imJeremyR

Morgan Missen: What I'm Reading - Organizations, Culture and Self-Development

Curious what the head of Talent Acquisition for Foursquare is reading? see below…

morganmissen:

Tech Company Culture

• Building an Entrepreneurial Startup Culture and Creating a Product Focused Startup Culture - Mike Karnjanaprakorn, CEO of Skillshare, a company that knows who they are and where they want to go.

• How Tumblr Created a Design Culture With No Design Team - Fast Company Design. “We think the users are smart, and don’t need things ‘sold’ to them,” Peter Vidani says. “Keeping this in mind gets rid of the clutter, like labels and chatty copy.”

• Foursquare Tries a Bicoastal Approach to Engineering - AllThingsD.“Code doesn’t care where it’s written.” - Benjy Weinberger

• Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility - The famous “Great workplace is stunning colleagues” slideshow

• How Gordon Moore Invented the Talent Economy (and Changed The World) - PandoDaily. “The introduction of venture capital essentially reversed these roles with capital now chasing talent. It is difficult to understate what a dramatic change this was. Instead of capital (the means of production) acquiring talent, Silicon Valley runs on the basis of talent acquiring capital.”

• What It Means To Work Here - Harvard Business Review. “A signature experience is a visible, distinctive element of an organization’s overall employee experience. In and of itself, it creates value for the firm, but it also serves as a powerful and constant symbol of the organization’s culture and values. The experience is created by a bundle of everyday routines, or signature processes, which are tricky for competitors to imitate precisely because they have evolved in- house and reflect the company’s heritage and the leadership team’s ethos.”

Organizational Development

• Mentoring Millennials - Harvard Business Review. “In four years Millennials—the people born between 1977 and 1997—will account for nearly half the employees in the world.” In some companies [and most tech startups], they already constitute a majority.

• Management Quality Assurance - Ben Horowitz’s Blog. “Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization­—Human Resources—should look like.” Using QA as an analogy for HR, Ben goes through exactly that.

• The Update, the Vent, and the Disaster - Rands in Repose.  This is 1:1 101. So many people squander what could be the most valuable twenty minutes of their week by giving status updates. Also take The Rands Test for a close examination of your reporting relationships.

• When Smart People are Bad Employees - Ben Horowitz’s Blog. Three examples (the heretic, the flake, the jerk) of the smartest people in the company being the worst employees. When you interview someone who is clearly brilliant, as them about their previous company—you may spot one of these things. 

Managing Yourself  

• Sheryl Sandberg: Leveraging Relationships and Scaling Yourself - Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture, 2009. I’ve listened to this entire lecture a dozen times and found it much more valuable than her famous “sit at the table” TED Women talk. (If this is an area of interest, check out the entire Stanford ETL series podcasts—like TED talks I can’t believe they’re free). She expands on advice nuggets like “go for growth, not trajectory” and explains “scaling yourself” and how to distinguish between those in your network who can help you, and those that will hire you—and leverage them accordingly.

• How Will You Measure Your Life? - Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School. “The powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.”   …    “Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.”   …    “If your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your  learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to  learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited”

• Goal Obsession: The Flaw that Creates More Flaws - Marshall Goldsmith in Fast Company. The author of What Got You There Won’t Get You Here describes how goal obsession can turn us into self-absorbed schemers. We all know someone like this but may not have thought about why.

• The Talent Society, New York Times Opinion. “We have gone from a society that protected people from their frailties to a society that allows people to maximize their talents.”