Are engineers more creative than designers?
On Tuesdays, I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came via email…
Category: Management
Has Your Boss Set You Up To Succeed or Fail?
A reader asked recently (see the archive): I have a new boss who I don’t trust yet. How can I…
Why The Right Change Often Feels Wrong
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from J.R.…
The Simple Plan for People Who Want To Solve Big Problems
[This is an excerpt from chapter 12, of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation] The Simple Plan If you want…
Why Culture Always Wins (An Excerpt from The Year Without Pants)
[This is an excerpt from The Year Without Pants, An Amazon.com best book of the year] Chapter 4: Why Culture…
A Critique of “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”
I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of Airbnb…
How To Convince Your Boss To Try Something New
Powerful people often become conservative. Once they’re in charge, it’s easy to feel that the knowledge that helped them…
What If Managers Didn’t Get Paid More?
One of the many surprises from The Year Without Pants is that Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, doesn’t pay employees more…
How to transition a team to remote work
Vivek Haldar wrote this thoughtful review of The Year Without Pants. His primary critique is there wasn’t enough focus on…
My letter to the Next Microsoft CEO (BusinessWeek)
BusinessWeek asked me to use my experience at WordPress.com to offer advice to the future CEO of Microsoft: Recently,…
Why Consultants Should Get “Real” Jobs (HBR)
My latest post for Harvard Business is about why consultants should return to traditional full-time work now and then:…
How to survive and thrive with multiple stakeholders
Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 40 votes, this week’s…
How to make smart project decisions: the checklist
Yesterday I was working on a complex project and found myself stuck. I was out of time and had…
How To Work With Stupid People
I wrote the popular essay How To Manage Smart People years ago, and often heard the feedback: “advice on smart people is…
How Do You Build a Culture of Healthy Debate?
From Monday’s pile of questions reader Ev Larsen asked: Assumptions have an unnerving way of becoming facts and received wisdom…
When to quit working for a bully?
From Monday’s question pile an anonymous reader asked: After five years of consulting I accepted a full time job with a…
When In Doubt, Make a List
The most helpful action when feeling overwhelmed is to make a list. Lists do many good things for our…
The Idiot Ratio
Every organization has a ratio of idiots to non-idiots. This is the idiot ratio. This is a harsh, shallow,…
How to Get Better Feedback
Stacey Hanke asked on twitter: Why is it that when I ask for feedback, it’s never constructive. It’s always…
What work traditions need to go away?
One theme of my book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work, is questioning aging work…