Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This book continues the story of General Electric in the period after that covered by The Man Who Broke Capitalism, thus presenting an opportunity to validate if Jack Welch really was the bad guy while also learning more about where Welchism took General Electric in the longer term. This book is very readable, with nice…
This is a book about motivation, specifically about how our assumptions that biological urges and extrinsic motivation are sufficient to model all human behaviours. It turns out that’s not true — intrinsic motivation plays an important part, and in fact badly applied extrinsic motivators can harm the much more powerful intrinsic motivating factors. (It will…
With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are — seeking to understand…
So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War’s approach of telling the story of…
This is the second business paper I’ve read this week while reading along with my son’s university studies. The first is discussed here if you’re interested. This paper is better written, but more academic in its style. This ironically makes it harder to read, because its grammar style is more complicated and harder to parse….
So, one of my kids is studying some business units at university and was assigned this paper to read. I thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a read as well. While not being particularly well written in terms of style, this is an approachable introduction to the culture and values of Google and…
In 2009 Harvard Business School published a draft paper entitled “Goals Gone Wild“, and its abstract is quite concerning. For example: “We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.” Are…
A reading group of managers at work has been reading this book, except for the last chapter which we were left to read by ourselves. Overall, the book is interesting and very readable. Its a little dated, being all excited with the invention of email and some unfortunate gender pronouns, but if you can get…
If I had to guess what would be a controversial topic from the mid-cycle meetup, it would have to be this slots proposal. I was actually in a Technical Committee meeting when this proposal was first made, but I’m told there were plenty of people in the room keen to give this idea a try….
I was bored over the New Years weekend, so I figured I’d have a go at implementing image cache management as discussed previously. I actually have an implementation of about 75% of that blueprint now, but its not ready for prime time yet. The point of this post is more to document some stuff I…