Deviant Abstraction

1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!
2. Indifference is as important as passion.
3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can’t have both at the same time.
4. Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.
5. Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.
7. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.
8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.
9. The best test of a person’s character is how he or she treats those with less power.
10. The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?
11. The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.
12. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated.
13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.
14. It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?
15. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity.

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Telecommuting is the new way of working. It suits better employees since they can spend more time at home. It suits better employers since they pay for a result and not anymore for a specific slice of time. Employers and employees spare money since one pays less office space and the others spare commuting costs. It can be partial (only a few days) to complete (”irl” meeting happens only a few times a year).

Telecommuting does not enforce a new organisation. Usually it is the same, a little bit more rigourous and supported by tons of low cost IT (e.g. VPN, Intranet). There is only one to three days a week in the workplace; the others are at home. Meetings and main communication happen during those workplace time. ((A totally telecommuting organisation requires a deeper organisational shift.)) This kind of telecommutign is widely accepted and practiced from center operators to executives.

To my surprise, some companies (luckily not mine) refuse to allow telecommuting at all. What I do not understand in this case is why they hire people since they obviously do not trust them. I even do not understand why employee now accept such a disrespectful policies.

How to hire people for a startup position? Here is I think the definitive reference.

Those advices are excellent for startups. Less for companies having passed that stage.

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This is simply one of the best career advice’s post I have read so far.

Excellent questions (as always with Guy) and insightful answers. They come from Penelope Trunk. I have actually added her book on my Amazon wishlist.

Having looked recently for a job for the first time in my life, it sounds right with what I have experienced and what I have felt.

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This interesting post makes good points on how to handle time. This is of course very specific to the funding business but is easy to apply in all fields.

I particularly like his classification of commitment: lead/active/passive.

Extending a little bit his thoughts, one key question is to ask to your team’s member which category are they in.

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A few things to add/substract, but most of the points are there.

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I have witnessed nearly all of those behaviours. It works like magic.

Management is hard so it is really easy to laugh at it.

Different people need different management strategies. For instance, between an operationnal marketing company or a high-tech startup, you do not ask the same from your employee. You do not want the same behaviour.

How To Make Your Employees Quit

Why Top Employees Quit

In his excellent column, Cringely just told us he is turning next week to blog (instead of Precambrien HTML), which is in itself a great news.

He also explains why YouTube is actually profitable and how they were so smart not to tell anyone (as the saying “To live happy, live hidden”).

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From Scott Adam’s blog.

My experience tells me this is true, even though the rationale behind might not.

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I have witnessed nearly all of those behaviours. It works like magic.

Management is hard so it is really easy to laugh at it.

Different people need different management strategies. For instance, between an operationnal marketing company or a high-tech startup, you do not ask the same from your employee. You do not want the same behaviour.

How To Make Your Employees Quit

Why Top Employees Quit