This Linkedin piece draws on ideas from the Friction Podcast and The Asshole Survival Guide about people in organizations who take sick satisfaction from wielding power or interpreting rules and policies in narrow ways that undermine progress and drive their colleagues and customers crazy. ... Continue Reading »
Friction Project
Better Service, Faster: A Design Thinking Case Study
This Harvard Business Review piece that I wrote with David Hoyt describes an intervention that a pair of Stanford students in one of my classes made in a social service agency to serve clients in ways that were less frustrating, more dignified, and more efficient. The students used multiple ... Continue Reading »
Why Your Job is Becoming Impossible to Do: The Tragedy of Well-Intentioned Organizational Overload
This LinkedIn piece considers why, in many organizations, there are many intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for people to add organizational friction and few incentives for removing friction. ... Continue Reading »
Dropbox’s Secret for Saving Time in Meetings
This INC piece by Rebecca Hinds and me describes a radical strategy used by Dropbox to pressure employees to think about the meetings they call and attended, to schedule fewer meetings and shorter meetings, to have meetings with smaller group, and to walk out of meetings that aren’t a good use of ... Continue Reading »
To Scale Up Fast, Sometimes You’ve Got to Slow Down: Waze Shows The Way
This LinkedIn piece describes how Waze CEO Noam Bardin—despite pressures from investors to go in a hiring spree and to accelerate product development, instead instituted a hiring freeze and paused product development for six weeks so his people could figure out why most people who downloaded this ... Continue Reading »
How Do You End a Meeting? Netflix’s HR Rebel Asks Two Simple Questions
My LinkedIn piece is based on an interview with Patty McCord, a key architect of the Netflix culture. McCord explains the two questions she asks at the end of every meeting to help spare people from unnecessary confusion and frustration. ... Continue Reading »