Four Holacracy Misses
Four things to reconsider about Holacracy: confusing word choices, a legalistic constitution; heavy dogma; a closed-source codebase.
Clay Parker Jones
I lead Organizational Design at Airbnb. Previously: August, Undercurrent.
Five Technology Things N° 1
Laws for spacecraft design; Competing with Excel; The original iPhone prototype; Build boring features; Your app is making me fat; Rants on the future of interaction design; Why publishers hate iOS7; Big things start as toys
Four Holacracy Keepers
Four key things to keep from years practicing Holacracy: Rule of Law; Continuous Participatory Reorganization; Structured Decisions; Defined Output Formats.
Core Protocols
Most employees give themselves over to a set of rules that govern their day-to-day corporate existence. How good are those rules?
Five Org Design Things N° 1
Nine barriers to change; Nudges; Scalable learning; Learning at scale; McDonald's & Walmart are software.
Worse Is Better
I was familiar with “Weniger aber besser”. But until I started diving into Linux vs. Unix (as a result of my week in Vegas) I’d never heard of “Worse is Better.” It’s a concept in software engineering that indicates an inverse relationship between quality and functionality (more functionality
Five Practical Things N° 1
Rules for Critique Tools for thinkingAn excerpt from Daniel Dennett’s new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, outlines seven of Dennett’s tools for thikottke.orgJason Kottke These basically work for feedback, too. Copying mostly whole-cloth from Kottke until the book he references magically appears via
Five Strategy Things N° 4
Super Bowl spending; Robots; Defining Strategy; Loyalty Cards r Bad; Disruption & Airbnb; How to win championships.
The Undercurrent Skills Maturity Matrix
This development tool is designed to give strategists clarity into their path forward, help them define and deepen strengths, and give managers a way to guide their directs.
Complex Good
Build discoverable complexity (otherwise known as interestingness) into your business and brand.
Forty Business Tips
These are all really two tips: focus on service and execution; if it’s not working, get out.
Objection Criteria & Strategy Reviews
Along with a few other folks in the UC “Management” crew, I spent Monday and Tuesday learning about Holacracy. It’s an interesting organizing idea that deserves a much longer set of posts, but the five-second version is that it’s a explicitly structured, distributed-authority, adaptive decision-making