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Designing processes and software to scale is expensive but necessary. I'll walk through why scaling by definition (basically always) leads to a loss of agility.
Getting past the euphemisms - this is what “performance management” looks like from the manager chair.
You don’t need permission to lead. You just need to look, sound, and act like a person others instinctively follow. Because, yes, we're all sheep.
Investments in operations should be at a minimal level that maintains the systems in an acceptable state forever. Poor operations are clearly bad news. But perfect operations are a waste of money.
The management job comes with interesting people challenges. Here are four I've run into more than a few times and what to do when they land in your lap.
More in life
My move from fractional work to full-time employment!
After a two-year absence from running a digital publication, namely Minimalissimo, I’m returning with a new project. Just when I thought I was out... Okay, no Pacino impressions. I definitely needed that break from curation and probably also from the constraints of minimalism for that matter. Over the past few years I’ve focused a lot on making digital tools and the odd experimental physical object. The latter still interests me hugely, and I’m casually working on a design for FFF, which I’ll cover in greater detail another time. Yet I became pretty disillusioned with the former: digital tooling in the age of AI. The sheer pace of development, replicas, slop, and hype just killed my enthusiasm for building. And I thought, “What do I actually enjoy doing?” The short and simple answer to that was “curation”. The longer and more complex answer is building a respectable publication that features journalistic deep dives, meaningful conversations, and tasteful curation. All presented and exhibited in a way that makes you appreciate the web experience over any social media feed or RSS reader. My new project is called MOUTHPRINT, which I’m building with my cofounder George Kroustallis, aka Minorstep. Together, our approach is to look closely at visual culture across art, fashion, and product design, tracing the people, processes, and choices behind the work. We’ll be publishing case files, which might sound a bit odd, but what the hell. These will examine individual projects through research and conversations with the people behind them. Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging and recording the many people who contributed to these projects and helped shape them. Alongside that, we’ll be publishing exhibitions that bring works together around a theme, making connections across disciplines and time. I’m under no illusions about how difficult it is to build a publication from the ground up. We’re totally up against it, but the web is a big place, we’re locked in, and we want to be heard. I’d now like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest developments ahead of our official launch. We’d love to have you along for the ride. → mouthprint.com
Measuring output and time spent is easy, while measuring efficiency and effectiveness is hard. Here's why trusting your engineers beats tracking their productivity.
The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease already exists. We just have to be brave enough to use it.
