SWLW #539: Navigating the unpredictability of everything, The Ambiguous Zone, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Scale. Skill. Speed.
7 minutes read.

These two insights are spot on and wonderfully written: "The challenge for successful organizations moving forward is not they do not have scale, skill, or speed but rather what happens as a new world emerges where the benefits of scale diminish, when new skills become critical but the ability to hire the newly skilled with the old incentives are reduced, and the speed of the world outstrips the speed of the organization." and "The shift of power from big to small, management to talent, and from the towers of power to the talent with wrenches in the trenches has only just begun."

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Culture

Old Apple Ads We Enjoy
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Navigating the Unpredictability of Everything
17 minutes read.

If you want to understand how to build a business or why founders act in a certain way, this post should be bookmarked and revisited. I've captured the lessons section near the end in Anki Notes, as it's an important list to iterate on when thinking about your business (as a founder or employee).

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Talking About Risk With Thresholds 🔥
3 minutes read.

Thinking with thresholds, as suggested by Ryan McGeehan, is an interesting approach. You can use it to set priorities by using minimum thresholds, e.g., "We'll invest at least 30% of our time this year to push forward our mobile offering."

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The Ambiguous Zone
3 minutes read.

There is no movement without friction. Learning to hire and retain employees who can challenge core assumptions and offer creative ideas is one of the most vital assets great leaders have.

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Peopleware

Why You Are Important... Historically So
6 minutes read.

ChatGPT (now v4) is moving us all forward in a remarkable cadence like never before. Things that felt like magic appear almost every month. Connor Beem with an interesting observation on the impact each one of us will be able to achieve by leveraging AI to produce more, faster. It might speed up how meaningful smaller companies can be, where each one of us can become a better builder (copywriting, code, design) and salesperson.

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Long Time Coming but a While Ago I Asked Twitter to Help Define "Product Thinking". I Finally Got Around to Grouping the 120 Odd Responses... (Thread)
3 minutes read.

The grouping of the results is helpful as a map of areas you can invest in learning specific tools and figuring out how to practice them. Try writing "what do I understand from that," "which tools or frameworks will help me practice that," and lastly, "where can I practice that this week."

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The Ultimate Guide to OKRs | Christina Wodtke (Video)
73 minutes read.

Christina Wodtke offers excellent tips on OKRs worth listening to before you start planning next year. It's not only about setting the right objects and figuring out the key results to measure, but also building the stories around it to align the team around them.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@ProfFeynman: 1. Never stop learning. 2. See failure as a beginning. 3. Teach others what you know. 4. Assume nothing, question everything. 5. Analyze objectively. 6. Practice humility. 7. Respect constructive criticism. 8. Love what you do. 9. Give credit where it's due. 10. Take initiative.

@bpoppenheimer: "Whenever I want to write a big song, I can't...That's when I get writer's block—when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy...But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it's got the universe in it." — John Mayer


p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.