SWLW #570: Listening Tours, Capital (in)Efficiency, and more.

As war continues in Israel (where I'm based), I continue praying for our loved ones and for better days. For those of you, like me, who find comfort in reading, I share my best findings for the week. May we all find the strength to make the world better even when we see hell.

 

This Week's Favorite

Information Diet: High Agency vs Low Agency
3 minutes read.

I love the connection made here by George Mac on High Agency and how changing our Information Diet can help shape our mindset: "High agency information diets are guided top-down by intentional design and goals. It has specific information borders because attention is the scarcest asset in the age of information abundance. High agency information diets proactively seek sources with a proven track record. It has firewalls against passive consumption of the world's worst events or social media drama."

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Culture

Must Have This Table
1 minute read.

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

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Listening Tours: Not Just for New Leaders
4 minutes read.

"Listening tours during onboarding are a proven, well-known practice in leadership circles. However, many of us put this valuable tool away after we feel onboarded." -- Chris Schillinger inspired me to look at this tool and think where we can practice it more with our leadership team.

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Making Hard Decisions and Working Through Tough Times
10 minutes read.

Great lessons from the CEOs of some of the best companies in the world. I loved Todd McKinnon's thoughts on changing his leadership style (e.g. adjusting his confidence and conviction in communication style to different audiences) during his time leading the company, and Anu Bharadwaj's takeaways on when to launch your 2nd big product.

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Capital (In)Efficiency
7 minutes read.

The biggest problem with looking at productivity as a proxy for our team's ability to produce value for our customers is our inability to measure productivity properly (hence, a new framework every few years, such as SPACE, DORA, etc.). It's like trying to use income to measure happiness. Yes, there is some correlation (money can solve money problems), but you still encounter miserable millionaires. Or as John Cutler puts it: "This means that there is almost certainly talk about employee productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness in your company. But behind these conversations is the most basic act of narrative clash and framing. [...] When you walk into a meeting to talk about productivity or efficiency, you are walking into a meeting with the last decade of wax and wane and individual professional identity (and financial outcomes.)"

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Peopleware

How to Tell Great Stories
7 minutes read.

This post is one of my all-time favorite posts on learning a topic properly and iterating on the learning (watching YouTube talks) and doing (recording a podcast). I feel Julian's charisma through his writing: "Because when your mind relives emotions, your body reacts to them instinctively. You become walking cinema. Diving further into Jason's videos, I found more insights: while blowing his own mind, Jason exudes charisma. I noticed that charisma is the state of projecting three qualities at once: confidence + joy + love for your audience."

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Step Change
3 minutes read.

"Executives give their most trusted product teams something else: a mission. Their goal isn't to monotonically increase or decrease a number. It’s to get something out the door. To solve a longstanding problem. To build something that the company wants to bet on. [...] The most valued product teams show their worth by aligning with execs, targeting an objective, and achieving it." -- Ryan Singer captures it so elegantly.

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Principles for Sharing on the Internet
4 minutes read.

Sari Azout captures well the principles for sharing on the internet, and I take it also into internal communication in technological companies. It's worth thinking about how to avoid having too large of a tax to let people communicate openly. This is where your values in the company should help to set expectations to reduce friction.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@farbood: Doing the right thing, is direction. Doing things right, is speed.

@shl: Don’t hire people who hire people to do their jobs



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.