SWLW #591: Bring back fun, The dumber side of smart people, and more

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

Bring Back Fun
5 minutes read.

"Whoever has the power and influence to create bastions of challenging fun where teams can experience how rewarding it can be to make stuff and have an impact together—I think that's what we need now. It is also what will jumpstart teams and kickstart hiring because teams having fun will be much more impactful, and real teams will be less divisive." -- Looking deeper into our leadership style, do we put fun and celebrate the joy of creation? Are we being too serious to get the job done only to move to the task? And then the next one. And the next.

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Culture

This Is the Ceo of Cognition 14 Years Ago. The Idea That 10x/100x Engineers Don’t Exist Is Such a Cope
1 minute read.

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

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50 Big Companies That Started With Little or No Money
12 minutes read.

I read this paragraph a few times. Playing a role. Falling in love with a fancy strategy to show intellect without showing real progress and outcomes to move the business forward: "Many entrepreneurs waste their time “playing CEO,” crafting a strategy and drawing up a dream org chart for what their business might become. The best founders avoid daydreams and focus on what can be done using only the resources at their disposal. [...] Startups are often measured by how much money they’ve raised, but it’s more important to consider how they spend. The best entrepreneurs orient their businesses around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital." -- More companies should drive inspiration from that. Inspiration is all around us.

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Marty Cagan on Product Management Theater
2 minutes read.

"It is a lot easier to deliver output than to deliver outcome." -- If you liked this one-minute rant, you'd like the full interview with Marty Cagan. The challenge is to spot this sentiment of optimizing for optics (and output) early on and fight this inertia. This is often being pushed by people with great intentions who worked elsewhere and say, "This is what we did back then, and it was great. Without it, we cannot succeed."

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Sparing the Midnight Oil
4 minutes read.

Aviv Ben-Yosef's suggestions under "Manifesting Urgency" are spot on. Introduce them while not stressing out about the reactions. People will pushback to state how process is critical, and how systems are everything. Like inertia, this is true only when it's serving your goals. Systems are worthless if they produce the wrong outcomes.

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Peopleware

The Dumber Side of Smart People
5 minutes read.

"I’ve come to believe that part of the reason professional money managers produce such lousy returns is because the industry attracts such intelligent people. They’re too smart for their own good. There’s a fine line between intellectual rigor and believing your own bullshit, and smart people are at more risk than ordinary folks." -- Morgan Housel covers 3 pitfalls that might lead us to make the wrong decisions. This is true for the financial world as it is for the software world.

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Founder-Led Sales Is Critical for Startups
3 minutes read.

This is a short and powerful reminder that people seek to interact with other humans, buy their product (or use it as internal users) because they follow their vision of how the world should be, and are willing to sponsor (time, usage, and sometimes money) their journey as they take them there. "Founders" can be of ideas and products, not only companies.

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The Simple Guidebook to Upping Your Management Game
17 minutes read.

"We have to restore dignity to the office of the manager. I’ve found that folks are too focused on finding really complicated, cool leadership-y things for their unique environment, instead of just focusing on the stuff that works pretty much everywhere. We’ve allowed ourselves to fall victim to this idea of grandiosity — that leadership is better than management. We focus on the esoteric, complex ideas that make us a “leader” rather than the specific things managers must do well." -- Evergreen statements (things you can say every day, forever). Feel-good statements. Shallow recipes. I love how Russ Laraway focuses on the fundamentals instead.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@RyanHoliday: Be quiet, work hard, and stay healthy. It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.

@jasonfried: Minimum Buyable Product > Minimum Viable Product


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.