How to bring a community to a ruinous end During my fourteen years as a campus minister I saw dozens of faith communities grow, sometimes to hundreds of members, while other groups would atrophy and die. Almost every group starts out with a weekly gathering where members discuss relevant topics and sacred texts. As the group grows their programs get …
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This past week, while I was getting my haircut, I shared with my stylist that my son was returning from college for Thanksgiving. “Where is he going to school?” she asked. “The University of Washington” I said proudly. “Good school. what’s he studying?” she said. “Computer science,” I proclaim. “Oh…” she said, a bit concerned. “Aren’t lots of tech workers …
Clear goals and guardrails empower teams to thrive with little guidance. Without clear goals and guardrails constant guidance will be needed. Goals + Guardrails > Guidance To be more precise, but less concise: Goals + Guardrails + strategic Guidance > constant Guidance
BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement I ask this question as a way to think about where I take my career and my own sense of contribution. Many of us ask “what’s my BATNA” and “what’s their BATNA” when we negotiate which is fantastic. But there a number of other ways to use these questions outside of negotiation that …
Don’t make presentations fancy. Instead, make them like Costco warehouses in the following ways: This makes for better internal presentations, helping companies and teams: When my team will make a decision after a presentation, I want Costco! Example here. For presentations focused on persuasion, designed to Intrigue, Inspire, or Induce desire… fancy may have a place, but even then, simple …
At Meta, I often train teams how to communicate with Extreme Clarity. For years I’ve had former colleagues request that I bring this training to their company or team. Some amazing colleagues and I adapted the presentation to share externally. Credit to @naomigleit and @guyro for inspiration. Enjoy! Extreme Clarity Training – Google Slides
Photo (@kamerakrazy) For over 10 years my focus, the one thing I strove to do well at was campus ministry. During my time at UC Berkeley my studies of physics and chemistry became secondary to my desire to help others explore the mysteries of the christian faith. After graduating I focused my career entirely on mentoring university students equipping them …
Over the past couple weeks I have been introduced to a number people in finance interested in transitioning to technology startups. As I was about to copy and paste a paragraph into the second email I realized it is time for another blog post! My quick suggestions below: 1) Research on what exists or soon will exists Do you have …
At Astrid, our vision is to help over 1 billion people become happier, healthier, and more productive. To that end, we need to not only be smart about how we build (engineering), but also what we build (design, product), and how to get the good news out to as many people as possible (marketing, PR, business development). While I have …
Over the years I have heard many stories of interns writing code for companies for entire summers and at the end, the company erased it all. In my opinion, this is a failure of management and mentoring. In contrast, the Astrid team has hosted 8 engineering interns in the past 12 months and all but one have written code that …