This blog post is all about three particular kinds of issues Airbnb focused on when declaring their way to fix problems in their company culture; why its important to name such issues explicitly; what happens if you ignore them & why it's so important not to do so.Disclaimer: the concept presented in this article is not mine, hereby I take no credit neither for the naming nor the idea itself. The terms come from Airbnb's CPO Joe Gebbia & I've read about them in "The Airbnb Story". I just think they are cool (& useful) enough to get you…
All posts in communication
In this blog post I'll describe why remote work != remote work, what's wrong about satellites and isles, why differences in communication bandwidth are worse than overall low bandwidth and what does it have in common with osmosis & water cooler.No, I'm not going to describe pros & cons of a remote work in depth. This is well covered in many sources & in a way I couldn't have matched in a blog post (or even series). My intention is to address a very simple & well isolated issue: plenty of people, encouraged by some commonly known successful examples of…
This blog post is all about: psychoanalysis :), that we all behave (occasionally) like parents & children, if you adopt parent ego state - you're forcing your interlocutor to adopt child stance, sometimes to resolve discussion that seems irreversibly stuck - the easiest way is to map the interaction to psychoanalytic model/pattern.I love working with smart people - apart from all the other reasons, I keep learning new stuff from them on daily basis. That's how I've come up with the topic of this blog post (thanks Agnieszka!) - this stuff is so good, I couldn't resist sharing it…
By reading this blog post you're learn that: transparency is deeply in shoes business, Definition of Done should contain necessary outbound communication, asynchrony is (again) king, publish-subscribe pattern has successful application scenarios out of code as well & habitual transparency can be a side effect of any kind of work. If I were to create statistics of words most frequently used in my posts, "transparency" would certainly rank high. For a reason. I strongly believe that the transparency is a foundation of every healthy work environment. But what does it really mean? Answering frankly to questions that do…
I'm not sure whether you agree with me or not, but IMHO we (in general) get better & better in embracing increasingly complex tools & technologies, while in the same time we keep failing in the most fundamental activities that do not change so dynamically over the years - like basic interpersonal communication, especially if it spans between teams / locations / career ranks / specialties. Where ... are we? Many people do not know how to communicate effectively and / or (what's even worse) undervalue the importance of the efficient communication. Perfect example to illustrate this issue is so-called "status/progress reporting"…
I've always wanted No Kill Switch to be 50% tech + 50% leadership+mgmt blog. But it just doesn't work out like that. I'll tell you a secret - I publish regularly twice a week, which is quite often, but I never struggle with finding a topic for the next blog post, quite the contrary: I always have like 4-5 unfinished blog posts that just wait there to be finished. And everyday activities like meeting interesting people, composing solution blueprints, auditing standalone applications or even complex systems (yes, I do such stuff sometimes) & any kind of other project work bring…