The Rands Leadership Glossary
Many years ago, before there were any published books, I started writing a Glossary. This was a collection of favorite leadership words that kept showing up in my writing. Familiar words, some invented. Companies that mattered then, companies that had vanished, but left a lasting impression.
I had fun writing that initial list in the Rands voice, a little snarky, but directionally informationally relevant. I had so much fun I ended up writing a simple Perl script to add new entries as I thought of them. This went on for a few weeks before it fell off, like many small projects, into disuse.
For the initial publication of Managing Humans, I refreshed the list. Fixed errors and brought it into the current year. Going forward, the Glossary would only be updated when I published a new edition of Managing Humans. There are four of those editions, soon to be five. The website? Horrifically out of date.
Recently, I needed a break from freshening Managing Humans 5, and the "front matter" of a book is a fun detour. The front matter is: About the Author, Acknowledgments, and Preface. It's the last thing you write when you write the first edition and one of the first things you rewrite. As I touched up the About the Author, I remembered a long-forgotten goal for the Glossary: link to articles I'd written on the words and ideas I described. I'd never done this because the Glossary was large-ish, and the task of excavating topics within the corpus of Rands was increasingly daunting.
Enter the robots.
In addition to firmly placing this Glossary in 2026 (see: artificial intelligence explosion) and updating the HTML/CSS, it took the robots about ten minutes to read every Rands article and figure out what snark mapped to which essay. An immensely satisfying to-do to check off.
Here's the latest version of the Glossary. ETA for Managing Humans 5? Great question. I'll get back to you.
Rands.
Three links for Tuesday morning:
- A movie about weather that has no business being this good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_(2026_film)
- The bottleneck in AI-assisted work is knowing what a good solution looks like: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/
- Related: The head of Claude Code has spent 2+ weeks letting it rewrite the Claude Mac app in Swift via a screenshot-and-compare loop — Gruber's skeptical take included: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/08/02/cherny-claude-swift
Join thousands of active leaders in the Rands Leadership Slack