Category: Leadership
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Learning More from Accidents
When accidents happen, there’s a seductive call to look for a root cause – that is, a chain of events without which, the accident would not have happened. In hindsight, root causes are apparently easy to identify; one works backwards from the accident, identifying causal threads until reaching the “root cause.” It’s simple, and it’s generally wrong.…
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Making it safe to speak up
This week in DuhaOne: SVB’s miss, keeping onboarding fresh, make safety to spot danger, and tackling inclusion. Leadership Moment: Silicon Valley Bank The postmortems have already begun for the SVB failure, the second-largest in US history. This line inside CNN’s summary leapt out at me: Several experts who spoke to CNN said it’s likely that…
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Food as Inclusion
Every Friday night, Jews around the world welcome Shabbat around the dinner table. Saying blessings for each, we light candles, we drink wine, and we salt and eat bread. Fire. Wine. Bread. Salt. These aren’t just Jewish traditions; I just happen to think of them that way because that is the culture in which I experience…
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You’re behind
“You’re behind.” Legacies are complicated. Sometimes a catchphrase so oversimplifies an interaction that, in filling in the missing pieces, we create a false caricature, and do disservice to the person we would honor. Danny Lewin was murdered a score of years ago today. He left behind a family, friends, colleagues, and the company he’d…
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Leading to Representation
It’s a trope among managers and executives that making significant inroads on building a more representatively diverse workforce is almost impossible. Moving the needle by even a fraction of a percentage point in a normal year is considered a massive success worth celebrating. That’s a cop-out. It’s not easy, but it isn’t impossible. And here’s…
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Kremlinology
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Sometimes, your own! There is a natural human tendency towards kremlinology – that is, the attempt to impute motives by observing only a few characteristics or outputs. In one application, it is called Fundamental Attribution Error, when we assert that someone has ill motives just because…
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The Future of Work
Here we are. Three to six months into CoviDistancing – call it lockdowns, social distancing, isolation, shutdowns – and, really, there’s no end in sight. Let that sink in for a few minutes. It’s possible that there’s an effective vaccine just around the corner – which generally means a year of human trials so we know it’s reasonably safe. …
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Moving to Distributed Work
So, you’re working from home … For a while. You’ve probably worked remotely before, and you’re thinking, “I’ve got this!” Odds are, you’re mistaken. You don’t have this. That’s OK; this is an opportunity to learn new skills. You can think of working from home much like someone moving into an entirely new environment. Your…
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One company’s successful approach to gender balance
In an industry where 10-15% of staff are women, the InfoSec team at Akamai—a cybersecurity, content-delivery network and cloud-service provider—is now 40% women. Driving that change—from 28% two years ago—took only a few, simple practices that might work in many other organizations. We drove those changes in partnership between the talent-acquisition team and the hiring managers;…
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Unsolicited Advice on Self Improvement
Some thoughts on advice about guiding others’ self-improvement. Often, advice comes in the form of “If you do X, Y will happen.” It’s worth unpacking that. What “If you do X, Y will happen” often really means is, “For some group, which I think is large and I believe you are in, doing X will increase…