The Simple Plan for People That Want To Solve Big Problems
[This is an excerpt from chapter 12, of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation] The Simple Plan If you want…
Category: Management
Why Culture Always Wins (An Excerpt from The Year Without Pants)
[This is an excerpt from The Year Without Pants, An Amazon.com best book of the year] Chapter 4: Why Culture…
A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”
I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of Airbnb…
How To Convince Your Boss To Try New Things
No matter what organization you are in, people in management roles tend to want to change as little as possible…
What If Managers Didn’t Get Paid More?
One of the many surprises from The Year Without Pants is that Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, doesn’t pay employees more…
How to transition a team to remote work
Vivek Haldar wrote this thoughtful review of The Year Without Pants. His primary critique is there wasn’t enough focus on…
My letter to the Next Microsoft CEO (BusinessWeek)
BusinessWeek asked me to use my experience at WordPress.com to offer advice to the future CEO of Microsoft: Recently,…
Why Consultants Should Get “Real” Jobs (HBR)
My latest post for Harvard Business is about why consultants should return to traditional full-time work now and then:…
How to survive and thrive with multiple stakeholders
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 40 votes, this week’s…
How to make smart project decisions: the checklist
Yesterday I was working on a complex project and found myself stuck. I was out of time and had…
How To Work With Stupid People
I wrote the popular essay How To Manage Smart People years ago, and often heard the feedback: “advice on smart people is…
How Do You Build a Culture of Healthy Debate?
From Monday’s pile of questions reader Ev Larsen asked: Assumptions have an unnerving way of becoming facts and received wisdom…
When to quit working for a bully?
From Monday’s question pile an anonymous reader asked: After five years of consulting I accepted a full time job with a…
When in Doubt, Make A List
My favorite trick when overwhelmed is to make a list. Lists do many good things for our psychology, memory…
The Idiot Ratio
Every organization has a ratio of idiots to non-idiots. This is the idiot ratio. This is a harsh, shallow,…
How to Get Better Feedback
Stacey Hanke asked on twitter: Why is it that when I ask for feedback, it’s never constructive. It’s always…
What work traditions need to go away?
One theme of my book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work, is questioning aging work…
In Defense of Remote work (and Marissa Mayer)
Recently Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer decreed that working from home would be banned at the company. In a company…
On What Your Culture Really Says
There’s an excellent rant on startup culture making the rounds called What Your Culture Really Says (archive link)by Shanley Kane.…
How do you hire for culture?
Bob Sutton wrote bravely about the No Asshole Rule, and how talent should never excuse destructive behavior. It’s a…