Be a thermostat, not a thermometer

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

Clock-Bound Wait

Wait to cover the uncertainty in time across cluster nodes before reading and writing values so values can be correctly ordered across cluster nodes.

How to Know if People Are Working Hard

Too many managers don't know how to manage remote people. Worse, those managers, or their organizations, don't trust people to do a good job. The organization installs spyware to see if people are working.

On hiring

Creating scalable, consistency and noise-free interview evaluations.

Don't Yell At The Weather

On why failure is not all that bad… as long as it's safe.

Accountability is Not Blame

We have strategies for encouraging cooperation. Counterfeiting these strategies is also valuable. That’s why I differentiate between the strategies (like consequences flowing towards power) & the words we use. Even with the best of intentions whatever word you use to refer to a strategy, someone will come along & twist it.

How to Become More Adaptable in Challenging Situations

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, we’re hard-wired to default to the mechanisms that we’ve relied on the past. However, new situations often can’t be met with old solutions. This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely to react with old approaches that aren’t suited to our new situation, leading to poorer decisions and ineffective solutions.