haruki zaemon

A courageous leader also has a healthy appreciation for the fact that sticking your neck out carries the risk of being wrong or failing. Many CEOs and senior leaders are looking to promote managers who have failed and can show they have learned from the experience. They want leaders who take big swings and, if they stumble, figure out what went wrong.

But still, we’re all too prone to put up facades of invincibility and perfection, polishing resumes that show a smooth trajectory and consistent record of success.

When I began to practice accountability people relaxed around me. They were more vulnerable & open themselves. We cooperated more fully.

In trying to “protect” their teams, many managers become what the authors refer to as “umbrella managers”: well-intentioned leaders who want to protect their teams from all inclement organizational weather. But this type of leadership comes with a heavy price for the manager, the team, and the organization. Many individuals leading highly sophisticated teams for the first time need help to figure out the balance between supporting their teams and delegating effectively. The authors present several key mental shifts umbrella managers should make to move from protecting their employees to supporting them.

The experiment of entering the bank account failed multiple times, with Lloyds Bank’s system saying it could not authenticate the voice. After making some tweaks on ElevenLabs, such as having it read a longer body of text to make cadences sound more natural, the generated audio successfully bypassed the bank’s security.

Invite people who have a dog in the fight, no one else. Anyone who consistently leaves without a task should not be invited to the meeting.

For a long time, psychologists saw personality as fixed throughout our lives. This has since been disproven – although personality is relatively stable, it’s far from set in stone.

Some individuals are simply more stable in their personality profiles than others – suggesting this quality of stability can itself be a dispositional characteristic. That is, whereas you might be relatively steadfast in how you respond to questionnaire items assessing all of the Big Five traits (ie, your Big Five personality profile), thus showing heightened levels of personality stability, your best friend could reliably change more frequently in their scores, thus showing general levels of instability.

Women are usually responsible for most of the allyship activity that takes place in organisations. In fact, female leaders are twice as likely as male leaders to contribute considerable time to diversity and inclusion efforts. Yet, research shows that male allies can make a huge difference. When men raise concerns about gender inequalities, their concerns are viewed as particularly serious and legitimate, and they are given more credibility because they are not perceived as acting in their own self-interest. Seeing men enact allyship in a workplace generates ripple effects that empower both women and men to confront sexism.

Large portions of the White majority outside the South, however, unlike Whites in the South’s majority Black counties where the most violent resistance was met, could be convinced that racial segregation was unnecessary and even harmful, largely, because they lived in majority White cities, towns and neighborhoods and managed to control their Black minority population without recourse to “Whites only” signs, poll taxes and literacy tests. It was therefore possible, which isn’t to say easy, to convince them that the time had come for other people in another region to change their accustomed way of living.

When the movement turned to the work of convincing the rest of White America that its time had come to tear down a system of segregation and subjugation far more widespread, resilient and subtle than the Southern one, they resisted mightily and, for the most part, five decades of work have failed to overwhelm their resistance.

Men benefit from this inequality, and they have also largely created and reinforced it over many hundreds of years. So finding a solution to this problem is thoroughly the responsibility of men. Men must be front and centre in fixing this.

And so, aside from this small piece, I’ve decided that this year the men in our office will be writing our IWD editorial.

The topic will revolve around how men can step up to address the issue of gender equality. And they can present it to me when it only needs minor edits, taking just mere minutes of my precious time.

The women, on the other hand, can have a paid day off.

Great meetings have an outcome:

• Decisions: Discuss problems to come to a decision. This includes ranking the backlog, deciding on the project portfolio, and possibly impediment identification and removal. Whatever this discussion is, it leads to a decision. These decisions might create action items.
• Work product: Collaborate to create a work product. This might be story creation and refinement, experiment creation, or any kind of outcome that the team will use to inform its future work.

Then, there are the status or information dissemination meetings. Stop them. Don’t go.

We’re entering a period wherein governments regulate large technology businesses more actively. Startups evaluating M&A have additional factors to consider.

The period between a startup signing a merger agreement & the transaction close (when money & stock changes hands) might last a few weeks for a small acquisition or drag for more than a year for higher-profile buys.

The longer the period, the greater the challenges facing the business.

unlike many other functions, engineering will be intimately involved after the acquisition closes, typically leading the integration and operation of the acquired offering. This incentivizes engineering to be particularly careful in their assessment. While there are no prizes for diligently vetting acquisitions, often just a trail of annoyed colleagues, it’s critical work.

It is not at all inevitable that because platform businesses operate by different economic rules than normal businesses, they will migrate from differentiation strategies to low-cost strategies as they grow and develop.

However, while not inevitable, it is the easiest trap in which to fall. Because the network effects on costs of modern Internet-based platform businesses are so strong, the easiest thing to do is follow a low-cost strategy powered by network effects.

Transitioning from differentiation to low-cost is really, really tricky. Differentiators have legacy costs which are likely to limit them to being, at best, cost-competitive, not low-cost. That puts them in danger of native low-cost players.