A crucial skill for an age of infinite leverage
Plus: Finding synergies, process over people, and a few books recommendations – Digest for the week of June 2nd.
My month-long experiment in daily publishing (Mon-Fri) has concluded. It was lots of fun for me and I hope you got some value out of it. I won’t be publishing as frequently in June so this might be the last digest for a while, so I might drop the split publication format.
In this digest:
Judgment is the decisive skill – "In an age of nearly infinite leverage, judgment is the decisive skill."
The synergist engineer – Carve your own career path by leveraging your unique combination of skills.
Process over people – Managing processes, not people, is the key to maintain productivity and foster creativity.
As always, I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply or find links to get in touch at the bottom. If your client cuts off this email, click the headline above to read it on the web.
Judgment is the decisive skill
As I mentioned in last week’s post on the value of getting exposure to topics outside one’s area of expertise, the issue of sharpening one’s thinking has been top of mind recently. Maybe it’s my default mode network simply doing its job, but I constantly find myself wondering whether I chose to work on the right project…
The Synergist Engineer
In The Developing Dev’s latest installment, Ryan Peterman tackled a question many engineers face during their careers: Generalist or specialist? Should you learn a bit of everything or drill into a particular field? I’d like to add a third option to the mix: Become a
Process over people
“If you want to run a company that’s light on full-time managers,” writes 37signals CTO David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), “you have to focus on managing processes before people.” There’s nothing wrong with full-time managers, but the full-time-manager-to-employees ratio is a proxy for how much bureaucracy and organizational…
Bunch of books – May 2023 edition
What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly This was a deep, inspiring book, one I feel I’ll need to read multiple times to fully appreciate. Kelly looks at technological progress through various lenses and concludes that technology is an extension of our minds and, at the same time, an independent evolutionary process and that we are coevolving with it.