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Kindle Notes & Highlights
No offense, of course — we’re sure you’re a very intelligent guy or gal. But do you realize how rare actual geniuses really are?
What’s going to make or break your career is how well you collaborate with others.
Almost every social conflict can ultimately be traced back to a lack of humility, respect, or trust.
The problem is that once you reach a local maximum on your team, you stop learning.
Your team’s culture is much like a good loaf of sourdough: your starter culture (your founders) inoculates your dough (your newcomers) with the culture, and as the yeast and bacteria (your team members) grow, out pops a great loaf of bread (your team).
A “strong culture” is one that is open to change that improves it, yet is resistant to radical change that harms it.
The interesting thing about team culture is that, if you build a strongly defined one, it will become self-selecting.
Communication isn’t typically the strong point of most engineers, who would rather spend an afternoon with a (predictable, logical) compiler than spend three minutes with a (unpredictable, emotional) human being.
Anything worth deeper discussion should take place after the meeting, with only the relevant people sticking around for it.
At Google, there’s a long (and unfortunately, often ignored) tradition of “No-meeting Thursdays”[19] in the interest of clearing time to just get work done.
people start reading email in a meeting because they probably don’t need to be in the meeting in the first place.
Strong teams don’t arise spontaneously; they’re carefully seeded and cultivated by team leads and founders who understand the high cost of trying to write software with a dysfunctional team.
