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Michael Lopp

Squint and You Can See It

EARLY MARCH. Welcome to March. The New Year is a distant memory, and you can see summer vacation if you squint your eyes. Let’s use that motivation, but first: This Week in Rands I fall in out and out love with my penchant for defining people labels. The articles

A Straight Line in Whole Foods

LATE-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took action. That project, concern, or issue, you took action on. Did you? DO THIS. RIGHT NOW. This is week six of this experiment, and this step — if you done the rest — is the most important. Give yourself an honest grade on the process to date.

Endless Robot Thoughts

MID-TO-LATE-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the concern, worry, or obstruction and you shared it with an important someone else. How’d that go? What did you expect to learn? What did you unexpectedly learn? DO THIS. RIGHT NOW. We’ve been noodling this situation for a bit, and it’s

The Knife

MID-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the first step toward solving a significant concern, worry, or obstruction in your mind about yourself or your team. The goal was to choose a direction, not a solution. How'd it go? You realize that I'm making these tasks so simple

Satisfying Problem Solving

Good morning, it's February 2nd. EARLY FEBRUARY. In your toolkit, you now have two short documents. A quick assessment of the team and a quick assessment of yourself. Go re-read those if you did them, and if you didn’t, here are the instructions for both. It’ll

A Very Rough Self Review

Good morning, it’s January 26th. LATE JANUARY. The calm of the holidays is becoming a distant memory. Last week, we did a super-fast assessment of your team. Not a performance review, nothing formal, just a temperature check. The practice I’m encouraging is a cache refresh. I want you

The Seasons of Leadership

Good morning, it’s January 19th. JANUARY. Most performance reviews have a strong recency bias. You remember the successes and failures from the last three months and use that as the foundation for the report card. This is unfair. Your team members have likely forgotten or rebranded their failures, but,

Happy New Year plus Reddit

December has always been a quiet month for writing for me. It’s partly because of all the other holiday distractions, but also because if you squint your eyes, you can see the new year coming… It’s almost… right here. Better prepare. I wrote the newsletter a draft of

The Pyramid

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW

Ahead

I’m writing a draft of this piece just for the newsletter this morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Try the Pinot — it’s excellent. Sorry about the typos. January 1st is a reset. What was late in the year — cold and dark December — transforms into a fresh new beginning in January. Resolutions,