https://retiari.us/categories/leadership/ Recent content in Leadership on Alex Maestretti Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 13 Sep 2018 22:31:21 +0800 https://retiari.us/books/who/ Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:37:03 -0700 https://retiari.us/books/who/ Who was given to me by a friend of mine who is a partner at a venture firm. They have been using this to grow their practice, and giving it to all their CEOs. The text lays out a solid strategy for hiring ‘A players’ into your organization. It provides a set of steps that address many of the shortcomings in hiring that I have witnessed in organizations, in terms of lack of investment and rigor in the hiring process. Too often hiring managers just dust off the last job description they used, wait for HR to send some resumes, and then make a hiring decision based on gut. The authors lay out a much better approach, and break it into Sourcing, Selecting, and Selling, which are the same basic phases that I have written about for my hiring approach. It is a quick read with some good details, but there are of course summaries available that capture the broad outline well. Sourcing starts with a rigorous evaluation of your needs for that particular role, all too often folks just start hiring without understanding the specific needs of the role. Hire specialists, not generalists. Sourcing includes all your personnel’s resources for networking. https://retiari.us/books/fooled_by_random/ Sat, 22 Jun 2019 14:37:03 -0700 https://retiari.us/books/fooled_by_random/ While focused on investment banking there are many generally applicable concepts from Fooled by Random. The basic idea is that far more of our lives, our successes and failures, are dominated by chance than we care to admit, or are even able to perceive. Survivorship bias plays an outsized role in how society celebrates success. The hero worship around the rich and famous incorrectly ascribes the majority of their success to skill or intelligence or hard work or other traits that we claim to hold worthy; while the reality is they likely have some of those traits but no more so than the many others who did not get that pivotal first role, or whose company did not time their product market fit as fortuitously. While the societal implications of this survivor bias are interesting, especially in the age of social media and widespread feelings of inadequacy, more relevant to security is the trading strategy he proposes, wherein one seeks to make small gains during normal events while protecting yourself from going bust on unexpected events, or better yet capitalize on ‘impossible’ events to make large returns. He is highly critical of the value of historical data in predicting future performance. https://retiari.us/books/the_advantage/ Sat, 22 Jun 2019 14:37:03 -0700 https://retiari.us/books/the_advantage/ This title is extremely popular with Netflix leadership. The first hit on Google for a good summary delivers. The overall argument of the book is that the best advantage you can give your business is organizational health, a concept that, to me, resonated as consistency. Consistency between the values your organization espouses and those that it lives, as well as consistency in the understanding of what your organization’s purpose and priorities are - particularly across your leaders. Inconsistency in any of these leads to politics, dysfunction, confusion, and bureaucracy. The meat of the text provides a framework for achieving consistency (or clarity) with six questions, and explores each to some depth, providing pointers to the author’s other work to flesh out those areas. There is also a lead in with some thoughts on the importance and suggested structure of a leadership team, and text wraps up with suggested cadence for meetings to maintain momentum and clarity once established. The six questions are:  Why do we exist? What motivated the creation of the organization? How do we behave? This establishes the values of the organization, and includes a good discussion of core vs aspirational and minimum values.  What do we do? https://retiari.us/books/essentialism/ Mon, 17 Jun 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/books/essentialism/ I already agreed strongly with the thesis going in. There is also a Netflix original on Minimalists worth watching. Everything you say yes to is a de facto no to something else, possibly something you are already doing. Pareto Principle from 1896. 20% of our efforts create 80% of our results. Most things we do are superfluous and should be deprioritized in favor of high impact activities. The trick is in identifying which are the 20%, which takes time and space to consider. It helps to have a concrete and inspirational goal to refer to. Anything not advancing that goal you gracefully say no to. If it is not advancing the goal you halt activities - zero based budgeting, don’t be trapped by sunk costs or ownership biases (we value things we own more than we would pay to acquire them). If you are not 90% sure you should take on a task, or hire someone, then that is a no. It is important to protect your health and not over extend. It is important to prioritize your family and relationships - set boundaries. Build buffer and slack into your schedule, but keep a queue of things to work when you find extra time. https://retiari.us/books/high_output_management/ Mon, 10 Jun 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/books/high_output_management/ The book opens with an introduction to manufacturing (managing a breakfast factory) and suggests a framework for managing knowledge work based on the same principals. The correlations are imperfect, but it is a useful optic. Part II focuses on how to manage by looking for the best leverage in improving your team and adjacent team’s output. Some tips on meetings and a good taxonomy of types of meetings and how to best utilize them. An interesting overview of hybrid (matrixed) organizations, some of the pitfalls but ultimately the necessity of them and how to maneuver in them for best impact. He uses a sports analogy which resonated with me, given Netflix similar approach for high performance teams. A great section on modes of control and when to employ different management styles based on a concept of Task-Relevant Maturity. “Put them on a racetrack” the power of competitive spirit. References Parkinson’s Law which is one of my favorites. Has elements of Essentialism, finding the highest leverage activities and deprioritizing the rest. A bit dated in the performance and promotion sections, defends the Peter Principle as inevitable. In the technology sector at least we are beginning to unwind the societal pressures to move high performing technical people into management as the only outlet for career progression. https://retiari.us/books/benedictine_rule_of_leadership/ Thu, 30 May 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/books/benedictine_rule_of_leadership/ Written in AD 530 the Benedictine order survives to this day in no small part thanks to the this management guide. While much has changed in the world around us, human nature has remained stubbornly consistent, and thus this book relevant. There are three parts and 15 total rules that make up the framework. Many familiar themes make an appearance: provide alignment on a common goal, hire the best, recognize merit over seniority, devolve power to individuals, encourage debate (questioning status quo), insist on ethical behavior. Leadership is done by example and with humility. A couple of items don’t resonate as strongly in a modern environment: stability is one of the tenets with members making a lifetime commitment. While a degree of stability is necessary to encourage taking risks, lifelong commitment would tend to limit the vital cross pollination of disciplines required for success today, there is a great deal more specialization than in the sixth century. The section on discipline reads like a PIP. While again, smart risk taking is to be encouraged through a sense of security and fairness (a-political analysis of failure) , changing underlying personality or performance through a formal process is generally less effective than making smart cuts. https://retiari.us/books/first_break_all_the_rules/ Sat, 25 May 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/books/first_break_all_the_rules/ My main take away was: play to your employees’ strengths rather than trying to correct weaknesses. You cannot change the essential talents a person possesses, so enhance them and manage around the shortcomings, or find them a better fit. Provides an ordered list of 12 questions to gauge the health or your workplace. Discusses four key activities for a manager: select for talent (over experience, intellect or work ethic), define the right outcomes (context not control), focus on strengths, and find the right fit (person to role based on talents, traditional career ‘progression’ can work against this). https://retiari.us/books/army_leadership_manual/ Mon, 20 May 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/books/army_leadership_manual/ A number of familiar themes and some that don’t apply as readily (physical fitness as a criteria for leadership). It is interesting that even in a very top down organization, where a commander’s orders have the force of law, there is a strong emphasis on empowering individuals with the resources and authority to accomplish their assigned mission, rather than control their every action. It is interesting to see many similar traits and approaches suggested at Netflix and in a military manual - candid communication for instance. The section on developing others is good and an area we beginning to explore more extensively at Netflix. https://retiari.us/posts/joy_of_feedback/ Wed, 15 May 2019 04:37:03 +0000 https://retiari.us/posts/joy_of_feedback/ Feedback is both a personal skill to master and a team sport. This post touches on feedback’s place at Netflix, how a team can leverage it to their advantage, and individually what we can do to become more effective at giving and receiving it. https://retiari.us/posts/oncall_devs/ Mon, 04 Dec 2017 12:02:31 +0000 https://retiari.us/posts/oncall_devs/ In hiring for my team I sometimes get questions about on call. I wanted to share some context on how I view on call for our team vs a dedicated engineering team. To the question of whether a role is a responder role or a developer role: It is both. I feel strongly that successful engineers solve their own problems so I am looking for responder-developers that can play both positions. In the larger more traditional SOC/SIRT teams they will often carve off engineering as a specialization mostly to ease hiring as they scale. The downside is the dedicated tools team can loose touch with the operational aspects of the role and start building things the ops team doesn’t need, even as they get more and more mired in requirements documentation and program oversight. The Netflix model, whether in security or building the UI, is that every engineer owns their program from start to finish; so you develop the requirements, you decide what to work, you build it and you operate it. Everyone is ‘on call’ and this aligns the incentives to write good clean functional code; when it breaks you get paged. I know many folks coming out of a SOC/SIRT role at a more traditional company are looking to leave on call behind, but that is mostly due to the type of on call they had to endure.