SWLW #540: Accountability is not blame, To benefit from AI your Organization’s Learning Loops must evolve, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​The Real Competition Is the Water
4 minutes read.

This post should be shared with every employee in your company: "If you’re a startup founder or leader, embrace reality. Outperforming a middling financial plan doesn’t matter. Neither does having slightly better performance than a bunch of other startups that aren’t ever going to be great. [...] Don’t let a long runway lower the bar for your company. High standards are a gift that you give your team."

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Culture

Everyone's Job Description After GPT-5
1 minute read.

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

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Accountability Is Not Blame
4 minutes read.

"Hold accountable" vs. "Vulnerable accountability" is an interesting framing by Kent Beck. Accountability is important to drive decisions and do what's right for the company in a sustainable manner. Being a servant leader is important to remember our role to help deliver more value by empowering the team, coaching them, and when needed - guiding them.

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To Benefit From AI, Your Organization’s Learning Loops Must Evolve
9 minutes read.

"But in a world where AI tools generate code with unlimited velocity, “outcomes over outputs” stops being aspirational and becomes existential. Managers will have to re-learn how to set measurable outcome goals (what John Cutler calls inputs to the North Star metric) and form a useful hypothesis for what opportunities the business should pursue to achieve those outcomes." -- developing software will change, and with that how we think about delivering value versus delivering waste.

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Improve Onboarding in Teams Through the Magic of Storytelling
4 minutes read.

Amin Rashidbeigi emphasizes using stories and sequencing - the right level of abstraction (to avoid overwhelming them) and the right order so it will be easy to follow and remember: "When new team member joins, they are usually overwhelmed with information. When it comes to technical information, it is better to provide a big picture that explains the components at a higher level of abstraction and how they contribute to the product and connect. If you try to explain all of the details and exceptions right away, the new member may need help understanding the big picture and may miss important parts."

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Peopleware

Some Thoughts on My Presentation Style
4 minutes read.

Lorin Hochstein inspired me to think about how I build my slides when giving a talk. There are so many gems (ideas and tools) in this post that you'd love and want to copy. Charity Majors developed a language and style that stands out (google up her name), making it easy to know it's her presentation when looking at a few slides. Like an artist, developing your own language and feeling comfortable using it when presenting your ideas is powerful.

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9 Visuals That Will Get You Excited to Read More Books (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Andrew Nalband with beautiful visuals. Read what you love until you love to read. The first two are my favorites.

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This Is Crazy and Absolutely Surreal! I Trained an AI on Steve Jobs’ Voice and Then Connected It to the chatGPT API 🤯
3 minutes read.

John Meyer gives us a great preview into the type of capabilities we'll soon have in our mobile devices. It can be fun to train it to talk with celebrities (dead or alive) or even with family members you miss - both their voice and style of communication (it will be easy to train them based on videos or things they wrote). Where else would you use it?

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@david_perell: Without commitment, we are destined for mediocrity. We waddle anxiously. We wander helplessly. We lose the sturdy dedication that underlies all greatness. Only by commitment can we master our craft.

@benedictevans: GPT4: writes your code. GPT5: passes Turing test. GPT6: can do Concur. GPT7: still can’t manage Workday.


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.