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Decisions

I subscribe to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited and Audible, where I can either read or listen to articles, books and podcasts that I would otherwise not have seen. While searching both these databases is cumbersome, occasionally I will see a gem emerge. Today, one of the Kindle gems was Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of…

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Recruiting

There is a right way to do a layoff. That previous bombshell of a sentence is click-bait, or, if you’re listening to this post on Swell, it’s auditory-bait. Of course, there is no way right way to do a layoff except to not do one. Though, one employer I had did a layoff in the…

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Innovation

You know that Jack Dorsey started Square, the payments company. Lesser known is his co-founder, Jim McKelvey. I heard him in a Harvard Business Review podcast that is my go-to when on a long weekend walk to Stern Grove in San Francisco. Stern Grove, a stunning grove with a permanent stage, is legendary for its…

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Competing

As a new CS grad at MIT, I was interviewed by Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. Microsoft stack-ranked my C code. IBM (actually) said they gave preference to US citizens. Oracle flew me to California, put me up in a hotel, and my to-be-boss took me to dinner. Oracle won me over, proving that great sales…

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Roadmaps

You might wonder: how are product roadmaps designed, or, as some may jest “is there a method behind the madness?” While the method is different for B2C products at any company, in B2B there are clear principles to follow when building for and selling to large teams. Here’s a template that has worked for some…

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Wait

The expression “thin slicing” was coined in a 1992 article in the Psychological Bulletin. It describes people’s ability to detect patterns in an event even if they experience only a narrow portion of that event. People who watched a series of brief, silent videos of a teacher reached similar judgments about the teacher as did students…