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)

• Fixing fitness apps
• Building badass users
• The illusion of product-market fit
• Venture capital vs. community capital