The Weekly Hagakure #22
"You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are." - Anna Quindlen
Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”
This blew my mind, because it is so true. And it applies so well to leadership at fast-growing startups. To me, it speaks to the ability of keeping your cool when everything is falling apart (“those around going crazy”) and still be able to deliver on the fundamentals (“the average thing”) that keep you going.
I wrote a little blog post about what I believe these fundamentals are. In a day and age where everyone is racing somewhere, I’d say it’s never been more valuable to get the basics of human collaboration right. And this week’s book recommendation is another key piece of that puzzle.
Onwards to this week’s goodies.
3 Articles
✍️ Building Great Engineering Teams, with Gergely Orosz
Exploring the interface between Product and Engineering, and how to build world-class Engineering teams are two interrelated topics that I'm passionate about. Being an eternal student, I love to hear what other practitioners have to say about it. So I had a nice chat with Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager at Uber, the highlights of which you can now read in this post.
✍️ Learning to love meta productivity
As Nickolas Means, Director of Engineering at GitHub, puts it, “transitioning to management isn't a promotion, it's a shift to a brand new career”. Not enough folks understand this going in, but they do feel the pain and disorientation shortly after. This post is a great antidote to that, particularly in how it takes inspiration from well-known team processes and applies it to helping individual managers understand the impact of their day-to-day work.
✍️ Leading senior engineers: lessons learned
One of the most frightening things for many novice engineering managers is the prospect of leading engineers much more experienced and senior than themselves. It's understandable, but also why reading Adrienne Lowe's take on effectively leading senior engineers should be mandatory reading for every EM out there — new and seasoned.
2 Videos
📺 Keeping Your Sanity as a Founder
Khalid Halim is one of my favourite people that I've never met, and I wish I could have him as a coach. The next best thing is devouring everything he writes or says. This fireside chat with a16z's Matt Levy is almost an hour of nourishing brain food, almost all of it applying to any leader, not just to founders and CEOs. I keep coming back to this chat periodically, it’s that good.
Should “best practices” always be followed? Why are they even the best in the first place? Dan Abramov pushes us to ponder these questions by illuminating the challenges — both technical and social — of code abstraction. Trade-offs mean we're trading one set of problems for another... so which set makes more sense to deal with in a given context?
1 Book
📚 Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude, by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin
Not so long ago, solitude (not to be confused with loneliness) was easy to attain. But that’s been taken away by technology. Which is no wonder since the brightest minds of our generation have spent considerable time and effort figuring out how to get us addicted to it. The result is that we’re always on.
By every conceivable metric, though, we live a (much) wealthier life than 50 years ago. In the United States, according to the Russell Sage Foundation, the median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 2019 it was over $62,000. This allowed for a lifestyle that previously just wasn’t possible.
But we are paying a heavy toll. Knowledge work largely made this possible but that’s work that happens in our heads — and we never leave our heads. Work never really stops.
Lead Yourself First is about keeping our sanity through reclaiming solitude and acknowledging that you can’t lead others adequately if you can’t lead yourself first. That’s why, for example, Jeff Weiner talks about the importance of scheduling nothing, and Bill Gates goes on his famous “think weeks”.
Using the stories of multiple inspiring historical figures (Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, to name a couple) as backdrop, authors Kethledge and Erwin portray solitude as the main character: what it is, why it matters, and how to leverage it. As an example, I loved the idea of thinking of solitude as who we are minus the many inputs we are exposed to — which we can (and absolutely must) consciously control.
This is a great read if you’re mindful that there’s an inherent issue here and you are looking for ways to push back. And if you’re a leader at work, I’d go ahead and say this is essential reading. Myself, I come back regularly to this one, both for intellectual and, particularly, inspiration value. And what better solitude activity than reading a good book?
🙌🏽 Thank you for reading! Enjoyed this week’s edition? Have feedback on how I can make this more valuable to you? I’d love to hear it — my DMs are open on Twitter or just write a comment below.
✍️ Find some of my own ramblings on tech and org stuff over at The Evolutionary Manager.
👉 You can also follow me on Twitter @prla