Archive

Are You Playing Along?

LATE MARCH. We just had Summer in March here on the West Coast. That sucked. These Weeks in Rands Any random tool, script, or workflow that I want to build or improve is ready for help thanks to Claude Code. It feels like the early days of the internet, where

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,

State of the Art

The above image was generated from this article by robots. You will notice extreme misspellings and odd layout choices. This is Google's oddly named Nano Banana Pro, and they've been going out of their way to highlight that this particular model is excellent at infographics. It

Nothing Compelling Was Created...

Pretty proud of this one. It was written at a time of great stress and was a therapy piece. It was a rare circumstance when the words just showed up. As a writer, this is your goal state. It’s why you spend all that time writing garbage. You’re

Seven Daily Decisions

The next book is for senior leaders, and I spend a lot of time being very directive as opposed to my usual approach of "describe the situation and let them decide what they feel is best." Throughout the book, I'm littering these lists of seven. Why

Here. There is Meaning.

My aptitude for a pithy saying is 100% due to Twitter. It was a required skill to jam as much meaning into as few characters as possible. The practice, unfortunately, was a precursor to our widespread, crippling collective short attention spans; it also taught me how to get to the

Promotions, The Hard Part

After writing a lot about promotions for the last two weeks, I’m certain there is a valuable book to be written on the topic. The work around promotions encapsulates many skills you need to develop as both an individual and a leader, but… someone else needs to write that

On Promotions

I’m dialing up the regularity of posts to the blog because, well, there are a couple of books to write. This means you’ll be hearing from me every Tuesday. It’s Tuesday. You are supposed to be reading a piece called The Wanderer, which I think you’ll

Airplanes and Compliments

There are two new posts over at Rands, and you should probably check them out because I’m not going to write about them here. I am going to write about writing. Here, I’ll make it super easy. Alrighty. At this moment in time, I am working on two

Summarization is Sugar

The robot fever seems to be passing as I wrote a piece that at first glance has nothing to do with robots… except it sort'f does. As I was letting the final piece stew, I dropped a venty footnote that talks about a certain demographic that worries me

Dance. Robots.

Saying I've been getting the robots to dance for me is an understatement. My second display is dominated by terminal windows with the robots busily doing stuff. What stuff? The most reliable use cases are: research buddy and tool builder. I've recently started paying more attention