Michael Lopp's Blog, page 29

On Bullshit

Stellar piece on Aeon regarding bullshit:

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.

I aggressively prune my inbox, but Aeon’s mailing list is one of a handful of publications that makes the cut. You should sign-up for their mailing list.

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Top 10 Most Viewed Fact-checks of 2016

Questions: How many of these did you hear or read? How many got in your head and made you mad or glad? How many did you assume were true or false without actually doing the work to determine if true or false? Embarrassed to say I heard many of them, raged a bit, and didn’t fact-check most.

(Via Politifact.)

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Rands in Review, 2016

I just finished the pitch letter for the third book. Unlike the prior two books, the next publication material never published before. My goal is to finish the third book of the leadership trilogy this summer which means a fall publication. Yeah, we’ll see.

Enough about the future, let’s review this terrible no-good very bad year that finishes with the passing of Carrie Fisher.

2016 started big for this place with the publication of Shields Down which is another perfect example of me having zero idea what articles are going to resonate with you. The honest appraisal of how people quit was by far the most popular piece in an otherwise quiet publishing year.

The next article of significance came in May. The Cave Essentials was written in between Pinterest and Slack. I started and finished the herculean task of a complete re-organization of all the books shelves. This multi-day job was pure joy. I worry about the future of books, but when I hold them with my hands, I worry less.

How I Slack showed up in mid-July after I’d started at Slack. This documentation of early Slack-learnings still captures the essentials of my Slack workflow. Part 2 is still kicking around my head. I remain stunned how much Slack’s own Slack and the Rands Leadership Slack have cauterized email from my life.

In late August, I published The Half Life of Joy. I wish I’d spent more time on the chart. It looks like a 4-year old doodled it.

The third edition of Managing Humans landed in September. This cover is my favorite. I removed chapters I hated. I freshened chapters that needed new life and perspective. I suspect I will continue to revise this book every three years until management doesn’t matter.

How to Recruit was a beast to write. In particular, the graph in the middle which depicts my recruiting model felt like accessible hard earned experience. However, for hours invested, the piece did not resonate as I expected further proving you should spend less time thinking what resonates and more time writing.

Finally, Five Leadership Hacks showed up in early December. It’s based on a talk I wrote for the second iteration of Calibrate called The Impossible Job. A simple concept with clickbait-ish title did well. In fact, the basic concept it was the inspiration for the next book.

38 short form and long pieces written last year. Meh. I didn’t count articles written in 2015, but my sense is that less writing than the prior year. However, I feel we’ll have plenty to discuss in 2017.

Happy New Year.

The Holiday Hole

This year’s Christmas presents hide right behind the closet door. Several boxes are on shelves while other packages are lamely stuffed in a festive Ted Baker bag on the floor. If you walked in the closet, you would see the presents with zero effort.

Ten years ago, my children would’ve paid cash money to know the essential information of the present hiding location. There were multiple confirmed incidents of aggressive present searching which resulted in a commensurate escalation of present hiding protocol. As evidenced by my total lack of present hiding creativity, we are past those years and I find myself disappointed.

The high water mark for present hiding was when I was seven. Under duress over breakfast in early December, we finally broke my father. “The presents aren’t in the house because you’d find them, so I’ve dug a hole, a holiday hole, somewhere on the property. All of your presents are in that hole.”

Our concern was palpable. “What if it rained?” we asked. “There’s a pretty good tarp covering the hole,” he responded. “PRETTY GOOD? Dad, these are our presents. WE CAN’T HAVE DAMP PRESENTS.” “I’m sure they’re fine… I bet they’re fine,” he concluded.

Just under 10 acres of land represents significant hole potential and I’m not proud to say that I searched those 10 acres multiple times over the next two Christmas season prompted by increasingly tempting clues from my father, “Did you check the redwood tree that has three tops?” WHAT? Where’s the redwood with three tops?

10 acres. Two years. At least it got me out of the house.

This morning the Lopp Family was discussing present hiding protocol and I told them the story of the holiday hole. They were delighted and it began a long discussion of prior searches for presents. My children believe they know all my spots, but I can safely confirm they do not.

This morning was a good reminder that while we love the presents, what we truly love is the stories we bring and share in this holiday season.

Happy merry.

The Next Big Thing

The icing on the cake when I do a presentation is Q&A. Being peppered with random questions might seem problematic, but I love it. First, because it tells me what the audience heard and, second, because it allows to me fill in the gaps of the presentation.

There are a standard list of questions I get on a regular basis, and one of them is, “If you were going to found a start-up, what would it be?” My answer has been consistent for the past five years, “I don’t know how I’d do it nor how I’d make money, but I would provide a service which allows a human to determine the source of a piece of information.”

Everyone suddenly cares about this idea a lot. Facebook recently announced it’s plan to vet alleged fake news with five different independent news/fact-checking groups. These groups are:

ABC News
Politifact
FactCheck
Snopes
The Associated Press

I remain jaw on the floor shocked how much opinion that swirls me is repackaged as facts. I’m not pointing the finger at a particular demographic; I’m talking about everyone (including myself) who says, “That insert-fact-here just feels wrong.” We are 100% entitled to our opinions. Our views are also protected. However, usage of an opinion as fact is rotting our national discourse.

Kudos to Facebook for taking action, but a better course of action is when you hear or read a fact that seems just plain off check out one of the sites above get the real facts.

p.s. There is a fact-checkers code of principles.

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It Takes Five Years for Holacracy to Work

Solid piece from Quartz on the state of the Holacracy experiment at Zappos. I’ve never worked at Zappo’s, but it seemed to me like a healthy culture to boldly engage in different productivity and leadership experiments. However, as reported, it does not appear to be working.

Nearly a third of the company has walked to the door. I don’t know what Zappo’s annual attrition rate has been, but I guess that is higher. When you combine this with the fact that Zappos dropped off the Forbes “Best Companies to Work For” list, you have evidence of a larger systemic problem.

To me, the money quote in the piece is, “Robertson [Holacracy’s creator] says it takes five years for Holacracy to work.” There’s a short list of the larger companies using Holacracy on their wiki, but my question is two fold: what does working mean and what company has successfully done it?

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It Takes Five Years for Holocracy to Work

Solid piece from Quartz on the state of the Holocracy experiment at Zappos. I’ve never worked at Zappo’s, but it seemed to me like a healthy culture to boldly engage in different productivity and leadership experiments. However, as reported, it does not appear to be working.

Nearly a third of the company has walked to the door. I don’t know what Zappo’s annual attrition rate has been, but I guess that is higher. When you combine this with the fact that Zappos dropped off the Forbes “Best Companies to Work For” list, you have evidence of a larger systemic problem.

To me, the money quote in the piece is, “Robertson [Holacracy’s creator] says it takes five years for Holocracy to work.” There’s a short list of the larger companies using Holocracy on their wiki, but my question is two fold: what does working mean and what company has successfully done it?

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Debugging Westworld

I inherited Eli’s code. He’d left for a start-up, and he’d written the import/export code for our application half done. He’d left in a hurry which meant I got a sixty-minute whiteboard session where he explained where he was at and where he was planning on going with his code. The whiteboard was pleasantly covered with method names and a lot of boxes and arrows and it seemed like an effective 60-minute meeting. When done, I felt confident I could finish the code.

Then I saw the code. His undocumented code. His spaghetti code.

It is a software engineering right of passage to inherit and maintain a codebase that you did not write. If the original writer is a moderately good engineer operating against a well-defined engineering style and they have taken the time to document their code, it’s still an effort to parse and understand how a chunk of code works before you start to add your own.

Eli was not a good engineer, there was no style guide, and didn’t finish. But Eli did help me better appreciate Westworld.

Wait what?

DISCLAIMER: There are no season one Westworld spoilers in this piece, but you shouldn’t click on any links below. This piece does not assume you’ve seen the series, but it can’t hurt if you did. There is no code in this piece, either.

Westworld is an HBO series based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie of the same world. Like the movie, the series is about a futuristic Western-theme amusement park populated by “Hosts” who are lifelike androids. In this immense park, actual humans (“Guests”) show up for vacation, paying a huge amount of money to fulfill their no-holds-barred fantasy. This includes Guests nonchalantly gunning down the Hosts.

From the minds of Jonathan Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight series, and Interstellar) and Lisa Joy (Burn Notice and Pushing Daisies), Westworld has complex depth. It is clear from the first episode that there are layers to the mysteries of Westworld. A torrential flood of theories appeared overnight after the first episode. With each subsequent episode, existing theories were refined while others were introduced. To date, I’ve spent three times as much time thinking and discussing Westworld versus watching it, and I’ve watched the series beginning to end twice. Perhaps a more compelling way to describe this act is I’ve been debugging Westworld.

There is a lot going on within Westworld. There’s what is going on in the park, there is what is going on with the administrators of the park, there’s a cast of characters who are androids who do not know what they are, there’s a cast of humans who treat the park like an amusement park, and there are those humans who believe the park is something else. Motivations are unclear, timelines are suspect, and so are narrators. Within a rich and complex set of narratives, there are constant reminders that there is more going on than meets the eye. Season 1 is written to be analyzed. It screams to be understood and to be debugged.

Attempting to debug Westworld is a similar act to understanding someone’s else undocumented code. The task begins by reading the code for the first time and beginning to build a mental model of how it works. The quality of the code greatly affects the difficulty of this task, and in the case of Eli’s code, this task was awful. Reading the code revealed no obvious model, and after a second read, I considered a complete rewrite. I didn’t have the time, and I also knew that all code obeys rules.

Eli’s code compiled, which meant it followed the basic rules. I could make basic guaranteed assumptions, so I began tinkering. What happens when I change this variable? Oh. What happens if this method is removed? Good to know. After many hours of deconstructing and reconstructing, I had a beginning model of how Eli’s code worked. It was still crap, but it was a bit more understood.

Here’s the process:

Read the code, which is based on rules.
Begin to build a mental model of how the code works.
Test the model.
Repeat until your model is sound.

In Westworld, the narrative is the code. It describes how that universe works, but as with any good narrative it wants to hold the viewer in suspense. The rules engine that drives this particular universe is meant to be discovered, and that is the joy of debugging Westworld – finding the rules.

Over the course of ten episodes, all the theories generated by the fans are an attempt to define the rule set of Westworld. What can the Hosts do? How much do they know? How far can they go to protect themselves? If Hosts look and act like the Guests, how do we know who is a Host or not? With each episode, new information presents itself, and theories are iterated and debugged.

At the end of the first season, it was reported that the Internet “outsmarted” the Westworld writers. The fact that many of the evolving theories about what was occurring in the Westworld universe were proven to be true was described as a sign that the show failed to live up to expectations.

This… is bullshit.

The fact that many of the popular theories were proven true indicates that Westworld is well designed. The narrative, the code, is proven to be structurally sound by the fact that viewers were able to infer the rules. A great majority of the viewers of Westworld were not obsessing over the apparently changing typeface on Dolores’s milk can. The majority of the viewers were casually consuming the show, but even by themselves they were building and debugging their rule set for the Westworld universe. They were perhaps more shocked by the twists at the end, but they were equally satisfied that twists made sense given their rule set.

A narrative whether it’s built with words or code must tell a complete story. The constitute parts must clearly contribute to a coherent and pleasant whole. Eli was a poor story teller, but Westworld’s story has just begun to be understood.

Bear: An Elegant Combination of Design, Whimsy, and Voice.

Without fail, when you tell me about a new productivity system, editor, or typeface, I will drop everything I am doing and give your new productivity system, editor, or typeface a whirl.

This happens weekly. It’s a problem.

The majority of these excursions are brief and can be summarized thusly:

Install the thing.
Use the thing.
Meh.

I usually find a deal breaker in the first few minutes of entering and managing tasks, writing a thing, or staring at a new typeface. Typical meh-ness can be attributed to the productivity system frustrating amount of opinion, the editor missing an essential feature or keyboard shortcut, or a typeface having juUuUUUUst a bit too much personality. Infrequently, an app or a typeface makes the cut. Bear made the cut.

Bear is a thin text editor. It’s not attempting to be every editor to every person. Bear is the designed for the tech savvy, multiple device, and design-minded humans. Starting with the name – Bear – the application is an elegant combination of design, whimsy, and voice.

Here are a few of my favorite feature and design choices:

Bear uses iCloud for storage in the Pro version and makes it non-trivial to get files in and out of the system. Yes, you can import and export notes, but Bear dispenses with the concept of a file object and suggests that Bear is an eco-system of notes, documents, and thoughts that follow you around on your various devices. I can hear your optionality rage about this paragraph, and I understand your optionality rage, but my question to you is: do you want to worry about where your files are or what you’re writing? Me too.
Bear appears to be designed iOS first. This is a guess and is perhaps biased by the fact that I am in the third week of actively using an iPad Pro as a primary desktop. Bear feels at home in iOS. Yes, the keyboard support is very good on both iOS and macOS. Yes, there appear to be no obvious feature gaps between the platforms, but where is the Save command? How do I duplicate a file? You can’t. This is a product design for the mobile world where, again, you aren’t concerned with the file system.1
Avenir New is the default typeface in Bear and I’m in love. As a Futura enthusiast, I am a little sad that Futura isn’t great as a body text font. It’s a presentation and heading typeface. Avenir New combines the modern sans serif whimsy of Future and makes it readable. Also, check out the Q!


I’ve been an on/off user of IA Writer over the years. The primary reason it hasn’t stuck for me is restrictions to my editing space. IA Writer is very opinionated about what is a correct writing space and restricts optionality appropriately, but there are times where I want to change the typeface. There are times where the background must be navy blue. There are times where I want to tighten line width because it just feels right. Bear does not give you ultimate Sublime Text-like control over your writing environment, but it gives you enough control to design your writing space to your mood.2
The default theme, Red Graphite, is a good introduction to the design sensibilities of the application. Along with the dulcet tones of Avenir Next, Bear gently, consistently, and usefully splashes the accent color (in this case red) throughout the user experience. In the pro version, the accent color changes depending on the theme, but the experience of color highlighting the thing you current care about is thoughtfully and tastefully implemented.
Bear attempts to make thoughtful leaps for me. I tend to capture links in a Markdown style with brackets/parenthesis pairs. Rather than leaving the eyesore of a URL in my text, Bear maps the URL to a human readable link. I didn’t know how much visual noise was created by those links until they were gone.
And there is a bear. Throughout the UI. And I love bears.

Other than a currently mysterious relationship with Markdown3, my biggest gripe with Bear is that you can’t purchase it outright, you need to purchase a subscription. While I was fully prepared to lay down cash money for Bear, I paused for many weeks because subscription models feel like credit cards Like credit cards, subscription models are more profitable because humans are lazy. While I have no issue with dollars going to the developers, I do have an issue with myself forgetting to act managing my subscriptions. I would much rather pay as I go as new and better releases of a product are released.

But I did get a subscription. Bear is that good. No meh.

Important to note: I lost my shit with iWork when they nuked file related commands on Mac OS X many years back. The file commands promptly returned in subsequent releases. This courageous cloud-minded abstract-away-the-file-system move was certainly the way of the future, but for me, it was too soon, Apple, too soon. ↩


Bear has themes in their Pro subscription. One theme is called Gotham. I recommend it. ↩


There is a Markdown compatibility mode, but I don’t know what that means, yet. ↩

Five Leadership Hacks

MIT has a storied history regarding hacking where the act is viewed as a “clever, benign, and ethical prank or practical joke” at the University. Hack is also defined as the act of breaking into computers or computer networks. My definition is a combination of both.

To me, a hack is a clever or unexpectedly efficient means of getting something done. A good hack should feel like cheating because the value created by the hack feels completely disproportionate from the work done.

With this definition in mind, I present five leadership hacks I regularly use. These are not practices designed to redefine your leadership philosophy. They are hacks. 

Two minutes early. For everything.

Let’s start simple. I attempt to show up for every single meeting approximately two minutes early, and it has to do with Apple. It may have changed since then or been team dependent, but the expectation at Apple was that every meeting started roughly five minutes after the scheduled start time. It was assumed. We called it “Apple Standard Time.”

If everyone is aware that “Apple Standard Time” is the standard then no big deal, everyone ends up accounting for this handy five-minute buffer. But everyone is not aware. There was no onboarding were we learned about “Apple Standard Time,” so there were not infrequent meetings where half the people showed up and stared at each other for five minutes wondering, “Where the hell is everyone?”

The origins of “Apple Standard Time” are unknown to me, but I bet it started decades ago when someone important, someone with an impressive title kept… showing… up… late. No one said anything because everyone assumed there was good reason for the tardiness. There was a reason: this leader was bad at running their schedule. Worse, this behavior was allowed to exist and – even worse – it became part of the culture. 

Two minutes early. For everything. This means I look at my calendar at the beginning of the day and account for transit time. This means I gracefully leave the prior meeting five minutes before the scheduled end. This means I profusely and honestly apologize for wasting people’s time when I walk in two minutes late and this means I don’t let this failure become a habit.

The clock faces you.

Ending a meeting that is going well is tricky. Laura is in the middle of a soliloquy about the powers of a good engineering program manager. It’s great. She’s on a roll, but I need to be across the building for a 2pm meeting, and it’s 1:55pm right now, and I can not hear an ending to Laura’s speech. 

Laura knows nothing about my internal scheduling turmoil and she’s looking straight at me because she knows my support for program managers is critical and if I’m busily checking my calendar rather than listening, I am telling the rest of the room, “This thing she is talking about is not that important.”

The first thing I do when I sit down in a conference room is to find easy sight lines to the clock. Hopefully, it’s on a wall, or maybe I need to turn it face me on the desk. The hack is: “I should be able to know the precise time of day at any moment without a single human noticing.”

By having an intimate understanding of the time, I can shape my exit. I can listen for the ever-so-small pause Laura lands at 1:58pm. She’s not stopping, she’s taking a deep breath, so I can jump in and say, “This is great. I have a 2pm across the building, can we continue this discussion later?”

Whether you’re running the meeting or attending the meeting, being frictionlessly aware of the time is the first step to getting a meeting to end on time.

Office hours.

At my last gig, I wanted to meet everyone. First all hands, I committed, “I will personally meet with each and every one of you.”

Admirable. Doesn’t scale.

I started with 1:1s, but it was quickly obvious it’d take six months to get through the entire team, so we quickly pivoted to round tables. Five to ten folks plus me – every week. These meetings were more time efficient, but in each, it was clear that there were always a handful of folks who simply didn’t want to be there. I have work to do.

You can flatten your organization by creating as many communication conduits in as many unexpected directions as possible, and this was the goal with my flawed “meet everyone” strategy. The question is how do you create this communication serendipity for all the humans?

Office hours. They’re announced broadly every two weeks. Two hours total. 30-minute slots. Google Calendar makes this super easy. 

The result: my office hours are filled every time I announce them by the folks who want to talk and have an agenda. These are some of the most interesting meetings that I have with the team on a week to week basis. Random thoughts. Emerging concerns. Criticism. Growth conversations. Deep strategic concerns. Communication that only happens 1:1 and in person on a regular basis.

Three questions before any meeting.

Another morning calendar hack: I glance at my day and make a quick assessment: what is the value being created by each of the meetings on my calendar? In a moment, I should be able to answer that question. It’s a new director and we’re going to get to know each other. It’s a weekly sync with a team in crisis. It’s a regularly scheduled 1:1. 

Once I understand the why, I then focus on the what. Whether I run the meeting or am a participant, I write three questions that I’d like to get answered at this meeting. For a day full of meetings, the three question exercise should only take a few minutes and it achieves two important outcomes:

First, it frames my goals for this meeting. What is top of mind for me and what am I going to ask when given a chance?

Second, if I am failing to come up with three questions, I ask myself, “Why am I going to this meeting?” Meetings are a virus. They infect and they multiply. The longer they exist, the more likely the humans forget why the meeting was called. If it takes more than 30 seconds to think about my three questions or if I can’t think of a single question that I want to ask, I decline the meeting with a clear explanation. 

Continually fix small broken things.

There’s a stack of books on the right side of my desk. They’ve been slowly growing over the past month; I keep telling myself I’ll deal with them, but today I’m dealing with them. The one good book goes in my backpack for reading; the rest go to the bookshelf because I have decided I will likely never read those books.

Sticking with the desk. I’ve been collecting pens, and my pen cup is too full. So, I pour them on the floor and decide which pens are staying in the cup and which pens will be declared free. It takes a little over a minute, but I reduce my pen load by 50% and a lucky someone in the office is going to find a bunch of exceptional pens in our office supply cabinet.

There are five more small broken things on my desk that – in less than 10 minutes – I could fix. These are small broken things I’ve been staring at and stressing about for a month, and in 10 minutes that compounding guilt is better. That 10 minutes made standing at my desk more joyful. 

As you walk around your office, you constantly see little things that are broken, but you often ignore them because you are urgently working on the big things. The last hack is the easiest and it’s the best: fix small broken things. Always. It takes seconds to clean that whiteboard, to plug in the clock in the conference room, and to stop, lean down, and pick up a piece of trash. Seconds.

The value created isn’t just the small decrease in entropy, it’s that you are actively demonstrating being a leader. I understand the compounding awesomeness of continually fixing small broken things.