Welcome to some of the notes I took during the month that marks a change of seasons and a return to school.
Paul Graham wrote a piece in which he distinguishes between founder mode and manager mode.
Melissa and Jhonathan disagree
[M]anagement [is] not a fucking mode, it’s not a switch on the back of your head, it’s a set of skills. It’s learnable, and we know it because we’ve worked with plenty of founders to help them learn it. The effort spent on essays trying to give founders some puzzle theory excuse for why they don’t need to learn those skills is such a waste. A waste that gives those founders permission to do some real harm along the way.
The secret truth. The truest taxonomy of leadership out there. Based on our work with thousands of leaders across industries and around the world. Is that there are two types of leaders. Those who have management skills. And those who don’t have them, yet.
Andrew Chen adds a third dimension: bureaucrat mode.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy creates a bureaucracy mailbox:
for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out…to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.
He also verbified the noun “action”.
Mike Loukides believes you should think better
AI is good—very good—at what it does. And it does a lot of things well. But we humans can’t forget that it’s our role to think.
It’s our role to want, to synthesize, to come up with new ideas. It’s up to us to learn, to become fluent in the technologies we’re working with—and we can’t delegate that fluency to generative AI if we want to generate new ideas.
Here’s a model to help you think about the use of LLMs in companies.
To make sense of this wide range when looking to build, invest in or use an AI tool, I find it helpful to plot AI offerings across two dimensions: Change and Trust.
- Trust indicates how much one needs to trust the product to “get it right” for it to be helpful. It ranges from smaller tasks you can easily verify (attended workflows) to tasks that need to get it right on their own to be valuable (autonomous workflows).
- Change indicates how much you need to change the way you work to use this product. It moves from products that integrate seamlessly into your current day to day (existing workflows) to those introducing a new way of doing things, requiring your processes to change (new workflows).
A manager’s must: Identify and Challenge assumptions.
First you need to observe how others think. When an engineer or designer makes a decision, ask them why. Don’t stop at the surface-level answer. Dig for more but make it clear it’s because you want to learn, not because you want to change their mind. Identify the assumptions they are making. Figure out which are valid, and which could be challenged. But don’t try to change the past. You are in observation mode.
The next time a decision is being made, reflect on your newfound knowledge, and think of a question that can push others to challenge the assumptions that support their logic. If a certain feature is hard to build , ask how they would build it and where it would break. You may be able to provide additional context (e.g. the customer doesn’t care about an edge case they are worried about). Or you may be swiftly shut down. That’s okay! You will undoubtedly learn something new for the next time. Iterate.
The reward:
Over time you will build the muscle that tells you when to push and how hard. At that point, it’s your duty to start teaching others how you think, so they can call BS on you.
Research: Employee well-being programs don’t work
Fleming’s (2024) study provides compelling evidence challenging the effectiveness of popular individual-level mental health interventions in UK workplaces.
The findings highlight the urgent need for organizational-level changes as a more sustainable and impactful solution for improving worker well-being: changes to work design, management practices, schedules, pay, and performance reviews.
Laetitia Vitaud asks: Should seniority be a criterion for pay?
Her answer is worth a read.
Household Income in the U.S. as per the most recent census
- Real median household income was $80,610 in 2023, a 4.0 percent increase from 2022;
- Income inequality was not significantly different between 2022 and 2023;
- For full-time, year-round workers, the female-to-male earnings ratio in 2023 fell to 82.7 percent from 84.0 percent in 2022. This is the first statistically significant annual decrease in the female-to-male earnings ratio since 2003.
Business opportunity that calls for innovation: the housing crisis
The U.S. housing market is sorely in need of a makeover. Prices are high, supply is tight, and it’s tougher than ever for the average American to own a home. In terms of affordability, the U.S. faces a shortage of nearly 7 million homes accessible to lower-income residents, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Pay yourself first (contribute to your 401k and get your employer’s matching contribution. It’s free money!). Start now.
A new AARP survey finds that 20% of adults ages 50+ have no retirement savings, and more than half (61%) are worried they will not have enough money to support them in retirement.
And now, for something different
Barcelona is turning subway trains into power stations
Every time a train rumbles to a stop, the energy generated by all that friction is converted to electricity, which is fed through inverters and distributed throughout the subway system. One-third of that powers the trains; the rest provides juice to station amenities and a growing network of EV chargers.