Start writing a 'Guide to Working With Me'​

(Photo credit @hannaholinger)

Once you’ve been in the workforce for a little while, you’ll start to realize that you have certain quirks, habits, and approaches as part of your workstyle.

• Maybe grammatical errors just drive your detail-oriented sensibilities nuts, and can sometimes cause you to overreact?

• Maybe you are a “see the forest” 🌳🌲🌳 person working on a team of people who “only see this leaf 🍁 right in front of me”?

• Maybe you need documents shared with you in advance so you can review them & be prepared with questions/comments, vs reviewing documents cold during an important meeting?

A great career strategy is to start morphing those quirks & habits into a “best practices for working with me” document, aka your 'Guide to Working with Me'

🅰️ Your 'best practices' doc can let your teammates and your manager know about your quirks and preferences, and also to understand them, which will also help you function better as a team.

🅱️ As you create this type of doc, you will continue to learn more about your own work style and preferences. As a job seeker, you can use this knowledge to help you find a better team or workplace culture fit. AND it will help you to come up with better answers to interview questions about manager preferences, greatest weakness, and other 'dreaded' interview questions.

For Managers

• A 'best practices for working with me' guide can be an incredibly helpful tool for each member of your team to develop because it helps surface potential problems for team collaboration before you hit them. It can also identify areas for improvement for each team member that you can help coach them on, or help guide them to seek out additional training opportunities.

• Sharing your blueprint with your team can also help them figure out how to best work with you and avoid pitfalls of communication.

HERE ARE A FEW EXAMPLES OF THESE ‘BLUEPRINTS’:

• Luc Levesque, Shopify VP on why this is important and his blueprint

• Josh Elman

• Blueprints from leaders across the tech industry

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#random

Back in the day, the Shoes video had its viral moment (with 67M views & counting) and made many of my MIT students laugh -- and the team is back with the Masks video. Dumb but worth it.

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Cultivating patience as a leader

(Photo credit @markusspiske)

1. Discover how you can cultivate patience as a leader.

   • This is something that I continuously struggle with, especially in tech, as there is always a competing motivation to move quickly to stay competitive. The NVIDIA CEO is a master of patience. 

   • HBR defines two key ways for leaders to develop patience: redefine the meaning of speed and be grateful to others

   • Take it from Navy Seals: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”

   • Cultivate a meditation practice to help you let go of impatience. At Harvard, I worked with HBS professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George - and he is a big advocate that mindfulness helps you be a better leader. 

#random

These Mathematicians Think the Universe May Be Conscious 🤯 

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Mobile gaming, 1984, and David vs Goliath

(Photo credit @jamesponddotco)

I have a confession: gaming is probably the one area of tech that I pay the least attention to. I have this sense that if I start playing, I may *never* stop - so it’s easier to just avoid it entirely. That said, you would have to be living under a rather large rock to have not heard about the “epic” battle between Apple and Epic Games. 

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#techtopic

The global mobile gaming industry is set to hit $76.7billion this year (up 12% from last year and 10% from the year before). There are 1.36billion users who play mobile games, and mobile games account for 33% of all app downloads, 74% of consumer spend and 10% of all time spent in-app. 

What do all these stats tell us? This fight between Epic Games and Apple/Google is a war of control over who receives the dollars: those who create the content vs those who own the access portal for getting to the content to consumers. And it’s a big chunk of change they are fighting over if 74% of mobile consumer spend is on gaming -- and Apple/Google get a 30% cut of all those transactions. The 30% helps A/G build the rails and maintain some semblance of order & rules to help consumers have better, safer experiences with apps. It makes sense for A/G to charge a % fee to Epic and any other app-maker who would like to appear in their app portals -- the big questions are whether 30% is too high and whether charging that much is stifling competition/business growth for app-makers.  

This is a very uncomfortable place for the Apple brand and its employees -- Apple is known for its legendary 1984 ad which pitted them as the ‘David’ to IBM’s Goliath. Epic smartly poked at that recently, placing themselves as the ‘David’ to Apple’s Goliath in a parody ad. 

And now Apple seems to be forced to decide between being the upstart who “thinks differently” and the trusted “keeper of privacy” -- two brand identities which are unlikely to co-exist for too much longer.

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#neverforget

I was living in New York City in the fall of 2001. I was at my desk in midtown, right across from Grand Central, when the first plane hit the towers. It was an awful day. Working at a company that helped laid-off workers find new jobs, we had multiple clients who became stranded when all transport stopped and were unable to call anyone as phone lines were overloaded. That day, AOL IM became a lifeline to connect with friends & family as it was one of the few communication tools that kept working. That day was a defining moment for so many, and in a similar way to the pandemic now, it helped accelerate the evolution of tech communication tools and the bifurcation of our society. I have hope that new tools & approaches are coming to help us mend this rift. I appreciated this article on the topic of how primitive our communication tools were in 2001: Pagers, Pay Phones, and Dialup: How We Communicated on 9/11

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