Why Being Great Is So Much Harder Than People Realize
Key Points: To get a quick start, competitors first copy the best practices of the top performers. Once they hit the best practice frontier, they then focus on experimentation. These experiments are often informed by best practices from other fields and new tools. In other words, they follow Pablo Picasso’s advice of “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Most experiments fail, but the ones that succeed become best practices and are copied by others. The body of knowledge that one must master in order to be great increases. Knowledge is always becoming outdated. However, occasionally, completely new paradigms arise where large bundles of old best practices become obsolete and early adopters create a bundle of new practices that create a new paradigm.
8 minute read ^ADJ
Track and Facilitate Your Engineers’ Flow States In This Simple Way
Resolved to never again lose a great developer unnecessarily, Maxwell turned her engineer’s mind to the gaps in her management tooling. She was missing a way to turn emotion into data, and she found it in an unexpectedly fuzzy place: the age-old concept of flow.
8 minute read - it is amazing what we can achieve when in flow, whilst targeted at engineers all the lesson's can be applied to your work ^ADJ
Warren Buffett: The Three Things I Look For in a Person
Students often go to visit Warren Buffett. And when they do, he often plays a little game on them. He asks each student to pick a classmate. Not just any classmate, but the classmate you would choose if you could have 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life. Which classmate would you pick and why?
3 minute read - some great reminders ^ADJ
Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year
Key Point: Many of the world’s largest economies are in a prolonged productivity slump. In Europe and the U.S., stagnating incomes and diminished economic hopes are feeding a growing appetite for protectionism and spawning divisive, us-versus-them political forces. While some hold out hope that robots, genomics, and the internet of things will one day yield a productivity bonanza, we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance.
5 minute read - some interesting case studies on reducing management layers and correlation to performance - food for thought ^ADJ
Jim Simons, the Numbers King
Algorithms made him a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good.
20 minute read - covering his time and founding of Rennaisance Capital and the foundation he is building - truly impressive ^ADJ
Don’t Let Your Brain’s Defense Mechanisms Thwart Effective Feedback
The human brain is highly protective, leading us to sense and respond to danger automatically. This is quite useful when the threat is real, be it a hungry bear or a livid boss. But often we perceive more danger than there really is, and that can be debilitating.