The Future of Generalist Work

That’s what -1 to 0 feels like: messy, confusing—squiggly. The hardest part is escaping. What ultimately leads you out of the mess is conviction, a state you must build incrementally and internally. And conviction and certainty are not the same.

For many people, -1 to 0 is also about deciding how you want to work. In a startup? In a big team? As a... See more

Ruchi Sanghvi • To Go 0 to 1, First Go -1 to 0

And what you see internally is what I'll say is razor-sharp focus on reducing cycle time and bias to action and how do we reduce cycle time. I think it's basically the core of it culturally to me is getting people to think about smaller units of time for decision making. It seems obvious but I think you really have to reinforce it culturally. So... See more

Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor)

“It's just to remind people that we don't work in years, quarters, weeks, we work in days. Each day matters and so never put out something tomorrow that you know can get done today. And that bias to action really permeates not just in the product teams but everywhere.”

Keep a curiosity inbox. Whenever you get a new idea, write it down in a specific note or on a dedicated page in your notebook. Then, each time the idea pops back into your mind, give it a mark or increase its rating. Over time, you’ll develop a ranked list of ideas based on your long-term interests. This strategy allows you to continue exploring... See more

nesslabs.com • The Curiosity Conflict: The Struggle to Shift From Exploration to Exploitation

Collapse the talent stack every chance you get .

As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer... See more

scott belsky • Tweet

Hiring generalists collapses the talent stack, thereby improving decision making and synthesis of information, and giving companies to act quickly when time and resources are limited.

As I discovered, talent and drive aren’t enough. If anything, talent can make finding ideas feel more daunting because it increases the number of available opportunities.

Ruchi Sanghvi • To Go 0 to 1, First Go -1 to 0

Build a cross-company network of change agents.

You need to start by building out a layer of high-performers within your own team. Before you go broad, adapt and iterate on the culture you want to build among that group. Then, just as they are ready to move up in their career ladders, facilitate cross-functional moves into key roles for them. This... See more

Superhuman

Emotional labor is the opposite of the industrial economy’s task-based, measured output. Even if we don’t dig ditches, the offer for a certain kind of work was: Process this pile of papers and we don’t care whether you like (or pretend to like) your job. The labor is the easily measured stuff.

But AI and mechanization have turned this sort of task... See more

Emotional labor and its consequences

The Silicon Valley small business, the SV-SB, is a hybrid of sorts — it intertwines small business values and discipline with big tech know-how and ambition.

Founding teams may look like that of a “traditional” Silicon Valley startup. They’re native to Silicon Valley ethos, skills, and playbooks. But , beneath the surface, they’re different. You

Anu • Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business

What else has been hidden by summary? What thoughts must we resist abridging? Those giant sequoias echo a reminder to ask ourselves, what are the unseen things today that could be growing?

Simon Sarris • Long Distance Thinking

If AI is the ultimate summarizer, and we transition our human processes to include AI to strip away context, what will we be missing?