Whatever Next #2: Leadership and management matters
This week you'll find topics about fatigue during the lockdown, remote work, web performance, gossips, working experiences, my blog posts, and many other things.
Hi @ll! This is my humble newsletter, where I will be sharing different topics that I found interesting during the week. Only ten sections maximum per newsletter, I don’t want to bother or bore you!
If you find the topics interesting, don’t miss the next newsletter and join!
Opinions and selection of topics are my own.
📜 My latest post
Sorry, I told you. If I write a blog post, I’ll add it to the newsletter. And I don’t use to write often but this week I published two.
First is related to the last newsletter, where I added some open questions and my personal opinion about the leadership of Michael Jordan based on “The Last Dance” Netflix series. If you’re interested in the topic, you could check the Leadership of the GOAT. What makes a leader? blog post.
The second post is related to a book that I am reading, “The making of a manager” by Julie Zhuo. While I was reading an experience that she was sharing, it reminded me of some experiences that I also lived, so I decided to write about it. The post is named Who wants to be a manager? Questions and experiences.
I am not a very good writer, that’s why I force myself to do it because I want to improve. Please feel free to add any comments and suggestions.
🤖 Computers vs Humans, Elon Musk vs Jack Ma
Nothing to add. Are you from Team Ironman or Team Cap?
I like the phrase from Jack Ma that he had never seen a computer invent a human being. If I have to choose, I am in Team JackMa. As human beings we have faced this situation in the past. Yes, with different conditions, but humanity always adapted to evolution, to new situations, physically and mentally, and I am sure we will do it again. John Connor will end up beating Skynet.
🙇 Are you feeling tired after some weeks/months of lockdown?
This week Robin Sharma shared some thoughts about feeling tired with this lockdown in his newsletter. I turns out that this is how I am feeling for two or three weeks. So I decided to do some research about it.
Looking for a psychology point of view, I ended in this article from psychcentral, where a Ph.D. psychologist shared many possible that could drive us to that feeling, like lack of sleeping, anxiety, sadness, lack of motivation, boredom, etc.
I decided to look for another point of view, and found this why you might be feeling tired while on lockdown article where they added another possibility more focused n our lack of structure or change/adaptation of routine. Confinement without a routine could end in low morale. Also anxiety could arise. In that post they suggest exercise as a tool to break this cycle, reducing feelings of fatigue while improving sleep quality.
I wasn’t convinced. I adapted my daily routine, but I still have a routine. And I also do exercise at home. Then this HBR article if you feel like you’re regressing you’re not alone appeared adding a very interesting point of view. They suggested that maybe we were experiencing an Emergency-Regression-Recovery pattern. The idea is that in this crisis, we first feel empowered when we are in emergency mode, then we move to a regression state feeling tiredness and lack of purpose. This is like combat stress. It is the way our body responses to pressure, and cannot be skipped. It turns out that boredom, lack of new experiences, and monotony can be also much more stressful than combat. Here the challenge is to move forward to the recovery phase, and in the article they share some ideas to get through the regression phase.
💚 Website vitality metrics: Hello Web Vitals.
Google introduced this month Web Vitals, new core metrics to help improve website UX. If you have any experience in web performance, this won’t sound new, but it is always good to see that new tools arise to help us improving performance from the customer’s point of view.
Two days ago, a new blog post was published to help considering these metrics: The Science Behind Web Vitals. In that study, based on data analysis, they help set up the proper thresholds for those metrics. I am going to copy the conclusion or impact:
We analyzed millions of page impressions to understand how these metrics and thresholds affect users. We found that when a site meets the above thresholds, users are 24% less likely to abandon page loads (by leaving the page before it finishes loading).
We also looked specifically at news and shopping sites, sites whose businesses depend on traffic and task completion, and found similar numbers: 22% less abandonment for news sites and 24% less abandonment for shopping sites.
It worth it considering and improving these metrics, don’t you think? As they remind on the post, providing a smooth journey for users is one of the most effective ways to grow online traffic and web-based businesses.
💻 Microsoft and its open-source decision
This is a very interesting thread from Steven Sinofsky, originated from the article Microsoft: we were wrong about open source. In a very brief recap, Steven says that it is not fair to say that it was all Steve Ballmer’s fault, because there weren’t the proper conditions and the game was different on those days. If you’re interested in knowing more about Microsoft and its evolution as a company, this is an interesting chapter of what could be its book of memories.
🧠 Mental models by Tobi Lutke
Tobi Lutke is the CEO of Shopify, but this thread is from George Mack who did a great job building a recap of learnings from Tobi’s interviews. Good insights and detail. Please, check it out. Also, if you are interested in his weekly learnings, you could subscribe to his newsletter. I did 😉
👷 Working at Amazon. An Amazon programmer’s perspective.
It is always interesting to know other people’s experiences because it could help new hires, and also helps to go through people who are living similar experiences, working in stressful and intense workplaces.
This is what happens when you read this text from an Amazon developer. A brave tale about a personal experience, with particular challenges and caveats, that in the end finished properly.
If you have experience in different workplaces, these issues could sound familiar to you. As he also shares, this is not complete Amazon-specific, at least until you get into the section of “fear” and “culture of silence”.
Everybody has its own experiences, and manages stress also in its way. I find valuable information in his text, and I am not going to criticize a single comma. Read it a take your own opinion about his experience.
🚫 Gossip is bad, and we like it
I shared this article from HBR some days or weeks ago, and reminds us of the dangers of gossip for individuals, teams, or a whole organization, as a destructive communication strategy.
“By talking to anyone, everyone, or even one person about another colleague who isn’t there to hear the feedback, provide his or her perspective, and engage in joint problem solving, you are undermining the benefits of an open, honest relationship and a feedback-rich culture.”
As it points out, conversations are part of our jobs, but we have to be aware of this bad habit and avoid engaging in gossip. We have to just keep it in mind.
🏠 After Work from home extension, remote hiring
Facebook announced that it is planning to hire remote workers from areas where it doesn’t have offices. In Zuck’s words, it is “aggressively open up remote hiring”, starting with the U.S., focused on engineering talent. He expects to have 50% of the workforce this way in 10 years.
Also, Sundar Pichai who was interviewed at The Verge said that he was still thinking about what will happen next, when his teams have to return to buildings, because they were surprised about people’s productivity. They were more productive working at home than they expected. So they are thinking about the idea of long-term remote work.
It is awesome to see how lockdown is evolving the way we used to work. Don’t forget this crisis is a tragedy, but in many ways forced us to evolve more in some weeks than we had done for years.
We will see in the next days if more companies join Facebook, and if it globally expands. It seems difficult to imagine myself working for Facebook remotely, but who knows. Facebook guys, I am here 👋
🎁 Curiosities
Look at this twitter post from Windows 3.0, with its “3D look”, and if you recognize it then you’ll start to feel older. I grow up playing solitaire and minesweeper!
And continuing with the purpose of helping you to feel older, check out also this one! Stay at home and stay safe!
And… That’s it! If you arrived here, thanks for reading. I hope you like it!
Please, do not hesitate to add any comment. I am open to any suggestion so if you want to add a comment or contact me, I encourage you to do it.
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