The end of the year is a natural time for retrospection. When I started this blog, more than a year and a half ago, I aimed to cover a pretty broad domain, where the predominant filter, beyond this loose boundary, was sharing content that passed my personal bar of being share-worthy. But when I took a step back and looked at all the content I shared this year, four distinct themes emerged. Here are this year’s blog posts, categorized by these themes:
Org and Role design
- Let 1,000 flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them
- Steve’s blank innovation cycle
- Taking the mystery out of scaling a company
- The vice president of business and people operations
- Organizational debt
- Holacracy or Humacracy?
- Entropy crushers
- Conway’s law
- Organizational systems need architects too
Systems and Processes
- Why strategy execution unravels
- What’s your operating rhythm?
- The cultural manifesto
- Benchmarks and guardrails
- Work Rules!
- Getting to yes
- Technical recruiting is broken
- Corporate policy and Reg 2.0
- Strategy as Heuristic
Culture, Values and Principles
- The new model for scaling a company
- Privacy and purpose
- Taming complexity with reversability
- Rubber bands, efficiency-responsiveness and motivation-coordination
- Vindictive protectiveness
- When metaphors backfire – ackoff’s 4 types of systems
- O-rings and the myth of the 10x engineer
- Giving away your legos
- Applying the universal scalability law to organizations
- Open space ?!
- Spotify
- It’s a pie not a queue
- Learning from failure
- The three types of clarity
- Engineering serendipity
Leadership
- Problem and context, even over solution
- Doctor, hospital administrator or policy maker?
- Turn the ship around
- A leader’s guide to deciding
- Decomposing leadership – the executive trinity
- From McGregor to Snowden through Stevens
- 2 Mins on focus
- Leading without coding
- It’s not a promotion – it’s a career change
- Leadership agility
- 10,000 hours with Reid Hoffman
- The Bezos BI interview
Misc
(No need to force content into a theme where one does not naturally exist)