SWLW #609: How to spot High Agency people, The magic of acorns, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

45 Life Lessons (At 45 Years Old)
9 minutes read.

Khe Hy has a unique voice that opens my thinking on life. Some of his insights made me look deeper into where I want to invest more of my time and energy. His advice on "Complex productivity systems are stressful" is relevant at any age, maybe more so at 20-40, as you think that by applying one more hack or one more system, you'll get there.

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Culture

Sales vs. Marketing in 1 Photo
1 minute read.

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

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The Magic of Acorns
4 minutes read.

What a beautiful story and an important lesson. It made me think of org design - If you think of companies that way, you can look at Builders aiming to change the org structure to solve everything, while Gardeners look at the individuals as a way to influence the transformation they seek to see.

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Nike Employee Memo From 1977
3 minutes read.

"Perfect results count -- not a perfect process. Break the rules : fight the law." I love this one. Finding global maxima requires such thinking.

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Your AI Team Is Slowing Down Your Company
4 minutes read.

Eden Shochat covers an interesting and timely org design dilemma most companies face if you think about LLM. You should have an AI team if the purpose is to create a differentiator on top of LLM, which will become an unfair advantage for the company. This requires internal learning cycles and expertise to determine what that means and how to approach it. You want to give them quiet and focus to understand the technological edge rather than investing in education. This is required to "scale out" the new paradigm thinking and tools. You should emerge the skills and mindset within teams if you seek to leverage the technology locally to find a new point of optimization in that team and product - e.g. how can we offer better experience on top of what we have, automate parts that will benefit from it, etc.

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Peopleware

Typical First Years of Startup Engineering Leadership
8 minutes read.

Marc Gauthier's post should be shared with anyone working in a new startup, having a map that explains the phases and challenges in the early days, with plenty of ideas for making it just a little bit easier.

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Wonder Why Some Team Members Need More Guidance Than Others? Spoiler: It's Not About Skill.
4 minutes read.

Task-relevant maturity (TRM) matching can help you keep people engaged and invest in their growth. The challenge here is to take High TRM and see if you can move them to Medium TRM by changing a few assumptions or requirements that will drive creativity and energy to look for a bigger upside.

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How to Spot High Agency People
3 minutes read.

Putting yourself around people with high agency is one of the most energizing things for your career and personal growth. They look at everything as an opportunity, seek insights to create leverage, and know how to build momentum to get the result.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@ESYudkowsky: One might say, "The intelligence of a system is the extent to which it avoids getting stuck in local minima", as distinguishes a planning mind, from water flowing downhill. This is one way of quick-observing "individuals are often more intelligent than organizations".

@venzann: Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away. SRE: Can I use AWS? Genie: There are 4 rules.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.