Weekly Roundup - Issue #13

How to Actually Build a Better Boss

Charlie and I read, gutted, or threw a lot of management books across the room while researching Out of Office. Most of them seem to profoundly misdiagnose the problem in the first place — or, just as often, attempt to treat the symptoms of bad management without confronting the actual malady..

annehelen.substack.com

A fairly long interview with Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale of the rawsignal group that is filled with anecdotes of their experiences managing people and training managers.

They have a bi-monthly newsletter where they discuss interesting stuff. Their latest post enquires about how it’s important to know what it is that “thing” that pushes work out of your brain.

Learning By Shipping

Company organization structure defines both how and what a company builds… It is frequently the case that when a company is doing well a given org structure serves as a model for others to follow; and when things are not going well there’s a chorus to change to some obvious alternative. Reality is far more complex, unfortunately.

medium.learningbyshipping.com

This week, Twitter had a busy week with Jack stepping down, a new CEO, a re-org and subsequent stepping down of the engineering & design heads. Even in my. relatively short career, I’ve been around quite a few re-orgs, some that made business sense while others felt like they were made to massage someone’s ego.

A lot of writing on this topic presents org structures but doesn’t talk about how they are in practice, that’s how this write-up by Steven Sinofsky(former president of the Windows Division) is different. By taking Microsoft as the example, he walks us through which structures work best and how to go about creating them.

P.S. I also realized that I need folks who I can discuss some of these org related questions. If you are interested let me know!

Design Tip: Never Use Black – Ian Storm Taylor

One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school…

ianstormtaylor.com

This post from 2012 popped up in my twitter feed last week and it a short read about why you shouldn’t use #000000 in your designs.