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Thanks everyone who sent me links and recommendations this week. If you stumble across something interesting, send it my way! You can send any recommendations to links@houstonp.com.
Books
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson - This is the second book by Isaacson, and I'm equally impressed. He weaves a compelling narrative about the history of computers and the internet. I didn't realize how important Iowa was to computing.
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden - I've read a lot about Snowden prior to this and wasn't really surprised by anything he wrote. There's nothing new that you can't read online. In fact his tone comes off pretentious – distracting from the point he's trying to make. I would have preferred the first two-thirds of the book to have been scrapped, and the last third expanded.
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni - Lencioni's fable is a fast read. The fable format makes it less dry than most management books. The Q&A on Amazon is almost a complete summary of the topics covered in the book. These two questions and answers specifically:
Q: What is the root cause of job misery?
A: The primary source of job misery and the potential cure for that misery resides in the hands of one individual–the direct manager. There are countless studies confirming this statement, including both Gallup and The Blanchard Companies. Both organizations have found that an employee’s relationship with their direct manager is the most important determinant to employee satisfaction (over pay, benefits, perks, work-life balance etc).
Even employees who are well paid, do interesting work and have great autonomy, cannot feel fulfilled in a job if their managers are not providing them with what they need on a daily or weekly basis.
Q: What are the three signs?
A: The first is anonymity, which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.
The second sign is irrelevance, which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life–a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor–in one way or another.
The third sign is something I call “immeasurement,” which is the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees who have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers’, to gauge their progress or contribution.
Podcasts
Some extraordinary episodes from this week:
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott - Artificial Intelligence with Lex Fridman - I'm as shocked as you are that I'm recommending something with that title.
Why Monoculture Moments Are Rare - The Information's 411
Mathletes and Tech-athlons - The Information's 411
Lessons of Greatness: Real Artists Get Out of the Building
Steve Blank: Great Entrepreneurship is Artistry
How to Solve an Impossible Challenge - Masters of Scale
df and dat - Not So Standard Deviations
You're Giving Your Boss a Loan - Planet Money
Designing Data-Intensive Applications – Scalability - Coding Blocks
Jeff Ma – Making Decisions with Data – Invest Like the Best
The Tipping Point Between Failure and Success - HBR Ideacast
The law that built the internet economy is going international - Marketplace Tech
Do female CEOs get called out more often for creating a toxic work culture? - Marketplace Tech
Microsoft's president reflects on a decade of antitrust investigations - Marketplace Tech
Videos
GOTO 2019 • Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters • Adam Tornhill
Lecture 14 - How to Operate (Keith Rabois) - How to Start a Startup
Articles
Operations and Internal Communication Strategies For Effective CEOs - Communication is important in an organization:
Poor information and unaddressed knowledge gaps compound over time and lead to all sorts of inconsistent contexts, and differing contexts are the root cause of conflict and unnecessary disagreements. If you don’t provide the same context that you have, your people are going to weigh decisions differently, and you’re going to be frustrated when they don’t execute as you think they should.
The article references CEOs, but ultimately every individual in the organization needs the ability to communicate up and down the org chart. I especially like the idea of a weekly team update email and the framework for meeting notes.
Context over control: the future of remote work - The article applies to more than just remote work. The type of work being done today is vastly different than generations ago. An actuary today is able to add orders of magnitude more value than even a couple decades ago. How individuals are managed determines how well they will perform.
Context incentivizes individual autonomy and independent decision making Control, on the other side, incentivizes centralized decision-making and high individuals inter-dependency
Understanding the Media of Internal Communication - Hot vs cold communication and low vs high resolution communication is a good framework to think through what type of communication is most appropriate for any piece information.
A Good Place to Work - Grove was a mentor to Horowitz, and you can see that come through in this piece.
One on One - Grove and Horowitz are adamant about one on one's. If you've read either of their books, they each spend an entire chapter on them. That's how important they think one on one's are.
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
The CEO’s most important operational responsibility - Again, the article references CEOs, but this should be true for any leader.
A good communication architecture enables information to flow across the company (up and down, side to side) without impediment. It ensures that every person understands the organization’s strategy and priorities (and their own role in it); that people can easily access the information they need to do their job well; that people understand how to make and communicate decisions; problems are surfaced to leaders efficiently.
A Noble Purpose Alone Won’t Transform Your Company - This actually alines well with Lencioni's fable:
The level and quality of interpersonal collaboration actually has the greatest impact on employee engagement.
The Evolution of Management - Advice for leaders and those moving up the corporate ladder, but it's important for everyone to contemplate their organization, culture, and management structure.
Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies - Can you relate to this?
Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing.
The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and budgets are set aside to support initiatives that fit the new strategy. And then nothing happens.
Advice From The CIA: How To Sabotage Your Workplace - This was almost too painful to read. It was all too real.
How to be Strategic - I often wonder what “being strategic” means. This article explained the concept well.
A good strategy is a set of actions that is credible, coherent and focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s) in achieving a particular objective. Let’s break that down:
achieving a particular objective: it should be clear what success looks like.
set of actions: there should be a concrete plan.
credible and coherent: the plan should make sense and believably accomplish the objective. There should not be conflicting pieces of the plan.
focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s): there should be a clear diagnosis of the biggest problem(s) to be solved, and the plan should focus resources towards overcoming those hurdles.
How to conquer work paralysis like Ernest Hemingway -
Pull: The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel, you will never be stuck – Ernest Hemingway
An Illustrated book of Bad Arguments - Logical reasoning is valuable for decision making and communicating ideas. The illustrations are wonderful, and the explanations are well communicated. Worth the time to go through.
Learning for a Living - There's a paywall if you don't have a subscription, but the subtitle gives the gist:
Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it.
A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet - Ben Thompson extrapolates on a regulation framework. Congress and regulators are going to mess this up, and the unintended consequences will be at the detriment of us all.
Financial Time Series Forecasting with Deep Learning : A Systematic Literature Review: 2005-2019 - I haven't made my way through all of this, but it looks like a well researched and comprehensive literature review.
From Generalized Linear Models to Neural Networks, and Back - This paper is fairly dense. If you're not interested in GLM's and neural net's, then move on. It reiterates how forecasting using traditional statistical models combined with more advanced machine learning methods is superior than each separately (but you have to be careful).
S&P 500 Buybacks Now Outpace All R&D Spending in the US - I'm less concerned about the buybacks and more concerned with the lack of growth in R&D spending.
Share Buybacks and the Contradictions of “Shareholder Capitalism” - A much more thorough discussion on buybacks and capital.
At bottom, the only justification for returning capital to shareholders is that there is no better investment option available to the company. And while it is true that any given business may from time find itself in such a situation, when this is said to be the case year after year at a massive scale, it raises profound questions.
Buyback Derangement Syndrome - Asness and company tackle some of the same claims made in the prior two articles and show that some of the criticisms are unfounded.
Global Money Notes #26: Countdown to QE4? - Pozsar is a well regarded expert on shadow banking. Interesting times going in to year-end.
Rest Easy: The Fed Isn’t Losing Control of Money Markets - A counter argument made by the WSJ made back in September. I don't know enough about the repo market and monetary policy to weigh in, but I'm sure there are truths in both sides.
How McKinsey Makes Its Own Rules - Another article about McKinsey this week. They've been in the news a lot lately.
That's it for this week. Again, if you have anything you want to share or have any comments, shoot me an email at links@houstonp.com.