I'll join the chorus of saying that falling down at age 40 means my skinned knee is still healing three weeks later. I'm very risk tolerant, but it's striking how the tides have turned on healing.
This seems like a situation where the adage "praise in public, criticize in private" would have helped.
It's important to have hard conversations about a team's ability - if for no other reason than expectation setting - but maybe in front of the entire team is not the right place.
This analogy seems like a stretch. An artist that has paint dripping from their strokes strikes me as sloppy. Is this analogy really tied to a single specific type of painting?
I believe the analogy is more a reference to the shape of paint drips as seen in the image on the page. The T model of skills has a single "descender" that represents deep knowledge in a single topic, whereas paint drips represent varying depths of knowledge in several areas.
It's a good enough analogy to go deeper than that. The T model is an intentional, planned descender. The paint drip thing implies that you don't know which drips are going to go where, or what will turn up. It's a more flexible approach that will be quicker to seize on underlying conditions people are just beginning to discover. The terrain defines what you end up doing, and if something takes off, the paint drip types are going to be all over it, even though it's not planned.
It's not that useful of an observation because you must then ask what you're going to do about it, but it is a valid observation all the same. This mode of being does exist. My career's based on being that, and also putting in the effort to finish things: otherwise it would be pure dilettantism.
Yeah but if you don't have attached article the first thing I'm gonna think about is "sloppy" or "this person is into boring tasks like watching paint dry"
I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back:
> I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot.
The 11th hour change was just one example of causing chaos provided by a leader, but for the sake of argument, let's focus on it. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a product does ship next week, there are some pretty critical flaws, and we're doing some final review with leadership. I think we can still raise red flags and follow the author's advice. The author of this article is suggesting there's a good way and a bad way to handle this.
Bad way: "Back to the drawing board, we can't ship, this is garbage."
Good way: "I see some serious errors here, let's outline them and make a plan to address these specifically."
I really like article's litmus test because of this - "Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it." That's not suggesting that there can't be a change of plan.
I think your reply is a bit disingenuous though, because whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly. Otherwise all you are talking about is having good manners and diplomacy, which is not what the article is talking about.
If you propose the changes, you’re rocking the boat. And if they are urgent and can’t be overlooked for the convenience of sticking to the status quo for others, you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.
The article’s advice is about reading the room and doing what won’t upset the others, because if we reinforce this as a norm, then existing leaders don’t feel threatened, and we can all celebrate mediocrity and keep our jobs. The more we advocate for this to have a hallowed place in our most critical workplace social norms, the more that the dissent of intellectual integrity can be quelled, so people write like this to popularize that tribal norm.
> whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly.
Respectfully, I disagree. One scenario results in a plan, one doesn't, and that's a core distinction between the two scenarios. Whether it's a good plan or not is a subject of opinion, but its presence or absence is not.
> you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.
That's not true in my experience. It sounds like you've worked in some pretty rough places!
Not really. I’ve worked in three large publicly traded ecommerce companies that are household names, one large education tech company, two startups and a defense research lab after grad school.
All of them were identical in this regard. What defines a “good plan” or what qualifies as “good leadership” is fully subjective and at the discretion of leaders most interested in entrenching their power.
This also has a lot of research behind it, eg like in the book Moral Mazes.
The description you give sounds like an extreme outlier that doesn’t have relevance for that vast majority of modern workplaces.
Yup, that was exactly the idea ^^. Plans need to change all the time, that's expected and just a part of life. The goal is just to raise red flags in a way that adds clarity and helps people to productively adjust.
Reading this article got me wistful for my Peek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device). You can do so much with email (todo lists, news, etc) and the device just felt good. It had a physical keyboard (!) and a real scroll wheel on the side.
Peek was also created by a small company but doesn't have the community support that the Chumby or Pebble has now. Maybe that's a product of being connected only to a cellular network?
Wikipedia, it's essentially a modern day library, and amongst internet resources, it might have had the biggest impact in my life. It's always been there for me to look up a concept, settle a bet, or to explore when I'm bored.
The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom [0], because it's bizarre what is still illegal in the United States between consenting adults.
But that's almost a harder decision - you can certainly buy a bland colored skin to put stickers on, but if you're going to the effort of skinning your laptop, why not pick an interesting skin?
