Taking stock compared to when I first wrote about the workplace, my thoughts have shifted a lot more from the mindset of individual contributor to driving outcomes,leadership alignment and workplace dynamics. The higher AI moves up the value chain, the further humans must move across the value chain.

Motivations

  • Employees will take the path of least resistance I.e playing KPIs or not engaging above their pay grade. The right incentives for longer-term thinking must exist for the working level to be a powerful bottom-up driver of growth.

  • The youth are the strongest force for positive change until disillusionment sets in from disappointments. We should be intentional about protecting their positive energy and avoid overexposure to things that are out of their control.

  • Most people are intrinsically motivated to build something sustainable and scalable. However in a high intensity workplace, the actions which remove the sources of discomfort that weigh most heavily end up being prioritised.


Communication

  • When the logic of a top down instruction or direction cannot be constructed bottom up, reinterpretation and confusion will have high recurrence.

  • Stakeholder management is inevitable redundancy, and so is getting lost in communication. But people won’t support what they don’t understand, or can’t take credit for.

  • The shortest path for alignment is trust, but trust is difficult to gain, easy to lose, and near impossible to recover.


Biases

  • If you can’t help, at least don’t get in the way. But it’s hard to recognise how we ourselves are part of the problem.

  • People are extremely complex but we often oversimplify their rationale and thinking when we are unable to fully grasp their position.

  • Technical debt is accumulated by people going their own way to get credit for “delivering” a result which can neither scale nor be replicated.

  • Are you agile or skipping due diligence. It takes some experience and self-awareness to know the difference in both planning and execution.


Driving Outcomes

  • It’s not particularly useful for team members to simply state points for improvement, or for leaders to state what should be the right goal (vision). It’s only useful if there’s a path towards fixing the problems.

  • It is not true that with enough time and energy you can achieve anything. Direction, focus and sustaining the momentum of a group is more important, because energy is always lost changing direction.

  • To move fast, management should be willing to compromise on the rigour of bottom-up reporting and exert the effort to fill in the gaps, just as the working level should exert the effort to fill in the gaps in top-down communication.

  • Every activity should be traceable (at least conceptually) to its ROI. Not keeping this in mind at individual, team and org level will lead to many unproductive activities and busy work at their respective levels.

  • When combating legacy systems, people and mindsets, one can choose gradual transformation or immediate disruption. Generally, gradual transformation can build trust, masterful strokes can successfully execute disruption, but it is very rare.

  • The vector sum of Individual Contributor’s work is the company’s output, management sets and drives the strategic direction of this vector, org culture and infrastructure form the scalar multiplier.


Leadership and Dynamics

  • Leadership is not the title. Anyone can exhibit leadership if they are willing to step up and take responsibility for the outcome. Titles risk perpetuating misplaced authority.

  • Constructive disagreements occur when people have high agency and want to argue for what they each think is right. Any way can be justified, but when a decision is made, everyone needs to be committed and not re-question everything whenever there is a slight stumbling block.

  • The mark of a good legacy is not how many things you started, but how many things people want to continue after you have left.

  • Good mentors help people understand and maintain a growth mentality in difficult situations.

  • The right manager is a mentor who can unlock the potential of staff, but not every staff is lucky enough to meet such a person. Therefore the onus is not on the manager, it is on the staff to seek out the one who can help you.


Product

  • Ability to influence where money, attention and resource flows is a stronger currency than technical skills or domain knowledge, (which are bought by money).

  • A successful product does not need to have advanced features, it needs to reliably solve without introducing new confounds.

  • Fail and iterate fast refers to product fit, engineering design and product development, not documentation and management reporting.

  • Applied Translational R&D does not mean adapt academic results to improve baseline performance, it means, make it work well enough to be put into production.

  • Engineers just want to work on and solve interesting problems. Management wants to create reusable frameworks and show progress on project KPIs. Neither can properly appreciate each other’s priorities. The bottom line will suffer when both are detached from the real objective: The customer wants the cheapest possible, reliably engineered, well-designed, stress free product.