*****A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read. from the Economist
another favorite expression of mine is after you get past a certain
phase as a company it's more likely you'll die of indigestion than starvation
14.15 I love Venn diagrams but if you think of, like
your career and career in a Venn diagram
over time what you're seeking is what am I really good at and
self-awareness is number one number two for anybody know what
you're really good at know what you're
not as good at the second thing is what
do I love doing I'm really good at raising money but I don't
really like it right so I know I can do it but I don't love it so it's like I'm not gonna be you know raising stripes next round or working for a non-profit and raising money I know I can do it but like what do you love and the third is more of the wild card for some people are very impact driven I'm very impact driven but other people might have other motivators and just want to understand what is that motivator
Anti hierarchy anti titles transparency
“Scaling People” is a textbook piece of management writing
Claire Hughes Johnson has gone long on tactics and pragmatism, short on guff
“Scaling People” is written by Claire Hughes Johnson, a tech-industry veteran who spent more than a decade at Google before joining Stripe, a digital-payments unicorn, as its chief operating officer in 2014. By the time she left that role in 2021, the firm had gone from 160 employees to over 7,000. In a world of coders, creators and visionaries, her work was to make things work.
Among other things, Ms Hughes Johnson gives tips on how to run an effective meeting; these include having a round of “check-ins” at the start (getting everyone to say what they want from the meeting, for instance) so that people are focused and so that the quietest members of the group participate early. She offers advice on how to do performance reviews, which decisions you can and should delegate to other people, and how to save high-performing employees from burnout. It is all refreshingly pragmatic.
Behind the tactics lies a clear philosophy, which is to make the implicit explicit. That means being clear about how specific decisions are going to get taken: is this a consensual process or an autocratic one? It means writing things down: by articulating Stripe’s culture, the startup can be clear to prospective joiners what the company’s norms are. It means saying things that other people are not saying, especially if those things are causing dysfunction.
It also means being aware of your own behaviour and preferences. Ms Hughes Johnson has long kept a “Working with Claire” document that spells out to new members of her team what they can expect: how she likes to take decisions, how quickly she will respond to messages, what she wants from them in a one-to-one meeting.
My last post about covid vaccines felt like shouting uselessly into the void … at least until Patrick Collison, the cofounder of Stripe and a wonderful friend, massively signal-boosted the post by tweeting it.
Set up Stripe
Takes about 5 minutes. This is how money from subscribers gets into your bank account.
Patrick – the redheaded older brother, now 30 years old – used to smuggle science and history books into class to read during the more tedious lessons; “you could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas… or you can cheat by reading them in books.”
He enrolled at MIT in 2006 based on an SAT he’d taken at 13.
