From 564ee94deb1d30ff73ec0da8d7bf528361786f05 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Phil Crosby <phil.crosby@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2024 01:10:52 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Update website

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@@ -20,7 +20,13 @@ <h1>Book Notes</h1>
   </div>
 
   <div id="content">
-  <h2>Engineering</h2>
+  <h2>Business</h2>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="powerful-patty-mccord.html">Powerful - Patty McCord</a></li>
+<li><a href="radical-candor-kim-scott.html">Radical Candor - Kim Scott</a></li>
+<li><a href="slack-tom-demarco.html">Slack - Tom DeMarco</a></li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Engineering</h2>
 <ul>
 <li><a href="shape-up-ryan-singer.html">Shape Up - Ryan Singer</a></li>
 <li><a href="thinking-in-systems-donella-meadows.html">Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows</a></li>
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+
+<head>
+  <meta charset="UTF-8">
+  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="./styles.css" />
+  <title>Powerful - Patty McCord - Book Notes</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+  <nav>
+    <a href="./" id="home">Book Notes</a>
+    <div></div>
+    <a href="https://github.com/philc/book-notes" id="github"><img src="./github.svg" /></a>
+  </nav>
+  <div id="title">
+    <h1>Powerful - Patty McCord</h1>
+  </div>
+
+  <div id="content">
+  
+<h2>General notes</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>(I took these loose notes from the audio book, so some of the material may not be under the
+correct chapter heading).</li>
+<li>The feeling Netflix wanted was for people to come to work not despite the challenges due to
+change, but because of them. They wanted work to feel like it was exhilarating. Netflix management
+tried to thread the needle between challenging versus hair-raising.</li>
+<li>People are motivated when they perceive they're part of a &quot;dream team&quot; and are facing intense
+challenges. Those are the ultimate motivators.</li>
+<li>&quot;If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give
+orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.&quot; - The Little Prince.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Treat people like adults (chap 1)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Great teams are forged when the problem is hard and they have to dig deep. The best teams are made
+when the startup is running out of venture funding and it must pivot to a new great idea or die.</li>
+<li>You want people to think &quot;God, this is hard; I'm so excited to be doing this. Because it's making
+a difference in the world.&quot;</li>
+<li>Patty learned in her experience prior to Netflix that bigger teams and more structure to support
+those teams doesn't get you a better outcome. The smaller, well-coordinated team has the great
+advantages of speed and flexibility. It's hard to turn a big ship. A big team can't grow and
+change in response to changing market dynamics.</li>
+<li>&quot;It's a misconception that more people make better stuff.&quot; Instead, focus on discipline and lean
+process.</li>
+<li>After having to fire 40% of their staff:
+<ul>
+<li>Everyone was working harder but having more fun. It was because only top performers were left.</li>
+<li>Also, they now had smaller, more nimble teams.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>It's hard work to manage large numbers of people.</li>
+<li>So, with this in mind, they just started cutting things out of their process and their teams to
+see if they could keep getting improved productivity and happiness by doing so.</li>
+<li>Abolishing yearly planning
+<ul>
+<li>They realized that their yearly plan was always off. It was false precision to think that they
+could make yearly headcount plans. So, they stopped doing them. They switched to only doing
+quarterly plans at that time, because that's the level of planning that was useful. Everything
+else was just wasted effort.</li>
+<li>They didn't do any more yearly roadmap planning or yearly revenue projections because they were
+wrong all the time. They were making it up. So they switched to quarterly.</li>
+<li>She experimented with everything she could think of to get rid of unnecessary rules and
+constraints on teams. Once she got rid of all expense tracking and budgets and said &quot;just use
+your judgment; spend the company's money wisely.&quot; And it was fine.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Communicate the challenge; the job to be done (chap 2)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>When everyone is intimately up to speed on the business, controls and management are less
+necessary.</li>
+<li>Employees need to see the view of the business landscape from the C suite.</li>
+<li>To provide education, Netflix instituted an employee college. This was a day of education with
+long presentations from all of the executives about their departments, the goals of those
+departments, and the challenges they expect.</li>
+<li>Show a business overview deck to every new employee who joins. They found that the business
+changed and the questions changed pretty quickly, so they had to update the deck every single
+quarter. They had to be on top of changing the message and evolving it all the time.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Practice radical honesty (chap 3)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>What adults need from you most is honesty. They need to be able to feel like they are getting your
+true opinion.</li>
+<li>Being blunt with people is a way of making them feel respected if they can handle it. It shows
+they are being honest and digging into the core of the issue and you really want to hear their
+true opinion.</li>
+<li>Encourage employees to give feedback to each other face-to-face. If an employee came to her as a
+manager and had feedback about one of her reports, she would encourage that person to just go talk
+to the report directly.</li>
+<li>In her experience, when people first join Netflix, the amount of direct negative feedback they get
+from peers is a bit of a shock. But they could get over it, and then are thankful for the feedback
+because it's helping them improve. And they start delivering that type of feedback to others.</li>
+<li>Any constructive critical feedback needs to provide specific examples of the behavior change being
+requested. And it needs to be actionable.</li>
+<li>As opposed to criticizing some essential quality of their being that they can't change, like
+&quot;you're forgetful&quot;, &quot;you don't seem to get enough things done.&quot;</li>
+<li>Most people value getting a better view of themselves from the eyes of others if the feedback is
+not delivered in a hostile way.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Debate vigorously (chap 4)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>She likes using the phrase &quot;data informed&quot;, rather than &quot;data driven&quot;. No key decision is made
+entirely in response to a data set. Every product decision they made which moved the needle
+required a huge amount of judgment applied.</li>
+<li>Consumer science meeting
+<ul>
+<li>(This sounds like a product review meeting or an experiment review meeting.)</li>
+<li>People would present the results and the data and the conclusions from all of the consumer
+testing they had done that month. Heads of product and founders would attend. These meetings
+required a lot of prep for the people presenting the data, but it helped ensure that the level
+of rigor was high.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>One important benefit of this meeting was that it helped them realize that no one person could
+intuit what customers wanted or needed based on their own judgment. The data always run counter to
+somebody's expectations.</li>
+<li>When hosting debates about product issues, they favored small groups. Small group allows the
+debate to stay civil, and it also ensures that no one can hide and not voice their opinion. Also
+it's a good way to mix together people from different functions so that everybody can learn about
+different viewpoints on the problem.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Focus on the future: hiring, promoting, managing teams (chap 5)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;A company is like a sports team, not a family.&quot;</li>
+<li>Their cultural model is that of a sports team. They want the very best team composition. As the
+business changes, the team composition must also change. And so they made it explicit that the
+goal of management was to put together the best team and that would mean sometimes, they must
+bring in people from outside, or let existing people people go, or have people change roles. Just
+like a sports team: they're always scouting for new talent and shaping the best team given the
+talent they have.</li>
+<li>Career planning
+<ul>
+<li>Patty thinks it's an outdated notion that managers have to also be career planners. The only
+thing they do for their employees is make the best possible product, and the best possible team
+to build that product. That's what gets everybody motivated and that's what's good for the
+company and that will ensure that their careers are successful. Over-optimizing for career
+planning leads to specially-crafted roles which don't make sense, or promoting people into
+positions they're not qualified for.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>They would regularly encourage the employees to interview elsewhere just to get a survey of the
+opportunities and make sure that they thought that their current role of Netflix was the very best
+for them. If it wasn't, they wanted them to go elsewhere.</li>
+<li>Hire the people you need for the future, now. Create a vision of the org 6 months out and build a
+roadmap for it, just like you would a product.</li>
+<li>Good managers are constantly scouting for new talent and culling their current talent.</li>
+<li>Don't be afraid to ask questions like: would you be better off by getting a more expensive person
+on the team and reducing the team's size to account for that?</li>
+<li>If you're not good at hiring great people, you'll never feel comfortable letting good people go.</li>
+<li>Good managers can let even good people go if their contributions are no longer the right fit for
+the team.</li>
+<li>The most competitive companies are the ones that manage to stay limber. She thinks the way to do
+that is to have malleable talent — constantly bringing in the best talent and changing teams to
+maximize skill to task.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>What motivates people? (chap 6)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>She doesn't think it's related to perks at all. Nobody stays or quit the company because of perks.
+What makes for lasting engagement is a feeling of success that the company is doing something
+useful and they're good at it and achieving success with the customers in the market, and the
+effort is a team effort.</li>
+<li>&quot;The best thing you can do for employees is hire only high performers to work alongside them.&quot;
+&quot;Excellent colleagues, a clear purpose, and well-understood deliverables: that's the powerful
+combination.&quot;</li>
+<li>Netflix pays competitive salaries just so they can compete with Google and Facebook for top tech
+talent. &quot;I didn't discuss compensation in the interview process until they knew that the candidate
+was willing to accept the offer; I wanted to weed out people who were there for the money. Because
+that's not a stable motivator.&quot; In fact if somebody was very concerned about whether Netflix can
+improve upon the compensation, they would say &quot;you're not the right fit for us at this point in
+your career, and you should go chase the money.&quot;</li>
+<li>They didn't feel like they were constrained by being able to make a good offer. They didn't have
+strict salary bands, or a strict bell curve distribution, where people get 6% raises each year.
+They're able to do what they needed to get a talent.</li>
+<li>She didn't believe in bonus programs. Intense challenge is what generates motivation.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Performance reviews (chap 7, 8)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>You must decouple the performance review process from compensation. The performance review process
+is not a good input into what somebody should be paid. It's ridiculously expensive and imprecise.
+It doesn't account for the value that the person has accrued working for the company. If they
+become the single expert for an important area, then you must recognize that with a lot more pay.
+Rather than keeping them in the standard salary bands. Or the external market will recognize that
+and give them much higher offers.</li>
+<li>If you can't pay market for every position, focus on paying the highest rates for the most
+important position for your company. It seems like a no brainer. Having a universal compensation
+schedule where you you tie your compensation to some percentile of what you perceive as market is
+too coarse of a strategy. There are some positions which are much more important to have stars and
+then others.</li>
+<li>Proactively let people go. Make that a part of your culture. It's good for the business, for the
+team, and it's good for the person. The worst thing for a relationship is to have a sense of
+dishonesty about it. That you've known for a while that they have been performing and haven't
+fully told them. Or, they weren't informed about the change of requirements of the job and that
+they were keeping up. Or, that you made a false promise, like they'll always be head of the
+department woods just can't be true is not in this not a promise you should've made.</li>
+<li>Get rid of PIPs. They're not great tools for genuinely changing performance. Instead, just be
+candid and give very regular feedback in every 1:1.</li>
+<li>Have a high bar. Ask yourself is this person excellent, do they love wheat they do, and does the
+company really need someone great in that position?</li>
+</ul>
+
+  </div>
+
+  <footer>
+    <hr></hr>
+    All content on this page, including text excerpts, is copyrighted by the author of the book.
+  </footer>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+
+<head>
+  <meta charset="UTF-8">
+  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="./styles.css" />
+  <title>Radical Candor - Kim Scott - Book Notes</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+  <nav>
+    <a href="./" id="home">Book Notes</a>
+    <div></div>
+    <a href="https://github.com/philc/book-notes" id="github"><img src="./github.svg" /></a>
+  </nav>
+  <div id="title">
+    <h1>Radical Candor - Kim Scott</h1>
+  </div>
+
+  <div id="content">
+  
+<h2>Intro</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Her anecdote about Larry was that he loved candor whenever he detected it. He craved it because he
+thought it was productive.
+<ul>
+<li>(The anecdote made him seem like a gracious leader: when she criticized his motivations in an
+email thread to the L-team, and she was gravely mistaken, but he didn't reprimand her for it.)</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>High quality relationships with your direct reports trickles down into the general culture.
+Relationships don't scale, but culture does.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Overview of the framework (chap 1)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>
+<p>There's a four quadrant image in the book:</p>
+<pre><code>            (care personally)
+                  |
+  Ruinous empathy | Radical candor
+                  |
+  ------------------------------------ (challenge directly)
+                  |
+  Manipulative    | Obnoxious
+  insincerity     | Aggression
+                  |
+</code></pre>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>&quot;It's called management, and it's your job.&quot; It requires a lot of &quot;emotional labor.&quot;</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Kim prefers the label &quot;boss&quot; to manager or leader.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The boss is responsible for results. A boss guides a team to achieve results.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Framework</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Dimension 1: &quot;care personally&quot;. Past work — care for them as a human being.</li>
+<li>Dimension 2: &quot;challenge directly&quot;. Hard feedback, high standards.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Both together build trust.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Bosses can easily make reportees feel inferior, as pawns on a chess board. Being a boss is a job,
+not a value judgement.</p>
+<ul>
+<li>All leaders should regularly be doing &quot;some of the dirty work&quot;. They're not above other people
+in the company. Like doing the dishes when you see them piled up in the office kitchen.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Avoid &quot;robotic professionalism&quot;: &quot;bring your whole self to work&quot;. Don't repress feelings because
+of the &quot;keep it professional&quot; mantra.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Care about the &quot;whole person&quot;: what motivates them in and beyond work. What scares them.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>&quot;When what you say hurts, acknowledge the other person's pain. Don't pretend it doesn't hurt or
+say it 'shouldn't hurt' — just show that you care. Eliminate the phrase 'don't take it
+personally' from your vocabulary — it's insulting.&quot;</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>What radical candor is not:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Gratuitously harsh. This isn't caring personally; it's being a jerk.</li>
+<li>License to nitpick. Only communicate critically and deeply on the important stuff.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>When delivering hard feedback or decisions, voice to yourself and possibly to the other person how
+you think they may feel, so your recognition of their emotions is explicit. E.g. &quot;You have a new
+manager over you... you may feel X, but really I think Y of you.&quot;</p>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Encourage guidance (chap 2)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Anecdotes from the book:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You sound stupid&quot;: how Sheryl Sandberg told Kim she sounds stupid when saying &quot;uhm&quot; too much,
+and got Kim a speech coach.</li>
+<li>&quot;It's not mean, it's clear!&quot;: what a stranger said when showing a dog owner how to make the dog
+sit when near traffic.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Giving praise
+<ul>
+<li>Be specific, and say why you feel this way. E.g. &quot;it makes me want to work harder, and I can see
+it improving the team.&quot;.</li>
+<li>(See also the concept of &quot;descriptive praise&quot; from the book &quot;How to Talk So Kids Will Listen&quot;)</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Don't personalize. Externalize and criticize the behavior, not the person's core. Very hard and
+important to do in spousal relationships.</li>
+<li>Obnoxious aggression
+<ul>
+<li>This is the second best style, besides radical candor, and is why competent assholes can still
+be effective bosses.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Manipulative insincerity
+<ul>
+<li>This is selfish. Don't hold your punches because you desire to be liked. It's insincere.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Ruinous empathy
+<ul>
+<li>Only giving positive feedback is suspect. It does not build trust, and creates an environment
+where people feel there are things which are going unsaid, below the surface, with both their
+boss and peers.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Benefits of radical candor
+<ul>
+<li>Broadcasts humility, if you frame it as &quot;I know I&quot;m wrong a lot and want to know when, so tell
+me.&quot;</li>
+<li>You will get lots more data.</li>
+<li>It builds trust with your team.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Balancing praise and criticism: try to have more praise, because it's motivating and reinforces
+good direction. But avoid padding in weak/trivial praise. It comes off as insincere.</li>
+<li>Criticism: must make it clear that the work itself is not good enough, while still reinforcing
+your confidence in the person's abilities.</li>
+<li>&quot;In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being
+right make the best bosses.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Understand what motivates each person on your team (chap 3)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Vocab used: rockstars (people with a gradual growth trajectory), superstars (people with a steep
+growth trajectory)
+<ul>
+<li>People fall into these categories at different times in their lives.</li>
+<li>A good team needs both kinds of people.</li>
+<li>It might be due to life events, like an infirmed relative, having a kid, needing money for a
+house.</li>
+<li>Recognize the whole person: in total, they may be growing a lot (e.g. having kids) even if they
+are on a gradual trajectory at work.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>General strategy: &quot;help everyone move in the direction of their dreams.&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>Don't feel like you need to provide purpose as a boss. It's over-stepping, and will feel like
+BS.</li>
+<li>Get to know each direct report well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their
+work.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Be a partner, not an absentee manager or micromanager
+<ul>
+<li>Help them make their work better.</li>
+<li>Don't ignore your good people, giving them complete autonomy.</li>
+<li>&quot;Managers often devote more time to those who are struggling than to those who are succeeding.
+But that's not fair to those who are succeeding — nor is it good for the team as a whole.
+Seeing what truly exceptional performance looks like will help those who are failing to see more
+clearly what's expected of them.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>The top performers probably crave recognition the most
+<ul>
+<li>This does not mean promotion. That often puts people in roles they're not a top performer at.</li>
+<li>Ways to provide recognition: compensation, domain expert designation, teaching role.</li>
+<li>Avoid an &quot;up or out&quot; framing. You want long-tenured domain experts, and they should feel
+recognized for accumulating experience. E.g. tenure awards, guru status.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Don't get overly dependent on top-performers. &quot;I often thought of these people as shooting stars
+— my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a time, but trying to hold them there was
+futile.&quot; So ensure they're working on making themselves replaceable.</li>
+<li>Management and growth should not be conflated. Recognize &quot;potential&quot;, not &quot;leadership potential.&quot;
+You need a strong IC ladder to handle superstar ICs.</li>
+<li>Managing the middle players
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Your job as a boss is to set and uphold a quality bar.&quot; Lowering it is &quot;ruinous empathy.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;Generally, by the time one of your direct report's poor performance has come to your attention,
+it's been driving their peers nuts for a long time.&quot;</li>
+<li>A common lie managers tell themselves is &quot;it will get better&quot;. But ask yourself in detail: &quot;how?
+And will it be enough?&quot;</li>
+<li>When firing, try reframing the problem to both you, and the person you're firing: &quot;it's not the
+person who sucks, it's the job that sucks — at least for this person. What job would be great
+for that person? Can I help by making an introduction?&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>E.g. a good &quot;launch and iterate&quot; person from Google joining Apple and failing there.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Drive results collaboratively (chap 4)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Relentless focus on &quot;getting it right&quot;: &quot;I didn't say Steve Jobs is always right... I said he
+always gets it right in the end.&quot;</li>
+<li>Kim has a framework of &quot;get stuff done&quot; with phases: Listen, clarify, debate, decide, persuade,
+execute, learn.
+<ul>
+<li>She argues that this non-autocratic style allows people to collaboratively solve big problems,
+and it's how Google and Apple operate.</li>
+<li>(To me, it sounds inefficient and bureaucratic.)</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Creating a culture of listening: give the quiet ones a voice, especially in meetings dominated by
+a few vocal speakers.</li>
+<li>Clarify: when an idea is nascent, it can die easily if it moves into the debate stage. Instead,
+require that it be &quot;clarified&quot; (fleshed out) so it can stand up to debate.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it's impossible not
+to grasp their argument.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Keep the conversation focused on ideas, not people. Avoid phrases which attribute ownership to
+ideas.</li>
+<li>Create an &quot;obligation to dissent&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>In heated debates, ask each team to argue the other's side, so they can see both sides of the
+argument.</li>
+<li>&quot;When people know that they will be asked to argue another person's point, they will naturally
+listen more attentively.&quot;</li>
+<li>Consider even funny props like an &quot;ego coat check&quot; outside the door of the meeting room that
+people can use as they enter.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Be clear when debate will end. It can reduce stress and improve clarity of the process to separate
+the debate meeting from the decision meeting, or to time-box the debate.</li>
+<li>&quot;Kick-ass bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process
+that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible.&quot; This improves
+both decision quality and morale.</li>
+<li>The decider should get facts, not recommendations. Asking for a person's recommendation carries
+the risk that the person's ego gets tied to it, which can lead to a political situation.</li>
+<li>Go to direct sources of facts. Deep dive on some decisions, to stay connected to the org.
+<ul>
+<li>Stevve Jobs would often go straight to the engineer who had the fact, rather than through their
+boss.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Persuading
+<ul>
+<li>This part of the work is necessary because only a small subset of the broader group were part of
+the &quot;listen, clarify, debate, decide&quot; portions. For the whole org to execute the decision, they
+must believe in it.</li>
+<li>Aristotle, basic requirements of rhetoric:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;To be legitimately persuasive, a speaker must address the audience's emotions, but also
+establish the credibility and share the logic of the argument. These are the elements of
+persuasion that have stood the test of time.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Logic: show your work.</li>
+<li>Keep the &quot;dirt under your fingernails&quot; to remain credible. Always maintain some IC work.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Answering questions at all-hands meetings
+<ul>
+<li>How well you answer these has huge leverage on the culture.</li>
+<li>For Dick Costello, improv classes were a great way to equip him to find a way to have fun
+answering all the awkward questions at all-hands meetings instead of dreading them.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Avoid the pressure to be consistent. &quot;When the facts change, I change my mind.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Relationships (chap 5)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Work-life integration&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>Work and life both improve each other. It's not a balance or a zero-sum game.</li>
+<li>&quot;A very successful entrepreneur I know went to the gym both before and after work during crunch
+times.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Stay centered:
+<ul>
+<li>Being rested, balanced, and fulfilled at home and at work allows you to spare the energy to care
+about others personally.</li>
+<li>Don't blow off those meetings with yourself or let others schedule over them any more than you
+would a meeting with your boss.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Trust needs to be built: with new reports, have frequent 1:1s, annual career conversations. Don't
+start off by assuming there's lots of trust.</li>
+<li>Allow for mental-health days
+<ul>
+<li>If you have a terrible emotional situation in your life, stay home for a day. You don't want to
+spread it around any more than you would a cold.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Walk, don't sit, for difficult conversations
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;When planning a difficult conversation, try taking a walk instead of sitting and talking. When
+you're walking, the emotions are less on display and less likely to start resonating in a
+destructive way. Also, walking and looking in the same direction often feels more collaborative
+than sitting across the table.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Guidance (chap 6)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You are the exception to the 'criticize in private' rule of thumb.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;The bigger the team, the more leverage you get out of reacting well to criticism in private.&quot;</li>
+<li>If you ask for feedback and the person didn't see it coming, they may brush you off. If someone
+says &quot;nothing comes to mind&quot;, give them 15 seconds to think of something. &quot;I'm going to wait for
+15 seconds while you think.&quot;</li>
+<li>Beware of explaining yourself after hearing criticism. It cheapens the feedback.</li>
+<li>Idea: &quot;management fix-it weeks.&quot; People log annoying management issues, they're voted on, and
+these bugs are assigned to managers.</li>
+<li>Be humble. It disarms their defenses. Acknowledge that you may be wrong.</li>
+<li>Situation, behavior, impact: this feedback construct is helpful in that it's not categorical, and
+so doesn't question the person's intelligence. Comes across as less arrogant.</li>
+<li>Don't personalize: say &quot;that's wrong&quot;, not &quot;you're wrong&quot;.</li>
+<li>As part of criticism, &quot;find a way to help them clarify the challenge they're facing — that
+clarity is a gift that will enable them to move forward.&quot; This alone is very helpful; you don't
+have to do the work for them.</li>
+<li>Give feedback immediately
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Putting criticism off is simply daunting and exhausting. It's much more effective and less
+burdensome to just say it right away!&quot;. Because both sides lose hold of the concrete example,
+and so you can't use the &quot;situation, behavior, impact&quot; framework.</li>
+<li>Give the feedback in 2-3 minutes between meetings, so that you don't need an explicit meeting.
+It should feel like brushing your teeth.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Avoid black holes&quot;: if someone is doing research for you or building you a deck, that they won't
+present themselves, funnel feedback/praise about the deck to the person who made it.</li>
+<li>Give guidance in-person
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The clarity of your guidance gets measured at the other person's ear, not at your mouth.&quot;
+In-person allows you to confirm, via body language, their level of understanding.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Praise in public, criticize in private.</li>
+<li>Biasing feedback for women
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;If you're a boss, it's your job to manage your fear of tears and not pull your punches when
+criticizing women. Criticism is a gift, and you need to give it in equal measure to your male
+and female direct reports.&quot; Holding back or softening criticism disadvantages female workers.</li>
+<li>Don't use gendered language: do you use words like &quot;abrasive&quot;, &quot;shrill&quot;, &quot;screechy&quot;, or &quot;bossy&quot;,
+that are rarely used to describe a man?</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Prevent backstabbing: before being an intermediary, ask the person who is giving critical feedback
+about someone to first have a discussion with that person directly, without you involved.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Team (chap 7)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>How to understand what motivates each person: have three 45m conversations:
+<ul>
+<li>
+<ol>
+<li>&quot;Tell me your life story starting from kindergarten.&quot; Inquire about the reason they made
+decisions in their big moments of change. This reveals motivators much better than abstract
+discussions. This is all personal, but to &quot;care personally&quot;, you must know each other
+personally. Respect boundaries as needed.</li>
+</ol>
+</li>
+<li>
+<ol start="2">
+<li>&quot;What are your dreams.&quot; Their description of work/life at the ideal. This is more telling and
+human than &quot;what are your professional aspirations?&quot; Challenge inconsistencies with their stated
+values. Break down which skills are needed for each dream, and action items for developing them.</li>
+</ol>
+</li>
+<li>
+<ol start="3">
+<li>18-month plan: the translation of current work to future dreams is inspiring. Focus on the
+next area to master or lesson to be learned, and how the role can be changed to get there
+quickest.</li>
+</ol>
+</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Reward your rock stars
+<ul>
+<li>Avoid promotion/status obsession
+<ul>
+<li>Announcing promotions breeds unhealthy competition for the wrong things: documentation of
+status rather than development of skill.</li>
+<li>She recommends only announcing changes in role, so there's clarity throughout the org.</li>
+<li>Focus on the work the person is doing, not on the status.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Gurus: give people opportunities to teach their mastery.</li>
+<li>Public presentations: give people opportunities to be visible.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Results (chap 8)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You can think of collaboration as 'mental prostheses' for each other. What one person doesn't
+enjoy and isn't good at is what another person loves and excels at.&quot;</li>
+<li>Staff meetings
+<ul>
+<li>Having up-to-date status prepared before meetings is generally unreliable if it requires getting
+people to fill in notes sometime prior to the meeting.</li>
+<li>Idea: &quot;study hall&quot;: everyone writes their snippets into a shared doc for 5m, and everyone reads
+them for 5m. This is more efficient and reliable.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Big debate&quot; meetings
+<ul>
+<li>Encourage the debate part by removing the pressure to converge on a decision by the end of the
+meeting.</li>
+<li>&quot;Make it clear that everyone must check their egos at the door. The goal of debate is to work
+together to come up with the best answer. There should be no 'winners' or 'losers'. A good norm
+is to ask participants to switch roles halfway through each debate.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Kanban boards: makes workflows visible so it's clear what teams are doing, and where the
+bottlenecks are. Otherwise, outsiders tend towards thinking the team does little. It fosters more
+respect between teams.</li>
+<li>Ensuring that people focus on the details
+<ul>
+<li>Focus on them yourself. It shows that the standard is worth upholding.</li>
+<li>Tell people when they complain about doing something that's not part of their job: &quot;if
+something's in your way, it's always your job to fix it!&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+  </div>
+
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+    <hr></hr>
+    All content on this page, including text excerpts, is copyrighted by the author of the book.
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+    <a href="./" id="home">Book Notes</a>
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+    <h1>Slack - Tom DeMarco</h1>
+  </div>
+
+  <div id="content">
+  
+<h2>Gems</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Efficiency and flexibility are opposing qualities in a team or business. Slack represents how far
+from perfectly efficient you are willing to go, to achieve some level of flexibility.</li>
+<li>You can keep a whole work force busy (fully utilized) if you allow work to buffer at each point in
+the network (on each person's desk, or on each team's backlog). This has the downside of reducing
+the velocity of tasks through the system.</li>
+<li>Most employees equate control in their career as their main opportunity for growth
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You have to give her some leeway, some opportunity to choose her own directions and make her
+own mistakes. Mistakes are important here. If she has control over her choices only to the
+extent that she makes the same ones that you would have made for her, she has no control at
+all.&quot;</li>
+<li>This can be called &quot;control slack&quot; — enough slack in the system to absorb suboptimal choices,
+which provides the benefit of employee control.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the
+interests of long-term health.&quot;</li>
+<li>On too much process:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about
+failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced
+mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>The first requirement of vision is to know who we are. Someone who can say &quot;product X might be
+nice, but it <em>just isn't us</em>.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Prelude</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The efficiency-flexibility quandary: the more efficient you get, the harder it is to change.</li>
+<li>Resource availability implies some inefficiency.</li>
+<li>You increase efficiency by eliminating slack in the system. But slack is required for change.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Madmen in the halls (chap 1)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The social convention for the effectiveness of someone is busyness — &quot;utilization&quot;. Think of
+Hollywood's standard depiction of a successful company: every employee is running around and &quot;on
+it.&quot;</li>
+<li>Flattening the hierarchy and removing middle management for efficiency wins are rewarded in the
+short-term by the stock market.</li>
+<li>In cutting middle management, we cut the capacity to change.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The main activity of those managers is reinvention. It is the middle of the organization where
+reinvention takes place. This is where the dynamic of today's organizational functioning is
+examined, taken apart, analyzed, resynthesized.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Busyness (chap 2)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a
+group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it's not the energy tinged with
+fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything.&quot;</li>
+<li>The value of a secretary that's not entirely utilized
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;She's available to do stuff that you or your people find you need to have done. That's part of
+what's so great about Sylvia: when something comes up, she can usually get cracking on it right
+away.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>You can keep a whole work force busy (fully utilized) if you allow work to buffer at each point in
+the network (on each person's desk, or on each team's backlog). This has the downside of reducing
+the velocity of tasks through the system.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>The myth of fungible resources (chap 3)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>A common strategy in restructuring is to allocate people into a pool so their partial time can be
+finely allocated to stakeholders.</li>
+<li>&quot;A highly partitioned worker can't be obsessively involved in any of his/her many fragmented
+tasks, and so tends not to bind into the team. Whatever the productivity boost due to team action
+may be, the partitioned worker does not benefit from it.&quot;</li>
+<li>Task switching penalty =
+<ul>
+<li>mechanics of moving to a new task +</li>
+<li>rework due to inopportune abort of previous task +</li>
+<li>immersion time for think-intensive tasks +</li>
+<li>frustration (emotional immersion in previous task) +</li>
+<li>loss of team binding effect</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>From a live study of software developers in 1984, &quot;we modeled performance against task-switching
+frequency and came to the conclusion that the best way to understand task switching was to assume
+that each switch imposes a direct penalty of 20m of concentration.&quot;</li>
+<li>So, restructuring which increases fragmentation of work for each worker carries a large
+productivity penalty.</li>
+<li>Author estimates (&quot;in his experience&quot;) that no less than 15% loss in productivity (6hrs/week)
+occurs from having a person do two jobs versus one (i.e. cover two bases, or work with two teams).
+The penalty increases with many jobs.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Managing Eve (chap 5)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>For curious, hungry employees, work must be structured to provide growth. It's as essential as the
+paycheck.</li>
+<li>On trying to control the work of volunteers in a non-profit, which robs them of their motivation:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;If you looked over their shoulders enough or imposed standards that were different from their
+own, they would shrug and walk away from the work, leaving you to do it yourself. Control, as
+they see it, is their payment for working.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Most employees equate control in their career as their main opportunity for growth
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;You have to give her some leeway, some opportunity to choose her own directions and make her
+own mistakes. Mistakes are important here. If she has control over her choices only to the
+extent that she makes the same ones that you would have made for her, she has no control at
+all.&quot;</li>
+<li>This can be called &quot;control slack&quot; — enough slack in the system to absorb suboptimal choices,
+which provides the benefit of employee control.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;You have to create a real sense that control is not completely centralized in your hands, but
+spread generously over the whole of your organization. Like a gifted helmsman, who knows that all
+use of the rudder increases drag and thus holds the vessel back, you have to steer with the
+lightest possible touch.&quot;</li>
+<li>It is not healthy for the management hierarchy lines to be the only communication conduit between
+partner orgs. These hierarchies are far too narrowband.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Business instead of busyness (chap 6)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The benefits of having slack designed into the organization:
+<ul>
+<li>Responsiveness</li>
+<li>Flexibility</li>
+<li>Better people retention</li>
+<li>A capacity to invest</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Ability to change is valuable, but it costs money. How much should you invest in having an ability
+to change?</li>
+<li>Ability to change cannot be siloed to dedicated &quot;change specialists.&quot; It should be implemented in
+a diffuse way, as some portion of everyone's mindshare.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Everybody needs to have some capacity to devote to change. This is time that people dedicate to
+rethinking how their piece of the whole works, and how it ought to work. Once the change is
+under way, more time is required to practice new ways and master new skills. That's the cost.
+The benefit is vitality and a firm grip on the future.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the
+interests of long-term health.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of
+investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that
+employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this
+human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people
+quit.&quot;</li>
+<li>The cost of a departing employee is: their salary * (rampup time / 2) + opportunity cost +
+training cost.</li>
+<li>Multiply this by churn per month, and this is the cost the company is paying for human capital
+drain.</li>
+<li>High utilization of a worker makes them feel &quot;used&quot;, and leads to churn.</li>
+<li>&quot;I am much more concerned when smaller companies invest outside of their own product areas. I see
+this as bankruptcy of inventiveness. It is particularly evident when companies find themselves
+with extra leverage due to run-up of their stock price. Their willingness to spend this found
+capital outside their own backyard is a signal that they have no real vision, no idea of how to
+grow in the arena that they know best.&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>This bankruptcy can happen if there's not enough slack for resources to be set aside for
+invention.</li>
+<li>&quot;Companies keep their people too damn busy to invent.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>The cost of pressure (chap 7)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Management adding pressure doesn't produce much gain; maybe 10-15%, according to the author's
+experience. In a dysfunctional org where there's lots of wasted time, it might deliver a larger
+improvement.</li>
+<li>Supplying additional pressure doesn't free up as much time as you'd expect within an already
+functioning org.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since
+wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to
+be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Overtime (chap 9)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Sprinting at the end of a marathon makes sense, but not the full duration of the marathon.</li>
+<li>Many types of valuable knowledge work are error-prone, and can't be done well in the later
+portions of a long work day. So a longer day doesn't increase the output for this type of work.</li>
+<li>&quot;When we measure human capital carefully and use the measurements to give a cash quantification to
+personnel turnover, it often becomes the second or third largest cost category.&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>Overtime increases turnover; people feel used because they their personal lives took a hit.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Eliminating overtime puts pressure on the work culture, to be more efficient, so that deadlines
+can be hit. E.g. fewer, smaller meetings, and higher friction to interrupt people.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Power sweeper (chap 11)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>It's bad optics to hire clerks and secretaries, but we really should. High-paid managers shouldn't
+be doing their own tech support or tweaking fonts in a deck.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;We have become so obsessed with getting rid of people who are burdened with the
+characterization of overhead that we have ended up with organizations where many high-priced
+knowledge workers and managers are spending as much as a quarter of their time being their own
+overhead.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Low-level support roles should add less interaction overhead to a team than a full IC, because the
+interaction paths are &quot;thinner&quot; between them and each full IC, because interacting with a support
+role should require less maintenance and brain power.</li>
+<li>His argument: &quot;by dividing up the work into four pieces instead of five, the total time spent
+serving the interactions is reduced. The capacity of the four-person team plus clerk is thus
+greater than that of the five-person team. Four developers plus a clerk also cost less than a
+five-developer team.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>The second law of bad management (&quot;put yourself in as your own utility infielder&quot;) (chap 12)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The mindset that leads someone senior to spending so much time on lower-level responsibilities:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;All the rest of your people are busy as hell; you don't want to further burden them with
+another task, particularly not one that upper management found to be of so little importance
+that they 'trimmed' the person who was doing it. Yet that 'whatever' still has to be done. Oh
+well, you add it to your own burden and do it yourself.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Assigning yourself to an unfilled position in your domain means that you unassign yourself (at
+least partially) from the task of managing that domain.&quot;</li>
+<li>Organizations discount the value of management, because managers are not making the product, and
+their interventions interrupt that process in the short term. But the reality is that the changes
+made by good managers greatly increase output in the long run.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Getting rid of management to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.&quot;</li>
+<li>Managers do lower-level jobs partly because they under-value the management work they're doing.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Blending management with your old IC work
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Now I was not only a manager, but able to spend my days doing sublimely black-and-white work.
+It seemed like the best of all worlds. But it wasn't. I was walking away from the challenge of
+management to return to work I knew cold. The relief it gave me was the relief of retreat.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Why management is hard
+<ul>
+<li>Unlike engineering, the problems are not well-defined, and what makes a good solution is not
+black and white.</li>
+<li>The skills are inherently difficult to master.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Culture of fear (chap 13)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The paradox of over-staffing
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The nature of project work is that whatever it is you're about to build, the early conceptual
+phases are crucial. But this kind of conceptual work can't be done with a crowd of people. A
+staff of no more than six might make perfect sense while the first-cut design decisions are
+made. Burdening the project with an extra fifty people at this stage will only make the work go
+slower.&quot;</li>
+<li>In response to a larger-than-necessary team: &quot;You're forced to partition the whole — this kind
+of partitioning is the essence of design — along lines that are dictated by personnel-loading
+considerations rather than design considerations. The result is sure to be a mediocre or poor
+design, something that will encumber the project from this point on.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Litigation (chap 14)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>In an environment where the bottom X% get cut each year, &quot;any failure by managers beside you on
+the org chart thus has the effect of reducing pressure on you.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Process obsession (chap 15)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Process obsession — developing a standard process for each problem — is an epidemic. It's
+ill-suited for knowledge work.&quot;</li>
+<li>Product standards — the interfaces of things — are very valuable. How-to standards are not.</li>
+<li>On letting the team own its process, instead of standardizing a process across all of the teams,
+such that each team loses some ownership:
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;In both of these examples, ownership of the process is pushed downward. Instead of being a
+corporate asset, it is a team asset. Somewhat lost is the flexibility to move people from one
+team to another, since over time the teams may begin to deviate substantially from each other.
+Offsetting this loss is a much more interesting workday for the workers, enhanced identification
+wit the product (and its customer), lower turnover, and strongly felt loyalties to the team and
+to the corporation.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Empowerment means &quot;putting process ownership largely into the hands of the people doing the work.
+That doesn't mean there should be no standard, only that whatever standard evolves should happen
+at the level of the work itself. Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do
+the work.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful
+management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions
+made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular
+folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are
+about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced
+mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Quality (chap 16)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>He argues that the corporate headline of &quot;quality programs&quot; really means headlining &quot;defect
+prevention.&quot; While important, this tends to crowd out the team's and company's focus on much more
+impactful things of product value, like uniqueness, and usefulness to the customer.</li>
+<li>&quot;Defect prevention and removal efforts may add sufficient overhead to the overall process so that
+it is too slow and unresponsive to market needs.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;Any risky new endeavor is likely to result in an increasing pattern of defects; the Quality
+Program thus may pit itself squarely against risk-taking efforts.&quot;</li>
+<li>QA is tacked on at the end of a project and doesn't have the influence to extend the delivery time
+to ensure QA is done well.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Efficient and/or effective (chap 17)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Directing an entire organization is hard. <em>Seeming</em> to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All
+you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that
+way.&quot;</li>
+<li>There is an &quot;unfortunate side effect to optimization, first noted by geneticist R. A. Fisher, and
+now referred to as Fisher's fundamental theorem: 'The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the
+less adaptable it is to any new change.'&quot; (e.g. the giraffe).
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to
+help it become more effective has been eliminated.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Management by objectives (chap 18)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;A fad from the 1950's&quot; (ha)</li>
+<li>It's a tool for incremental changes along the current direction.</li>
+<li>&quot;MBO is always based on stasis, the organization's present steady state. MBO sends the message 'Do
+everything the same as last year, only this year do more of X.'&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>I.e. it assumes the current direction is correct, and that we should just travel faster.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;Stasis plus just a bit of tinkering with the particulars is hardly a recipe for success in the
+new economy.&quot;</li>
+<li>Rather than a company being a vehicle of &quot;production&quot;, which implies an ongoing steady-state, &quot;the
+new central organizing principal is the project. A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a
+portfolio of projects. Each project seeks to effect some change, and there is no longer a
+long-running status quo.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Vision (chap 19)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>The first requirement of vision is to know who we are. Someone who can say &quot;product X might be
+nice, but it <em>just isn't us</em>.&quot;</li>
+<li>Drucker argues that culture is the one thing that cannot and should not change. It's the bedrock.</li>
+<li>&quot;When a vision statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part
+is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;People want to sign on. They want to be enrolled.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Leadership and &quot;leadership&quot; (chap 20)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or
+effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for
+this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;Blueprints&quot; are a powerful and necessary part of leadership, because they make actionable the
+challenging proclamation.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Fear and safety (chap 22)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Starting with a new way of doing things: &quot;people can make this kind of change, but they can only
+make it if they feel safe. In an unsafe environment, people are not likely to let themselves be
+thrust into a position of inexperience.&quot;</li>
+<li>Change has an intrinsic cost. While time may have made the old way no longer the best way, the old
+way has the advantage that it's familiar and people have mastered it.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Trust and trustworthiness (chap 23)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Effective leaders quickly acquire trust by giving it
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The giving of trust is an enormously powerful gesture. The recipient gives back loyalty as an
+almost autonomous response.&quot;</li>
+<li>Good leaders &quot;give responsibility well before it's been completely earned. They know when to
+turn their backs and take their chances.&quot;</li>
+<li>This is how parents progressively empower their kids — with responsibility and trust on the
+edge of their capabilities.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Timing of change (chap 24)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>In periods of growth, people feel like they're winning, and have less anxiety about change. Change
+is perceived differently, as &quot;growth-related change&quot;, e.g. necessary scaling and refactoring now
+that our team or business is larger. It's good. This is the easiest time to introduce chance.</li>
+<li>Introducing change during decline carries the added baggage that people are anxious about
+corporate health, and maybe their jobs.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>What middle management is there for (chap 25)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Middle managers are the change agents — the implementers of reinvention. If they get trimmed for
+the sake of efficiency, the org will find it much harder to execute change.</li>
+<li>Companies &quot;have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In
+order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder.&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>They need slack for non-routine or unplanned work; reinvention.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Danger in the white space (chap 27)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Competition between middle managers, creating silos
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Over the years, I have come to believe that this kind of competition is almost never explicitly
+designed into an organization; rather, it happens without anyone really wanting it.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>&quot;In knowledge work, all internal competition is destructive.&quot; It inhibits cooperation, which is
+essential in knowledge work.</li>
+<li>&quot;Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision
+making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone
+else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine
+formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning.&quot;</li>
+<li>A key element of training is the slow-down characteristic: the person learning is given the space
+to perform a new skill at a much slower speed than an expert. Argues that efficiency-obsessed orgs
+do not allow for long, slow training/ramp-up periods.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Uncommon sense (chap 29)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Don't expect your organization to overcome all adversity. It's unrealistic, and ends up
+discouraging risk-taking.</li>
+<li>&quot;An organization that has suffered no important setbacks has in fact taken no real risks.&quot;</li>
+<li>&quot;Risk management&quot; means planning for failure, and deploying enough slack in the system to
+accommodate failure.</li>
+<li>Stochastic control: control over a variable (e.g. employee churn), with influential, but imperfect
+levers (e.g. employee comp). This form of control doesn't feel sufficient when managing a single
+team or project, but at a company level with a portfolio of teams and projects, it can be
+sufficiently effective.</li>
+<li>&quot;Risk management is the explicit quantitative declaration of uncertainty.&quot;
+<ul>
+<li>Delivery date of a project should be shown as a probability distribution function.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Risk management: the minimal prescription (chap 30)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Risk diagrams&quot;: for each component, a list of outcomes, and a probability for each.</li>
+<li>Risk containment: when risk materializes and costs you unplanned money or delay, this gets paid
+out of a reserve (i.e. a buffer). Intentional risk planning sets aside an explicit reserve.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The major effort is to keep the risk reserve from being eliminated by someone who wants
+desperately to hear lower numbers.&quot;</li>
+<li>In corporate life, there is constant downward pressure on explicit risk reserves.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>Many risk containment strategies require pre-materialization work. Like installing fire
+extinguishers in a school before the crisis of a fire occurs. This work is often not prioritized,
+because we're busy.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2>Learning to live with risk (chap 32)</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Management by default favors zero-risk projects. The author argues those resources are better
+spent on big, transformational wins, given the modern business environment.
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;The only new initiative you can afford to take on today is one that is full of risk. It's got
+to be something that thrusts you into a new market or exploits a brand-new technology, one that
+transforms your company.&quot;</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+  </div>
+
+  <footer>
+    <hr></hr>
+    All content on this page, including text excerpts, is copyrighted by the author of the book.
+  </footer>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
diff --git a/docs/styles.css b/docs/styles.css
index 20840d2..32aead6 100644
--- a/docs/styles.css
+++ b/docs/styles.css
@@ -91,6 +91,21 @@ footer {
 #index-page a#home, #index-page footer {
   display: none;
 }
+/* We move the github icon down to be next to the page title. This CSS is a bit fragile
+ * if the height of the h1 changes due to other style changegs. */
+#index-page nav {
+  position: absolute;
+  width: var(--width);
+  height: 80px; /* The empirical height of the h1 */
+  margin: 0 auto;
+  inset: 0; /* Center this absolutely positioned element. */
+  pointer-events: none; /* Disable pointer events because this now sits on top of the h1 */
+  top: var(--padding);
+}
+
+#index-page nav a#github {
+  pointer-events: auto;
+}
 
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   :root {
