TWH#S2: What I Read This Week

The Sunday Edition #2

Welcome to another TWH Sunday Edition. 🙌

Grab your favorite beverage and ease into the great reads below. 🙂

Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

✍️ Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups

(Jade Rubick • 8 min read)

Super insightful first post in a series by Jade Rubick on how they build manager support groups back in the day at NewRelic. “Mini-Ms” are groups of managers that meet regularly to share challenges they face. They create an apprenticeship environment, provide multiple perspectives, and help managers clarify their thinking. They also provide a support network, help retain and attract managers, and create a management culture.

✍️ Your Best Work

(Rands in Repose • 4 min read)

A story of advice from a mediocre manager that turned out to be a lifelong lesson everyone should learn and practice. Michael Lopp (aka Rands) encourages the reader to focus on the one task in front of them—this person, this meeting, this design—and to absolutely avoid any distractions. Focusing on one thing leads to greater understanding, and is the precursor to doing one’s best work.

✍️ The organizational secrets of the Large Hadron Collider

(Michele Zanini • 3 min read)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operated by CERN is an incredibly complex machine, requiring the coordination of thousands of people from around the world. Michele Zanini, co-author of Humanocracy, gives an overview of how CERN learned to deal adequately with that level of complexity without requiring a command-and-control, top-down structure. In fact, in many ways, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to manage with it.

✍️ Why Your One-on-One’s Should Probably Be Longer

(Don Neufeld • 5 min read)

The perils of “context switching” are often discussed, but here we learn of an important distinction: major and minor context switching. While both have costs, major context switches are a much higher tax. Don Neufeld explains the difference, and provides some actionable advice on how to put this insight to work in our day-to-day scheduling.

✍️ The Biggest Threat To Pioneering Firms Are Its Own Leaders

(Joost Minnaar • 6 min read)

When we observe current management practices, it’s hard to predict the effect they’ll have down the line, and therefore succumbing to “short-termism” becomes the rule. This piece by Joost Minnaar mostly quotes an insider’s perspective on the recent Southwest Airlines debacle. It’s a sobering real-life tale of how what I call “management by spreadsheet” is a woefully inadequate way of running businesses, and how a change in leadership can bring down even the best of companies.

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That’s it for this week’s Sunday Edition. I wish you an interesting week ahead! 🙏