff meetings, and in the project documentation or “workbook.”
First systems are always flawed, and are always discarded—either all at once, or piece-by-piece. Therefore, you should anticipate this and build a prototype to throw it away.
“The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it.”
Simple systems, developed by a singular person or small teams, reduce side-effects, where fixing a bug in one part of the system introduces bugs in other parts of the system.
Use very concrete milestones to prevent schedule slippages.
“The project manager has to keep his fingers off the estimated dates, and put the emphasis on getting accurate, unbiased estimates rather than palatable optimistic estimates or self-protective conservative ones.”
“There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.”
“The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important.”
There’s a great, but long, outline at the end of the book that summarizes the whole book.

Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister


“Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive.”
“We spent far too much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough time asking the key question, ‘Ought this thing be done at all?’”
“’But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality.’ Read those words and weep, because they are almost always true. People may talk in glowing terms about quality or complain bitterly about its absence, but when it comes time to pay for the price of quality, their true values become apparent.” (My take: this book was written in 1975, and people are probably more willing to pay for quality now than they were then).
“Quality, far behind that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.”
“Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.”
“Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people. Their lives are just too short to allow too much loafing on the job. Since they enjoy their work, they are disinclined to let it drag on forever—that would just delay the satisfaction they all hanker for. They are as eager as you are to get the job done, provided only that they don’t have to compromise their standard of quality.”
“In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and a lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals. In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much.”
"In a 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study…they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others…Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever ('Just wake me up when you’re done.') had the highest productivity of all."
A variation on Parkinson’s Law: “Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.”
“The typical project that’s stuck in the mythical backlog is there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building it, even with the most optimistic cost assumptions. If we knew its real cost, we’d see that project for what it is: an economic loser. It shouldn’t belong in the backlog, it should be in the reject pile.”
“The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”
“‘While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in the productivity among software organizations.’…Our study found that there were huge differences between the 92 competing organizations. Over the whole sample, the best organization (the one with the best average performance of its representatives) worked more than ten times faster than the worst organization. In addition to their speed, all competitors from the fastest organization developed code that passed the major acceptance test. This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences.”
According to the study, the most effective organizations:

had more dedicated space for programmers to work
were acceptably quiet
were acceptably private
allowed the programmers to silence their phone
allowed the programmers to divert their calls
and had people needlessly interrupting them at much lower rates


“Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more likely to delivery zero-defect work.”
“Work measurement can be a useful tool for method improvement, motivation, and enhanced job satisfaction, but it is almost never used for these purposes. Measurement schemes tend to become threatening and burdensome. In order to make the concept deliver on its potential, management has to be perceptive and secure enough to cut itself out of the loop. That means the data on individuals is not passed up to management, and everybody in the organization knows it. Data collected on the individual’s performance has to be used only to benefit that individual. The measurement scheme is an exercise in self-assessment, and only the sanitized averages are made available to the boss.”
Have small, private offices for software engineers, so they can focus. “If you can pick up a lease on a run-down fraternity house or garden apartment that would make cheap, idiosyncratic, fascinating quarters for your people, well then, so what that they will be housed differently from everyone else in the company? If it’s okay with them, who cares?”
“…managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don’t stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn’t have enough leverage to make a difference in their nature. So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.”
“The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable for their dissimilarities than for their likenesses. But one thing that they all share is a preoccupation with being the best. It is a constant topic in the corridors, in working meetings, and in bull sessions. The converse of this effect is equally true: In organizations that are not, “the best,” the topic is rarely or never discussed.”
“Retraining is not the cheapest way to fill a new slot. It’s always cheaper in the short run to fire the person who needs retraining and hire someone else who already has the required skills. Most organizations do just that. The best organizations do not. They realize that retraining helps to build the mentality of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong sense of community. They realize that it more than justifies the cost.”
“Getting the system built was an arbitrary goal, but the team had accepted it. It was what they had formed around. From the time of jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, any goal, together. Refocusing their attention on the company’s interest in the project didn’t help. It just made success seem trivial and meaningless.”
A strategy for “teamicide,” or ways to prevent a team from “jelling:”

Defensive management (trying to protect against your people’s incompetence)
Bureaucracy
Physical separation
Fragmentation of people’s time
Quality reduction of the product
Phony deadlines
Clique control


“You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. If your staff isn’t up to the job at hand, you will fail.”
“A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.”
Good managers exercise natural authority rather than positional authority.
“Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding together and liking it. This is part of the mechanism by which the team builds momentum. The chemistry-building manager takes pains to divide the work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has some substantive demonstration of its own completion. Such a manager may contrive to deliver a product in twenty versions, even though two are sufficient for upper management and the user.”
Projects should start with a small core team, and when the system is ready for production and tasks are partitionable, expand considerably.
“Imagine going through today’s e-mail onslaught, asking about each and every arriving message, ‘Do I need to know this?’ How many messages would pass the test? The ones that don’t are a kind of internal taxation, using up your time and the time of others.”
“Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you’re not going to get much done.”
“Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people. When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can’t take place at all.”
“…progress toward more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The thoughtful manager doesn’t want to stop the trend, but may nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder. Once the idea is stated so baldly, it’s simple enough to compile a list of ways to implement this policy: pilot projects; war games; brainstorming; provocative training experiences; training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats”
“It’s supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn’t then there’s nothing else worth concentrating on. Choose your terrain carefully, assemble your facts, and speak up.”

Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb


Things can be described as either fragile, robust, or antifragile:

Fragile things break as soon as they’re put under stress
Robust things are built to withstand a lot of stress, but when it becomes too much, they break as well
Antifragile things are strengthened by stress, disorder, and chaos. They naturally add capacity when stressed.


Barbell curve—try to avoid the middle, and put stresses at the extremes.
Look for optionality—upside in the form of many options, which gives you antifragility.
Green lumber fallacy—Taleb tells an anecdote about a very successful green lumber salesmen who had no idea what green lumber even was—he thought it was lumber painted green! So you don’t need to know all the details to have success, just recognize the meta-details. Similarly, you don’t need to know aerodynamics or physics to ride a bike.
For antifragile things, there is a nonlinear relationship between shock size and benefit, where benefit increases with the larger the shock size, up to a point.
If you have more than one reason to do something, don’t do it. By reminding yourself of more than one reason to do it, you’re trying to convince yourself to do it.
For nonperishable things, something is likely to exist the amount of time it has already existed.
Favor the old, which does not need to be replaced often (e.g. classical literature vs the latest novel).
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
What mother nature does should be considered rigorous until proven otherwise, and what humans do should be considered flawed until proven otherwise.
Look for skin in the game. Never ask someone their opinion. Just ask them what they have or don’t have in their portfolio.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey


“Be proactive”
“Begin with the end in mind”
“Put first things first.” Prioritize and focus on important, but not-urgent tasks.
“Think win-win”
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
“Synergize.” Look for systems with other people where the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
“Sharpen the saw.” Take time to renew yourself.

The Lean Startup, by Eric Reis


Find what customers want as quickly as possible.
Increase your rate of learning by shortening the cycle of the build-measure-learn feedback loop.
Try to validate your hypothesis without building anything.
If you can’t fail, you can’t learn.
Find early adopters, willing to put up with an imperfect product.
Two hypotheses:

Value hypothesis: does the customer find value in this product?
Growth hypothesis: how will new customers discover this product?


Test important assumptions with minimum-viable products (MVPs).
MVPs enable the build-measure-learn feedback loop in the lowest amount of time possible.
If you’re building something no one wants, it doesn’t matter if it’s on time or on budget.
If you don’t know who the customer is, you don’t know what quality is.
Win by learning faster than everyone else.
Use split-tests—two versions of the same product offered to two different groups of customers.
Three types of MVPS

Video MVP - explain the concepts in a video
Concierge MVP - do everything manually to create a customized personal experience
Wizard of Oz MVP - simulate the technology by doing it by yourself behind the scenes


Measure productivity in terms of validated learning, not in terms of production of new features.
Pivot, or persevere?
Different types of pivots:

Zoom-in: a single feature becomes the whole product
Zoom-out: the whole product becomes a single of feature of something larger
Customer segment: the product serves a different customer segment than who we’re currently targeting
Customer need: the customer doesn’t actually need what we’re building, but we have an inkling about what they might actually need
Platform: change from an application to a platform or vice versa
Business architecture: high-margin, low volume vs low-margin high-volume, or b2b vs b2c.
Value capture: how the product actually makes money
Engine of growth: change in strategy to grow faster
Channel: change in distribution channel
Technology: provide the same solution with a different technology


Smaller batches = faster learning.
Three engines of growth:

Sticky growth: if the rate new customers that use the product exceeds the rate users stop using the product, the product will grow. Growth rate = natural growth rate - churn rate
Viral engine: the product grows virally. Viral coefficient - how many new customers will use the product as a result of each new customer signing up.
Paid engine: use advertising to grow. Customer lifetime value must exceed cost of customer aquisition.


“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
It is counterintuitively faster to build things one at a time, than by trying to make an assembly line. This is because the learnings applied when building the first thing can be applied to the next, and mistakes will only have to be re-done once.

Principles, by Ray Dalio (CEO of Bridgewater)


Use a set of principles to guide your actions, so you don’t make emotional decisions in the moment not consistent with your values.
Create a machine that carries out all of your principles mechanically, and then test them against what you would do in the moment. If the answer differs, consider why, and either update the machine, or change your actions to be in line with your principles.
Be radically transparent and open.
Create an error list. If someone writes down their error on the error list, they won’t be punished, but if they try to hide the error, they will be punished.
Use believability-weighted decision-making. Weigh peoples opinions on a matter based on how believable they are. You can determine believability by keeping a log of past successes.
Raise arguments to the level of principle to resolve them more quickly.
Dalio records every meeting within Bridgewater, and creates an edited version later to get people up to speed. This radically increases transparency, and has the added affect of reducing politics.
Create an idea-meritocracy.

Good to Great, by Jim Collins


Jim Collins studied companies that were doing OK, and then suddenly had a huge spike in value. He put together a list of six attributes he found to be common among them verses comparison companies that did not exhibit good-to-great growth.

Have level 5 leadership

5 levels of leadership:

Highly capable individual
Contributing team member
Competent manager
Effective leader
Level 5 executive - blends humility and professional will


First who, then what.

Focus on the right people, not what you're going to do.
When in doubt, don’t hire and keep looking.
Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your business' problems.
Companies can only expand at the rate at which they can find great people.


Confront the brutal facts (or, seek the truth, no matter how much it hurts)
The hedgehog concept

Good-to-great companies were similar to hedgehogs, in that they had one tactic and stuck to it. The comparison companies were more like foxes, trying many things, but nothing really working out too well.
Identify

What you’re deeply passionate about
What you’re the best in the world at
What drives your economic engine


Good-to-great companies had a culture of discipline.
Good-to-great companies used technology to accelerate, but not as the core of the business.

Does the technology align with the hedgehog concept?


Collins also discussed the idea of a flywheel, where consistent steps forward with the hedgehog concept lead to the accumulation of visible results, which feed back into forward steps. Basically, momentum.
This is contrasted with the doom loop, where disappointing results lead to reactions without understanding, which lead to no accumulated momentum, and more disappointing results.