The Metaphysical Club was a name attributed by the philosopher Charles S Peirce, in an unpublished paper over thirty years after its foundation, to a conversational philosophical club that Peirce, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the philosopher and psychologist William James, amongst others, formed in January 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dissolved in December 1872. Other members of the club included Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Nicholas St. John Green, and Joseph Bangs Warner.[1] Within the philosophical discussions of the original club, pragmatism is said by Peirce to have been born.[2] The name of the 1872 club was chosen "half-ironically, half-defiantly," according to Peirce, as the group rejected the radical foundationalist European metaphysics in favor of a moderate foundationalism, pursued critical thinking of a pragmatic and positivist nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metaphysical_Club (more)

A Product Team should be collaborative, but communication/psychology/flow is simpler if there's a single "leader" (TeamLead) who the members report to. (more)

Concept of having most of the steering for a product team done by the in-team Product Manager, Engineering Lead, and Designer.

Martina Lauchengco: Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (more)

Project-oriented Roadmaps are counter-productive for Software Product Teams. (more)

Venkatesh Rao wonders whether you should drink the Kool Aid. (more)

Venkatesh Rao thinks that having a "Thrust Engine" (Passion?) makes your whole life better. If you don’t have a thrust engine in your life, drag reduction will also become nearly impossible, because there is no source of energy. Everything from getting organized to losing weight becomes easier if you have a thrust engine humming. Not only do you have a reason to reduce drag (free up more resources for thrust), you have the means to do so. (more)

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says ‘founder mode’ came from studying Steve Jobs. One of the reasons I love talking to Brian is because he spends so much time specifically obsessing over company structure and decision-making — if you listened to his previous Decoder episodes, you already had a preview of founder mode because Brian radically restructured the company after the covid-19 pandemic to get away from its previous divisional structure and transition into a more functional structure that works from a single roadmap. ((2023-11-14) Brian Chesky's New Playbook) (You Are Not Steve Jobs) (more)

STL (S Tereo Lithography) is a file format native to the stereolithography CAD software created by 3D Systems. STL is also known as Standard Tessellation Language.[1] This file format is supported by many other software packages; it is widely used for rapid prototyping and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) (Desktop Fab). STL files describe only the surface geometry of a three-dimensional object without any representation of color, texture or other common CAD model attributes. The STL format specifies both ASCII and binary representations. Binary files are more common, since they are more compact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_(file_format) (more)

Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a company that produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States.[1] The company's headquarters are in Toronto, Ontario, where it was founded, and Denver, Colorado.[2] It develops software in offices in the United States, Canada, and Serbia.[3] Dominion produces electronic (e-voting) voting machines, which allow voters to cast their votes electronically as well as optical scanning devices used to tabulate paper ballots... In May 2010, Dominion acquired Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc.) from Election Systems & Software (ES&S). ES&S had just acquired Premier from Diebold and was required to sell off Premier by the United States Department of Justice over anti-trust concerns.[25] In June 2010, Dominion acquired Sequoia Voting Systems.[26] In 2018, Dominion was acquired by its management and Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems (more)

Steve Denning: Warning To All Managers: Your Job Is Becoming Obsolete. In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle published a story about the mysterious disappearance of a famous racehorse and the murder of the horse’s trainer. No one could figure it out until the fictional detective Sherlock Homes pointed out that none of the witnesses had heard the watchdog bark during the night. This negative fact showed that criminal must have been someone the dog recognized. (more)

Steve Denning: Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—By Solving The Wrong Problem. Two months ago, Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson and associate professor Michaela J. Kerrissey wrote an eloquent article in the May-June issue of Harvard Business Review., “What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety.” (more)

Steve Denning: Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete: Master Value Creation Now. A management revolution is under way in business. Pursuit of profits no longer gets the job done. Firms that practice traditional management are going out of business. The managers who run these firms are now also at risk. They should prepare for these changes by mastering the ten basic truths of value-creating enterprises. (more)

Steve Denning: Why Firms Need A Phase Change In Adaptability To Survive A Trade War. With the launch over recent weeks of a global trade war by the United States against all the major economies of the world, including its closest trading partners, individual firms face an exponentially more uncertain context. (VUCA) (more)

Steve Denning: Why Mindset Is Driving The Age Of Agile. As noted in my last article here, Agile management, after living in the shadows from general management for 15 years, is now “eating the world” and even heralding a new age. (more)

Steve Denning: Crafting A Manifesto For Management In The Digital Age. What used to work, doesn’t any more. The complexity and the pace of change of the digital age are so different from the industrial-era that generally accepted management practices are now obsolete. A new set of management principles and processes are guiding the actions of the most successful firms in the world today. They are summarized in a Manifesto for Management in the Digital Age (Figure 1) and represent a guide to a prosperous future. (more)

Steve Denning: Understanding The Agile Mindset. Practitioners are thus said to have an Agile mindset when they are preoccupied—and sometimes obsessed—with innovating and delivering steadily more customer value, with getting work done in small self-organizing teams, and with collaborating together in an interactive network. Such organizations have been shown to have the capacity to adapt rapidly to a quickly shifting marketplace. (more)

Steve Denning: How Networks Of Competence Help Avoid The Trauma Of Reorganizations. ...trauma of reorganizations can be avoided with a different kind of organizational arrangement: a network of competence, rather than a hierarchy of authority. (more)

Steve Denning: Why Networks Of Competence Also Require Hierarchies. On December 19, 1154, in Westminster Abbey in England, Henry FitzEmpress, an educated 21-year old, became the first man to dare to crown himself “King of England”. His aspiration was to create a nation. His problem? The country was in chaos. After a disastrous civil war, robbery was rampant. After the crusades, squatters occupied vacant castles. No one knew who owned what. Henry saw that if being king was to mean anything at all, he would have to establish a system to prevent crime or administer justice, while establishing his own power as the source of justice. (more)

Organizations tend to swing between Functional structure (you report to someone who used to have a job like yours) and Project Management or divisional structure (you report to someone who is coordinating your efforts with those of other folks not like you). The styles have complementary strengths and weaknesses. MatrixManagement freezes the pendulum in the middle by having you report to two managers at once. WikiWikiWeb:MatrixManagement (more)