How to hire for Director+ roles?
Hiring folks in leadership roles is very challenging. One difficulty is that almost every candidate who gets to that level is generally good at communication, charismatic in their demeanor, and well trained to say the right things to get the job. Nonetheless, there is a huge difference between how people interview and how they deliver once they get hired.
^ADJ: Hiring well is critical for sustained growth - and it is probably one of the most challenging part of the job. This article frames up some good thinking on hiring and process, and some reminders about getting the basics right, along with some good practical ideas to make the hiring process better,
An architect's guide to DevOps pipelines: Continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD)
One of the most approachable books written about the DevOps process is The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. A reference page in the back of the book explains the software deployment frequencies of different companies. It states that a typical enterprise releases software only once every nine months. In contrast, Netflix, releases software updates thousands of times per day due to its well-constructed DevOps process.
^ADJ: For most readers, the article content can be ignored until you get to the table that shows the frequency of software releases by various companies - this is why I included this article - think about the competitive advantage of a firm that is organised around releasing software multiple times a day, compared to how long your organisation takes to make change and introduce new ways of working.
I know what most of you are going to say, we are not a "tech" company, we are different, and my pushback would be, I bet accommodation providers wish they thought differently versus AirBnB as a sector example - worth thinking about, especially if your competitors are not doing anything massively different to you but engineering their systems with massive improvements across all factors of the business that create competitive advantage from internal systems to employee experience.
5 More Helpful Things to Say Than "Calm Down"
n all my years as a psychologist specializing in anxiety, and as a relentless observer of human interaction, I can't think of a single time where the words "Calm down!"—especially shouted in a voice that is itself tense—had the desired effect.
A thank you to Dr, Ian McCormick for passing on this article.
^ADJ: Some great tips, and one that I want to use more often is: "I am going to pause for a moment to slow things down."
Elad Blog: Back to the office
Prior to COVID, there were only 3 companies in tech that reached any real scale as remote first companies - Automattic, Gitlab, and Zapier [1]. During COVID companies were forced to work remote. Many companies are now going back into the office and companies are navigating this transition in real time.
^ADJ: Probably the most contentious issue around at the moment, so some good thinking about why, what you are trying to achieve, but most importantly, how do you actually create value - and what environment really supports that!
State backed cyber-attack exclusions
Market Bulletin from Lloyds: To set out Lloyd’s requirements for state-backed cyber-attack exclusions in standalone cyber-attack policies
^ADJ: I included this because this is a massive change and as a good reminder of how cyber security should be tightly interwoven into a firm's thinking about operations - too often, we are seeing it standalone.