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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Berkun
Read between
August 19 - August 26, 2022
The wise engage all new things with an open mind.
Hanni also told me I'd break things as I learned, and this was expected. Learning to fix broken things was part of the job too.
Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.
Product creators are the true talent of any corporation, especially one claiming to bet on innovation. The other roles don't create products and should be there to serve those who do. A classic betrayal of this idea is when the IT department dictates to creatives what equipment they can use. If one group has to be inefficient, it should be the support group, not the creatives. If the supporting roles, including management, dominate, the quality of products can only suffer.
I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
The fundamental mistake companies that talk about innovation make is keeping barriers to entry high. They make it hard to even try out ideas, blind to how much experimentation you need to sort the good ideas from the bad.
An organization where nothing ever changes is not a workplace but a living museum.
Schneider described his philosophy in this way: 1. Hire great people. 2. Set good priorities. 3. Remove distractions. 4. Stay out of the way.
Instead of treating employees like children, which many executive staffs do, Schneider and Mullenweg explicitly desired an environment for autonomous adults—a place for people who know best what they need to do great work.
“We don't have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn't your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.”
Kafka wrote, “It's often safer to be in chains than to be free”
What assumptions do you have about your organization that hurt you? And what experiments are you doing to discover them and find better ways to work?
To understand who people really are, start a fire. When everything is going fine, you see only the safest parts of people's character. It's only when something is burning that you find out who people really are.
“Real Artists Ship.”
no one starts a project planning not to ship.
Everyone who passionately makes things is driven by a desire to see what they make in use by whomever they made it for.
Dreams are free; shipping must be earned.
safeguards don't make you safe; they make you lazy.
It's design, not functionality, that determines if people will succeed or fail in fulfilling the promises products have made to them.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.
To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion.
E-mail empowers the sender. They can put in your inbox whatever they like and as many times as they like
E-mail decays over time. If someone writes a great e-mail, an employee has to do something to preserve it.
I want to be taught, not told.
There must be someone challenging ideas in ways their creators don't necessarily like in order for those creators to see the blind spots in their thinking. Breakthroughs await in those blind spots.
Employees can yell and complain, but there is no louder message to management that something is wrong than forcing them to watch a great employee walk out the door.
