Top Posts
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Why Nobody Can Copy Apple
Horace Dediu has written another brilliant piece titled...
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The Job Decision Matrix
A Job Decision Matrix will help identify what is actual...
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Path To Green
A Path To Green (PTG) is a clear, crisp, and complete s...
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You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong
Most people think about their career trajectory as bein...
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The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
Always have a plan. Always. A great, simple, framework...
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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...
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Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success
The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts...
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Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligate...
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Tenets
Tenets are a few carefully articulated guiding principl...
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Work Backwards From The Customer
At the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developer Conference...
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Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + Organization
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Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins
Tom’s Hardware is generally really solid. But they shou...
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One-Way and Two-Way Doors
Effective decision-making starts with understanding; in...
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Paying Developers is A Bad Idea
The companies that make the most profit are those who b...
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Be a Great Reader
When an organization has a culture where the written wo...
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Category Archives: Organization & People
Send in the Wolfes: Why Hard Problems Need Fixers, Not Just Leaders
When an organization hits a wall—be it a product failing in the field, a critical project slipping off the rails, or a big customer walking away—the knee-jerk reaction is often to lean on the leaders already in place. After all, they’re the ones with the titles, the experience, and the authority, right? Wrong. Hard problems don’t care about org charts. Once you’ve got a grip on what’s broken, the real trick is finding the right …Continue reading
Stop Answering the Wrong Question: Unlock Your True Work Happiness
Let’s start with a simple question: What kind of work do you like doing? Go ahead, answer it in your head. I’ll wait. … Did you just describe what you like working on? Or who you like working with? Or maybe you veered into what you like accomplishing or who you like working for? If so, you’re not alone. Nine out of 10 leaders, when asked this question, end up answering a completely different one. Here’s the thing: the dictionary definition of “work” …Continue reading
No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization.
June 6, 2024
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 is the concept of starvation. In the context of prioritization, starvation refers to the lack of attention or resources given to tasks lower down on the priority list. By definition, as we allocate more resources to higher-priority tasks, lower-priority tasks …Continue reading
Announcing Kindel Leadership Development
July 21, 2023
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 expertise in the space domain I discovered how fulfilling helping multiple companies with leadership and operational excellence was. To that end, I have pivoted and made Kindel Leadership Development my primary focus. Hire me for Learn more and get …Continue reading
Engineer the Sh*t out of Errors – Everywhere
May 30, 2023
Errors. They’re everywhere, but they don’t have to spell disaster. In fact, they’re an opportunity for improvement, if you Engineer the Sh*it out of them. By everywhere, I mean in all functions of a company, not just product or operations. A hallmark of a world-class organization is a mechanism that treats errors as they should be: imperfections in the systems or processes, not personal failings. One of the most famous is Amazon’s Correction of Errors …Continue reading
Make the Routine, Routine – Blow up Dunbar’s Number
April 2, 2023
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.Continue reading
Breaking Down Innovation & Invention
January 8, 2023
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 Technology (CBTO) mental model. What do you think? Lexicon: Taxonomy: This lexicon and taxonomy of innovation and invention provide a mental model for understanding and categorizing different types of innovative ideas and approaches. However, simply having innovative ideas is …Continue reading
From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to Space…
February 23, 2021
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 the importance of having a principled organization, and ask questions about his most recent adventure around space.” Czech it out here (I love that the transcript is available along with the audio): From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to …Continue reading
How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)
February 3, 2021
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.Continue reading
Open Office Hours with Tig
December 22, 2020
Last month I offered “office hours” to anyone who wanted to chat with me. It was an experiment to see a) if interesting people would reach out, b) if I could be useful to these people, and c) if I’d be exposed to domains where I could spend more of my time in the future. All three hypotheses have turned out true. Thank you to all of you who utilized this so far! I still …Continue reading
Mechanisms
March 6, 2020
Mechanisms are complete processes built around a tool, owned by a leader that gets adopted broadly and regularly inspected and improved to ensure things get done, not because everyone has good intentions, but because the mechanism’s elements structurally force the desired behavior. “Good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen.” — Jeff Bezos I’ve written previously about how Good Intentions are Never Enough and why mechanisms are needed, but I didn’t go deep into how to make mechanisms actually work. …Continue reading
Dive Deep != Micromanaging
You’ve said it. You’ve heard others say it. You are not quite sure how you feel about it. “So-and-so is a micro-manager. He/she’s always in my shorts and doesn’t let me just do my job.” This week’s Amazon Leadership Principle tip may help you navigate this common meme more effectively. The following has been my pinned tweet for the past year: “The more details you know, the better questions you can ask. The better questions …Continue reading
Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
March 13, 2019
Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. – Amazon’s Leadership Principles This Leadership Principle actually combines two principles that go hand-in-hand. First, there’s the “Have Backbone” part and then the part about disagreeing but committing …Continue reading
Ownership
A strong bias towards ownership is important in org culture. The problem is, folks often over-index on ‘I own this area, so I’m going to nail it!’ vs. ‘I am an owner on behalf of the entire company and need to do the right thing for our customers!’. The key is to balance these. Amazon’s definition tries to make this tension apparent by explicitly stating ownership is broader than themselves or their team: Ownership Leaders …Continue reading
Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
April 21, 2018
CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue 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
A Job Decision Matrix will help identify what is actually important to you in your career (and life). Gaining clarity on what is important to you, right now, will help you identify new job opportunities, avoid wasting time on job opportunities that are not right for you, and make a job decision with conviction. This blog post is one of my oldest on leadership and by far the one I’ve gotten the most positive feedback …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
My Best Hiring Stunt To Date
I’ll be doing some serious recruiting soon. I will only hire the best, and attracting the best requires them noticing jobs are available. This got me thinking about “best-practices” for driving recruiting. Watching others lead, and as a manager myself, I’ve seen that no one way is “the right way.” As a manager, it depends on who you are as a person. I’ve seen successful teams get built around the “serious boss man” and I’ve …Continue reading
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