leadership

  • One of the things I have come to believe strongly is that culture is real; it’s also incredibly important, and it’s something that many people don’t understand at all. It’s both an easy, natural consequence of your company’s evolution and something that can quickly become a problem if you don’t tend to it.

    Consciously guiding the culture of your team is part of a leader’s job, and to do this well, you need to understand what it means in the first place. So what is culture? Culture is the generally unspoken shared rules of a community.

    — The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier

  • The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the people inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to find new ways of doing things.

    — Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

  • ‘Story’ is defined as ‘a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader’. This limiting definition sells ‘story’ short.

    Traditionally, in business and career development, we’ve primarily used our stories as communication tactics — ways to get people to see us — while overlooking the opportunity to leverage them to help us see ourselves more clearly.

    Far from just being a way to differentiate us, our stories can help us to decide, plan, lead, sell, inspire, influence, persuade, rally, create value, build trust, foster connection and succeed by building better, more purposeful organisations and lives. Our stories can shape who we are.

    — Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa

  • To transcend means “to go beyond,” but this need not compel us to adopt an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (such as the spiritual level) to be not of this world.

    We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Although I have been called a materialist, I regard myself as a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.

    Since the material stuff of which we are made turns over quickly, it is the transcendent power of our patterns that persists. The power of patterns to endure goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems, such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that support life and intelligence.

    — The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

  • I think of product culture along two dimensions.

    The first dimension is whether the company can consistently innovate to come up with valuable solutions for their customers. This is what product discovery is all about.

    The second dimension is execution. It doesn’t matter how great the ideas are if you can’t get a productized, shippable version delivered to your customers. This is what product delivery is all about.

    — INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan

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