Hiring First. Everything Else Second.
Excellence in organizations starts and ends with hiring. Most leaders agree in principle. Very few behave as though they believe it.
Category: Clarity of Thought
Load-Bearing Terms
Effective leaders master the skill of choosing memorable terms, defining them precisely, and using them with unreasonable consistency. I call these load-bearing terms: words and phrases that hold up part of the structure. Remove one and something falls down.
Program: You Keep Using that Word, I Don’t Think You Know What it Means
I’ve heard “program” used to mean everything from a team to a project plan to a portfolio to lines of code. At some point, someone has to stop and say: you keep using that word—I don’t … Read more
Mechanisms In Action: How Tech Giants Scale “Good Intentions”
Mechanisms are complete processes—owned by a leader, built around a tool or ritual, broadly adopted, and continually inspected and improved—that make the right behavior the default. Rather than hoping people do the right thing, great leaders engineer processes that guarantee it.
Your Leadership Priorities Are Probably Backwards (And How to Fix Them)
Here’s a simple yet powerful exercise, the CBTO Stack Rank, designed to force you into uncomfortable clarity about where you really stand as a leader.
Exorcise the Ghost of Mediocrity
Every great org starts the same way: a handful of people with conviction, urgency, and the energy of a shared mission. The best ones are driven by clarity of purpose, crisp principles, and a team that … Read more
The First Rule of Skills
The first rule of skills is simple: know the skill exists. That sounds obvious, but most people—especially growing leaders—aren’t intentional about skills. They focus on outcomes. Goals. KPIs. But they don’t stop to ask: What specific … Read more
How To: Write a Working Backwards Doc
This post introduces the concept of Working Backward (WB) narratives and formalizes the mechanism through which a company can drive product development. The WB mechanism is a complete process designed to create a “virtuous cycle” that … Read more
No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization.
Prioritization means making decisions that focus energy and resources on a few things that are at the top of the list, and starving things that are lower in the list. The most important aspect of prioritization … Read more
Don’t Sell Ideas – Debate Them
The practice of selling ideas in meetings can lead to misalignment and superficial agreement. When the focus is on persuasion rather than understanding, team members may agree without fully grasping the implications or having their concerns … Read more
The Secret to Delivering Outsized Results
In 35+ years of building companies and organizations in multiple industries, I’ve concluded most leadership books are great examples of survivorship bias. I’ve learned a lot from many of these books. But none of them really … Read more
Announcing Kindel Leadership Development
In 2020 started hosting my Free and Open Office Hours as a way to give back and meet more people in the space industry. As I became useful to those in the space industry and gained … Read more
Biases and Fallacies Lead to Smol Thinking
All human beings are prone to cognitive biases and fallacies that influence our thinking and decision-making processes. These biases and fallacies can be sneaky and hard to detect, but it’s important that we are aware of … Read more
Make the Routine, Routine – Blow up Dunbar’s Number
As fast-growing organizations approach Dumbar’s number, they either become forever mediocre or they adapt and become excellent at scaling (in addition to being excellent at delivering customer value). The key differentiator is making the routine, routine by implementing cadence-based mechanisms, which I call Routines.
Breaking Down Innovation & Invention
A friend recently asked me if I had a Lexicon & Taxonomy for Innovation and Invention. While I do, I realized I’ve never written it down. Here’s my first stab; using the Customer, Business, Organization, and … Read more
Virtuous Cycles, Platforms, Flywheels, Snowballs, and Tidal Waves
I’m working on writing down my thoughts on space. I’ve learned a ton since deciding space would be my next mission. Some pretty clear thoughts are forming, and whenever that happens, I’ve trained myself to write, … Read more
From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to Space…
Last week I joined my good friend Den Delimarsky and his colleague Courtny Cotten hosted me on The Work Item podcast. “In this episode, we dive a bit deeper into Charlie’s approach to product ideation and design, discuss … Read more
Find the Crux by Debating Excellence
No, don’t debate excellence; become excellent at debating. “It is better to debate a decision without settling it than settling a decision without debating it.” – Joseph Joubert Vigorous debate is critical to clear thinking in … Read more
How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)
Great leaders don’t let changes happen to them. Instead, they become skilled at driving change. Leaders effective in driving change are known as agents of change or change agents. This post documents a tool called D x V x F > R that will enable you to become a great agent of change.
Do Your Job – Don’t Use Placeholder Text
If you are a UX designer, Software Developer, or Product Manager, and you use placeholder text anywhere but where it’s impossible to know what the content will be (user supplied) then you are doing it wrong. … Read more