If you’re a rookie project manager, maintaining a calm and productive team environment should be one of your primary goals. I recommend three important practices that’ll help you in that quest. | Continue reading
Seductive job titles come with daunting job descriptions. You may not bargain for the pain that comes with roles. | Continue reading
“Scribo ergo sum”. I write, therefore I am. A post about the top three reasons why I write. | Continue reading
When pointy-haired bosses run out of real arguments for a “return to office”, they turn to disingenuous corporate speak. There are many examples out there, but three of them annoy me the most. | Continue reading
Super managers, i.e. managers of managers must monitor if their direct reports demonstrate care for their team members. In this post, I discuss three techniques for super managers to hear directly from their direct reports' direct reports. | Continue reading
I’m a big fan of dividing and conquering. After all, isn’t that what asynchronous collaboration is all about? But dividing and conquering without a cohesive vision is mere reductionism. Ingredients are nothing without a recipe. A recipe is nothing without a vision. The whole is m … | Continue reading
AI has disrupted our search and content creation experience. To recognise this shift, Nagarjun Kandukuru and I have written an AI-first KM manifesto , which we’d like to introduce to you. | Continue reading
IT workers successfully pushed back against a draconian 70-hour work week proposal in Karnataka. But such victories are shallow if we don’t stand in solidarity with our other, worker brethren, who often endure far worse working conditions. | Continue reading
In a psychologically safe workplace, people share feedback freely. But when feedback lands on deaf ears, it fosters feedback fatigue. | Continue reading
What should the purpose of artificial general intelligence be? Cut jobs? Slash costs? I argue that the purpose could be to elevate our creativity. | Continue reading
Efficient work rituals lead to predictable, high-quality results. As part of my depth rituals, I setup a clean workbench before I begin any work. The inspiration? Elite sport and master chefs! | Continue reading
Consumer AI is outpacing enterprise AI tools. The bigger the chasm between these experiences gets, the greater the security and engagements risks for employers. | Continue reading
When teams and managers forget about the values and sentiments driving the agile movement, practices become convenient fig leaves to cover up the “inanities of corporate life.” I've observed four such fig leaves most often. | Continue reading
When leading a diverse team, you can’t manage everyone the same way. Depending on their skills, experience and work styles, some people may need more managerial care for them to thrive at their jobs. | Continue reading
Remote work impacts not only standard capitalist measures such as productivity and access to talent, but also social aspects. | Continue reading
Remote work is popular, but its not for everyone. Some people may do better in an office. | Continue reading
Volunteerism at work can do more harm than good. I believe that employees should steer clear of it, when possible. | Continue reading
When I look back at my life’s experiences - by accident or design - I’m glad I ended up being insignificant enough that no one misses me too much when I go away for a bit. I may not have made my dad proud, but I’m happy. | Continue reading
It’s easy to believe that just because people look close to each other on a Powerpoint slide, they’re setup to collaborate with each other. Real life is more complex than slideware. | Continue reading
If a new hire can join your team and start contributing asynchronously in a short time, it shows that you’re running a tight ship. This article, a repost from reworked.co, shares three patterns for effective onboarding to distributed teams. | Continue reading
A meeting-centric way of working on distributed teams can undermine deep work and flow, inclusion, flexible work and in the long run knowledge sharing. It also doesn’t lend itself to scale. Choosing asynchronous ways to collaborate can be an effective alternative to this meeting- … | Continue reading
Not all asynchronous collaboration is productive. There are four ways I see teams get “async” wrong. | Continue reading
LLMs promise to make sense of a company’s unstructured information and surface meaningful information to each user. But a KM strategy that relies only on LLMs is incomplete. | Continue reading
One-on-one meetings are a great way for managers to connect and manage their remote team members. Here’s a guide to run these meetings effectively. | Continue reading
There’s always more to do than I’ll ever have time for. I’m sure you face similar choices in life and at work. I take a detour today, to explain why I’m doing less than I possibly can with this website and my professional presence on the web. | Continue reading
Personal user manuals are a way for distributed workers to broadcast information about themselves to their colleagues. While they aren’t without their pitfalls, they can be an effective way to achieve some personal and team objectives. | Continue reading
Survivorship, or selection bias when telling company stories, promotes an echo chamber, where the organisation becomes blind to its inadequacies. | Continue reading
In many teams, distributed leadership is a neglected capability. People have unproductive experiences, because no one pays attention to the design of their distributed workplace. | Continue reading
While tools aren’t the end-all and be-all for distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing, they’re hardly trivial. Companies cannot allow their collaboration tool stack to languish. They must aim for a world-class user experience. | Continue reading
When screens mediate our work relationships, we must consciously show empathy towards our coworkers. I describe opportunities for digital empathy in this article. | Continue reading
All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work. | Continue reading
Sabbatical policies can benefit both employers and employees. But these extended leave arrangements need careful design and inspection. | Continue reading
Tech proliferates into our lives with the promise of improving communication and giving us access to information. But it’s also left us more disconnected and busier than ever. In this post, I reflect on my years growing up and whether a subtractive approach to using tech, may lea … | Continue reading
Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings. | Continue reading
It’s the holiday season of 2023, so I want to share a few goodies with you. | Continue reading
Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead. | Continue reading
The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the sp … | Continue reading
Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so. | Continue reading
We wrongly apologise for switching off from work or work related communication, when we have enough reason to do so. Such apologies undermine our professional contracts and set us back in our attempts to achieve work-life balance. | Continue reading
When we leave cultural characteristics open to interpretation, we run the risk of creating toxic cultures. The loudest voices usually undermine diversity. It makes more sense for distributed organisations to do the boring work of defining culture. It isn’t as sexy as a secret sau … | Continue reading
Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely. | Continue reading
In the corporate world we often reach for training as silver bullet solution to performance problems. But building and practicing new skills is hard and if we don’t recognise the real-world difficulties people face, it’s likely that many skill-building initiatives will fail. | Continue reading
You won’t hear from me for the next few weeks, because I’ll be out practicing my hobby; i.e. photography. I believe everyone needs a hobby that they practice for its intrinsic value. | Continue reading
Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working. | Continue reading
It’s easy to look at headlines and imagine that all tech workers are headed back to the office. While some part of this assumption may be true, the narrative deserves more nuance. | Continue reading
The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode. | Continue reading
We must soon retire the word “hybrid”. It does less to clarify work patterns and more to confuse people. | Continue reading
When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed … | Continue reading