Reading List

"If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved."

"It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck."

"He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation."

"There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets."

"Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

"Don't start negatively and don't start small. People will often focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty."

"Today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century. The beginning era of technology, where new challengers were started every year, has come to an end; however, that does not mean the impact of technology is somehow diminished: it in fact means the impact is only getting started."

"Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry."

"I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones."

"A manager's job is to build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently."

"When I have a problem that I want to solve quickly and cheaply, I start thinking about process design. A problem I want to solve permanently and we have time to go slow? That’s a good time to evolve your culture. However, if process is too weak a force, and culture too slow, then organizational design lives between those two."

"Ultimately, the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens."

"Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal."

"Some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience… twenty times in a row."

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"

"A Disaster is the end result of poor management. When your employee believes totally losing their shit is a productive strategy, it’s because they believe it’s the only option left for making anything change."

"Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation."

"A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence."

"The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it."

"When I asked Sam Shillace, who ran Gmail and Google Apps for four years, about the costliest mistake he's seen engineers make, his response was, 'Trying to rewrite stuff from scratch -- that's the cardinal sin.'"

"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity."

"The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies"

"The single most important thing [you can do] is to shift [your] internal stance from 'I understand' to 'Help me understand.' Everything else follows from that."

"Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities."

"The only way to sustain growth and avoid hitting the growth wall is to have a continuous supply of winning moves. At any time, you should be working on one to three."

"Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible."

"Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame."

"People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool--even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs"

"To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from 'What information do I need to convey?' to 'What questions do I want my audience to ask?'"

"Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done."

"The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. The leader acts as an 'Eyes-On, Hands-Off' enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates."

"Highly successful people seemed to get there by breaking through limitations of how their jobs were defined—by conceiving and doing extra things above and around their job descriptions."

"People almost never change without first feeling understood."

"Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think."

"We only get value from finishing projects, and getting a project over the finish line is the magical moment it goes from risk to leverage. Time spent getting work finished is always time well spent."

"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."

"Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it."

"Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person."

"He recalls his old group of buddies from Yahoo who went on to become great successes in tech, including Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, and Andrew Braccia, a venture capitalist at Accel who invested in Slack. “All of them are men,” Butterfield says. “It’s not a conspiracy, but it’s also not a coincidence."

"You can make up your own ruler! As long as that ruler is consistently being used over and over again. This is why I say it's important for people to have A framework... not necessarily any one framework. And that they come back to it. - Quentin Clark"

"That is what happens in Ruinous Empathy—you’re so fixated on not hurting a person’s feelings in the moment that you don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run."

"A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members."

"The only commonality we could find in extraordinary leaders is that they are extremely effective at a few things."

"Transition failures happen when new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them."

"Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are."

"You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you."