Resources for product teams from industry experts.
Expertise is the inventory of knowledge and experience you possess on a particular subject. You’re not necessarily born with it; you develop it, research it, thrive on learning as much about your subject as you possibly can. The greater your expertise, the greater your potential to teach, the stronger and more productive you can be as a leader.
— The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, et al.
…the process of strategy then reiterates through these steps over and over again, constantly evolving. In other words, strategy is not a discrete analytical event — something decided, say, in a meeting of top managers based on the best numbers and analysis available at the time. Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process. Managing it is very hard — the deliberate strategy and the new emerging opportunities fight for resources.
On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing. It may be challenging and unruly, but this is the process by which almost all companies have developed a winning strategy.
— How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, et al.
The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it’s really all about the people. Sure, there are plenty of stories in the press about the industry’s young geniuses, but surprisingly few about its management practices. What the mainstream press misses is that Silicon Valley’s success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees. Here, talent really is the most valuable resource, and employees are treated accordingly.
The most successful Silicon Valley businesses succeed because they use the alliance to recruit, manage, and retain an incredibly talented team of entrepreneurial employees.
— The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, et al.
When you strip away all the rational mechanics of decision making — the generation of options, the weighing of information — what’s left at the core is emotion. What drives you? What kind of person do you aspire to be? What do you believe is best for your family in the long run? (Business leaders ask: What kind of organization do you aspire to run? What’s best for your team in the long run?) Those are emotional questions — speaking to passions and values and beliefs — and when you answer them, there’s no “rational machine” underneath that is generating your perspective. It’s just who you are and what you want. The buck stops with emotion.
— Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
I would never write anything that suggests the path to success is a continuum of positive, even euphoric experiences — that if you do all the right things everything will work out. Frequently it doesn’t; often you crash and burn. This is part and parcel of pursuing and achieving very ambitious goals. It is also one of the profound lessons I have learned during my career, namely, that even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control.
Rather, it’s like quicksilver — fleeting and elusive, not something you can summon at will even under the best circumstances. Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called failure.
— The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, et al.
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