On building of All Trades

And maybe that’s part of the problem, trying to be legible to everyone. The tug of war of wanting to water things down for mass adoption versus building something I want for myself and trusting the others will come.

Sari Azout • Making Sublime

“Self-management requires an interlocking set of structures and practices.”

How We're Working Without Managers at Buffer

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the... See more

Sari Azout • Can I Ramble for a Sec?

Founders need a new way of thinking, of building, of support that allows them to drive systematic, methodical and meaningful change.

The actual measures of productivity that might be useful range quite a bit:

I did enough to not get fired.

I did enough to get promoted.

I did enough to get hired by a better firm.

I solved a problem for a customer who was frustrated.

I changed the system and now my peers are far more productive.

I invented something that creates new possibilities and

PW 5: Measuring the right thing

Know what you want to stand out for, how you’re different, what you can do that no one else can that can’t be captured by an algorithm or simple market signals, at least not yet.

There’s a market for almost everything.

The most valuable things will always be the ones that are hardest to price.

Superhuman

Makers are here to discover something new, to bravely explore. They crave being first to uncover some way to make technology do a thing that nobody else had seen before. Makers become increasingly more disinterested with a particular technology as it matures and becomes polished. Polish and reliability mean that the tech has become mainstream—and... See more

Dimitri Glazkov • We Are Entering a Maker Renaissance

Job titles are just the most visible ladder of them all. It’s interesting that pompous executive job titles were invented during the Victorian era. This is when we started the trend of calling a cleaner a hygiene technician. A bin man became a waste management and disposal technician. Later on, a call-center worker became a communications... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

Generalists have shirked the the notion of a true job title to fit their work and have followed the thread of providing value and making an impact. No wonder there’s a group of talented professionals hiding in plain sight given how constricting the traditional job titles have become in affirming our professional worth.

The researchers, Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, were interested in people who took a less conventional approach to life. They interviewed hundreds of high-achieving, wildly successful “dark horses”: people who swerved in and out of jobs—and often industries—to find a good fit. From symphony conductors to chess masters, Apple execs to dogsled mushers,... See more

Simone Stolzoff • In Praise of the Meandering Career

Learning to thrive in a resilient culture is essential. Being indoctrinated into a rigid and fragile mindset is not.