Prominence
Making prominence your aim is like building a skyscraper without laying foundations: you might make something tall, but it’s unlikely to last and it will… Read More »Prominence
Velcro, geckos, and making friends
Some ideas for strengthening your connections within a group of people or scene: Have good, generous intentions. Show up to serve or share where it’s… Read More »Velcro, geckos, and making friends
The Onion (3): exemplar interesting problem – learning to read
Problems gain (or lose) interestingness as their context and scale changes. Take teaching a kids to read as an example. It’s almost inevitable that a… Read More »The Onion (3): exemplar interesting problem – learning to read
Seth Godin on leadership, responsibility, authority
Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. You don’t do followership for years and then someone anoints you and says, “here.” In fact, it’s… Read More »Seth Godin on leadership, responsibility, authority
The hard thing about soft skills
The hard thing about the ‘soft’ skills of courtesy and consideration is that they’re only partly skills. They’re far more about our attitude: how much… Read More »The hard thing about soft skills
Peter Drucker on continuity and change
The more an institution is organized to be a change leader, the more it will need to establish continuity internally and externally, and the more… Read More »Peter Drucker on continuity and change
Taking the temperature
What do you do to keep an eye on how your team is doing – as individuals and a team? A less-structured meeting (or part… Read More »Taking the temperature
Raising the average (2)
The basic principle is that when you’re recruiting, you should be seeking to raise the average of your team, bringing in people who increase the… Read More »Raising the average (2)
The Onion (2): a model for solving interesting problems
My first post about The Onion looked at interesting problems as systems of networked sub-problems, and suggested that our solutions will mirror this structure. The… Read More »The Onion (2): a model for solving interesting problems
The Onion (1): understanding interesting problems
This post is a sketch of a way of thinking about how problems work, and what we need to do to make our solutions (“the… Read More »The Onion (1): understanding interesting problems