Issue #465, 22nd October 2021

This Week's Favorite


Willingness to Look Stupid
11 minutes read.

Dan Luu's writing will make you stop for a second and think. Are you drinking too much of your own Kool-Aid? Sometimes our intelligence is our source of power and strength. Are we ready to get better by allowing ourselves to be more vulnerable?

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Culture


Microservices Architecture After 5 Years of Coding
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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Five Clues Your Employees Are Still in Crisis Mode
5 minutes read.

I love Lara Hogan's questions to assess different situations at work and getting the other side to share their view and engage. These two questions are handy: " If you were me, how would you handle this and why?" and "What are you optimizing for?"

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How to Break Down Silos Between Teams
4 minutes read.

The part about "Communicate with intention" is so easy to miss. We all do our best to move forward, being productive and pragmatic, that we forget about the friction that comes with different views. Use the 3 questions offered by Raul Herbster in areas you have teams working together without a clear framework for how they want to work together.

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Working Backwards
14 minutes read.

Working Backward is a great book I enjoyed reading, and this post might get you interested. Reading about how Amazon works made me invest more in writing and ask more of our teammates to apply thinking through writing. It made the conversations deeper, and helped us understand each other better. "Bar Raiser" helped me shape how I imagine senior leaders making an impact. See if it triggers you to explore areas you want to improve, adapting it to your style.

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Peopleware


10 Tips for Using OKRs Effectively
5 minutes read.

I'm sure that some of you are thinking and planning next year. I found this post by Rushabh Doshi helpful to leverage OKRs effectively by creating an alignment on what they are and how to use them.

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How to Win Without Talent or Luck (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I highly recommend following Sahil Bloom on Twitter. His writing inspires me as I always learn new ways to frame the world and my values. Some of my favorites: "Simplify Where Others Complicate," "Have Strong Plans (Loosely Held)," "Prioritize People," and "Play Long-Term Games."

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50 First Levers - How to Start Building Leverage
5 minutes read.

Eric Jorgenson will get you thinking of the levers you're using today, and maybe come up with new ones. A few of mine: Leverage Twitter by following people who can expose me to thoughts and content in areas I want to learn about, Eat the same food at work every day to reduce mental load, Use a personal trainer with a goal "to come and practice for the next 50 years."

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Inspiring Tweets


@rands: Managers tell you what’s happening. Leaders tell you what’s coming.

@abarrallen: Company alumni networks are often more important than college networks. Put as much care into picking the companies you work at, as you do picking your college!

- Oren

P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.

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