Author: Rich Liebling
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Aligned Autonomy
A friend shared this image with me that wonderfully captures the essence of the “Loosely coupled; tightly aligned” mantra. For more on alignment, please see my posts on Bumper Cars or Go Karts and Leading vs. Managing
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Would You Rehire This Employee?
In the investment world, some advise people to consider their holdings with the question: Would you buy this again at the current price? The point is that if the answer is “no” then you ought to sell it. In effect, each day you hold the security you are choosing to repurchase it at the current price. Similarly, some apply this advice to managers in the form of asking: Would you rehire this employee today?
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The Three Questions and Followup
With agile processes and Scrum, in particular, being so prevalent, most people are familiar with the famous “3 questions” for daily standup: 1. What did I accomplish since last standup? 2. What do I intend to accomplish today? 3. What blockers do I face? However, I find that many people fail to appreciate a certain subtlety of the questions. I’m talking about the significance of the word accomplish in the first two questions.
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Book Recommendations
Some of my favorite (work-related) books Leadership and Management Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders — A very inspiring story of leadership, taking a nuclear sub in the US Navy from the lowest rated in the fleet to the highest performing. First Break All the Rules — Gives great advice on the role of a manager. If nothing else, do take note of the 12 questions to assess employee engagement.
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Adopting New Technologies - A Lesson
At dinner the other night with a former colleague of mine, he shared some war stories from the trenches with Kubernetes. Don’t get me wrong: I think Kubernetes is incredibly powerful and useful. But, it brings a lot of complexity and with complexity comes trouble. So, what did he share? He’s working at a very cool startup that has not yet launched their product/platform. But, they are up and running with a few folks using the platform.
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