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Why Nobody Can Copy Apple Horace Dediu has written another brilliant piece titled... 155.2k views
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The Job Decision Matrix Thinking clearly about what is important to you can be... 16.5k views
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Path To Green A Path To Green (PTG) is a clear, crisp, and complete s... 11.7k views
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You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong Most people think about their career trajectory as bein... 9.2k views
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STOP 0xC2 aka BAD_POOL_CALLER Blue Screen and bad memory My computer bluescreened with a STOP 0xC2, BAD_POOL_CAL... 7.5k views
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The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor Always have a plan. Always. A great, simple, framework... 7.2k views
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Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligate... 6.7k views
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Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts... 5.7k views
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Work Backwards From The Customer At the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developer Conference... 5.6k views
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Tenets Tenets are a few, carefully articulated guiding pr... 5.3k views
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Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins Tom’s Hardware is generally really solid. But they shou... 5.1k views
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Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO) CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + Organization 4.9k views
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One-Way and Two-Way Doors Effective decision-making starts with understanding; in... 4.1k views
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Be a Great Reader When an organization has a culture where the written wo... 3.9k views
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Paying Developers is A Bad Idea The companies that make the most profit are those who b... 3.8k views
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Category Archives: Clarity of Thought
Clear Narratives Show Instead of Tell
This is yet-another-post on the topic of Amazon-style “six-page memos,” aka Narratives. This post focuses on the mantra: “Great narratives show, they don’t tell.” When writing things you believe to be facts, ask yourself: How do I know? How can I qualify it? Then, qualify it in your words. Tell (Bad): The BMW E28 M5 is a rare car. Show (Good): Of the 722,328 E28 5-series sedans BMW built between 1981 and 1987, only 2,191 …Continue reading
Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
April 21, 2018
CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue reading
Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success
The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts. The idea is that a scout can only earn a particular merit badge (actually a patch that gets sewn onto a vest) by demonstrating mastery of the skill or ability defined by the badge. For example, a scout would only receive the “Firemanship” badge by clearly demonstrating, repeatedly, the ability to start fires without matches. Merit Badges can come in all sizes. A small …Continue reading
Attention is the Currency of Leadership
Great leaders optimize how they spend their attention. They are skilled at turning up the heat to get others to focus their attention on the right things at the right times. Attention is the currency of leadership, and each person has a fixed amount of attention to spend. “Leaders have a fixed amount of attention units they can spend in a day, week, or year. Are you spending yours on the right things?” (A mentor …Continue reading
Have a Plan
Yesterday someone asked me to share my thoughts on the secret to building excellent things. I summarized what I know as: “Put the customer first, have a plan, create a shared mission, get early victories, remove process, and make it fun.” – me, yesterday. This was the formula my cohorts that built the Windows Phone app platform used. It worked. This is what the small team that created www.milelogr.com did. “No battle was ever won …Continue reading
Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You
Leaders are often visionary “idea people”. The difference between success and failure is how good these leaders are at training their teams to say No. Idea People often forget they are disrupting their own teams by voicing their ideas. If leaders don’t learn and practice skills for controlling the flow of ideas, their teams will fail. When I was building home networking for Windows at Microsoft, I learned getting a team to a focused plan, …Continue reading
Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes
While in Amman Jordan last month, I had the opportunity to speak at Amman Tech Tuesdays, a local startup event held every month there. I was asked to talk about what I’ve learned in my career to an audience of about 500 geeks and entrepreneurs. I decided to talk about focus, a topic dear to my heart. The title of the talk is “Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes”. Below the video …Continue reading
The Job Decision Matrix
Thinking clearly about what is important to you can be hard, but without clarity on what is important to you making a job, the decision is fraught with danger. As I have traveled along my personal career trajectory I created a tool that has helped me with this. I call it the Job Decision Matrix. The Job Decision Matrix will help identify what is actually important to you at this point in your career. Gaining …Continue reading
You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong
Most people think about their career trajectory as being like a bell-curve or that of a cannon ball fired from a cannon. Something like this: For 99% of all successful people, this is completely the wrong way to think about it. For that other 1% (the Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerbergs of the world) it might work. For the rest of us, there’s a mental model that will help keep you sane, help you appreciate …Continue reading
90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter
In my post The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor, I noted that “90% of the decisions you make don’t matter; real success comes in being able to identify the 10% that do and focus on those.” The best, most effective leaders can free their teams up to get stuff done by making lots of decisions quickly and enabling those decisions to stick. We all regularly hear criticisms of ineffective leadership voiced as “Decisions …Continue reading
The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
Always have a plan. Always. A great, simple, framework for any plan is the 5Ps: Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and Plan. This framework applies to software development projects, job searches, building a garden, or a phase in your life. I have personally found the 5Ps a useful tool for small projects (e.g. prepping for a VC demo/presentation) as well as large-scale projects that include 1,000s of people. The 5Ps : Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and …Continue reading