Ex-Amazon 10+ years, product. Build the world you want to live in from first principles. Not Financial Advice. 🇺🇸 🏴☠️
Seattle, WA
Joined May 2020
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Correct
Trigger warning - controversial post on people management.
Most corporate PIPs ("performance improvement plans") are corporate CYA shams that torture employees while delaying the inevitable. It's much better for the company (and the employee!) to part ways quickly and with generous severance.
If managers just paid employees severance for the time the average corporate manager would have lallygagged with a PIP that goes nowhere, they can save time, money, and grief.
Team performance is upgraded faster. And the problem employee can move on to something they can succeed at faster—spared the embarrassment of a sham PIP that is usually designed to set them up for failure.
There is one critical but rare exception: a non-performing employee with a track record of exceptional performance. Or when is specific, compelling evidence that in a different role they can be not merely ok, but truly great. In that case, leaders should be curious and try (authentically, but only once!) to create the circumstances for exceptional performance.
In my experience, true performance turnarounds are possible about 5% of the time. Mostly PIPs delay the inevitable or result in retaining a low performer who should not be retained.
In the 95% case, parting ways quickly is good for employee and company. The 5% case where a turnaround is possible can create one of the most rewarding experiences for leaders.
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Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
The irony of last night's outcome: it's not that more voters now support the values of the Democratic party.
It's that the party that was elected to deliver Republican policies did complete the opposite: no free trade, rampant inflation, and big government spending.
The voters who switched simply veered off the path that wasn't taking them where they wanted to go.
Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
FT comments never miss.
I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.
I've been in France since 2002 and have never seen the streets so violent nor the politics so extreme. From the sacking of the supermarket on my street to the prospect of Présidente Le Pen, here's me @FT including thoughts from 2 French Nobel laureates as.ft.com/r/addcad57-0f9d-4e…
Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
unequivocally, yes
- 65 y/o Winston Churchill became Prime Minister after a decade in the political wilderness, and led Britain through WWII
- 65 y/o Frank Lloyd Wright started an architecture school at his home after a decade of “wilderness years”, and went on to design Fallingwater and the Guggenheim
- 52 y/o Ray Kroc started franchising McDonald’s after 17 years selling milkshake machines, and built it to 7,500 restaurants and a $500M fortune
- 46 y/o Katharine Graham took over the Washington Post as a self-described “doormat wife” who’d never run anything, and led it through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate while the stock rose 3,315%
- 46 y/o Alfred Loomis started a private physics lab after making a fortune on Wall Street, and went on to run the MIT lab behind America’s WWII radar
- 45 y/o Mary Kay Ash started Mary Kay with $5,000 after being passed over for a man she’d trained, and built a company with $3.5B+ in annual sales and 2.5M consultants
- 44 y/o Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential after 28 years in kitchens, and became a TV icon: 248 episodes, ~100 countries, 5 Emmys
- 40 y/o Jim Simons started a hedge fund after a career as a prize-winning mathematician, and built the Medallion Fund: 66% a year for 35 years with no losing year
- 40 y/o Vera Wang started designing wedding dresses after a figure-skating career and 17 years at Vogue, and built a brand selling $700M+ a year
- 38 y/o Stan Lee started The Fantastic Four after two decades of formulaic comics, and went on to co-create Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk
Yep
Elon Musk goes out there and builds what every teenage boy fantasizes about.
Apart from Elon’s brilliance, this sci-fi level of engineering has also been enabled by the culture of Silicon Valley, which itself is an offshoot of broader American culture.
Whether you like them or not, you have to admit that Americans have truly mastered risk-taking as a culture.
And I must insist that it is culture. You can’t recreate Silicon Valley simply with the right policies or incentives.
You have to build a culture that celebrates risk-taking, that celebrates audacity, and that celebrates curiosity above everything else.
Often, the greatest inventions are byproducts of a group of people stubbornly following their curiosity. This is hard to justify economically because there are no immediate returns.
And it is a distinctly American achievement to have institutionalized this culture.
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Exactly.
What puzzles me about French economists like Gabriel, as well as Emmanuel and Tomas, is the zeal they bring in trying to convince Americans that they have to implement a French model that is focused on redistribution rather than growth, because every indication we have suggests that the focus on redistribution has cost France, and some other countries in Europe, like my own native Belgium, very dearly so far. In fact, the French economy looks like it is about to enter a serious fiscal crisis because its redistribution model is no longer sustainable.
Californians ought to celebrate the fact that wealth is being created in California, and not somewhere else in the U.S. or in the rest of the world. Americans, and Californians, for that matter, should continue to do what they do best, which is focus on growing the pie. It would be a mistake to adopt a model that is fundamentally broken.
What the French should do instead is try to copy the model that made California an engine of innovation. In that case, smart, highly educated French kids wouldn't come to the U.S. to start companies. They would do so in France. If they had done that, they would have more than one AI startup company.
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Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
I'm a @delta Diamond Medallion flier, and I'm generally happy with the airline, but the one thing that could make me switch to @united is Starlink. It's just so much better. Crazy to deny your customers the best just because you don't like Elon.
CEO of @Delta Trashes @elonmusk To Explain Rejecting Starlink — “It’s All True What They Say About Him”
viewfromthewing.com/delta-ce…
🤔
If you are a legal immigrant in Europe you shouldn’t particularly care or worry about whether Europeans in general are accepting of people that look like you unless you are being personally attacked.
Europeans in the last few centuries benefited massively off their settlements and colonies across the globe. And they did this, well because, they could.
By the way, I am not saying this gives you an automatic moral right to come live in Europe. My point is this: people throughout history have simply done what they wanted to, limited by what they could.
So I think it is entirely possible for these two somewhat conflicting ideas to be simultaneously true:
1. It makes perfect sense for Europeans to not want demographic change, to want to limit and control and curate the kind of people they want to be neighbors with.
2. It makes perfect sense for you as an individual to want to better the conditions of your life, to go live where you feel you can live life to the fullest.
However, the last thing you should do is plead for acceptance. Because it never works and if it works if comes mixed with pity and that sort of acceptance is not worth losing your dignity over.
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This is America 🇺🇸
Walt Disney named Karandeep Anand to the newly created role of chief technology officer for the entertainment giant bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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To the racists and ass hats - this is America 🇺🇸 too. We love the country and aren’t going anywhere.
For those asking, the menu —
Pink lentils (masoor daal)
Basmati rice with cumin (jeera chawal)
Salad with lemon juice, salt, and pepper
Beef keema with peas (keema matar)
Cauliflower and potatoes (aloo gobi)
Full fat yogurt
No dessert. This was very satisfying and I’m 🥲.
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Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
Happy weekend and good Shabbos to all — yes, even the people who call me a “paperwork American,” who post racist nonsense for clicks, who haven’t read enough books, who don’t know history. God loves all of you and it’s not too late to stop being wrong.
I’m going to spend the weekend with my family. Hold your loved ones close. Say “I love you” more. One day it will be too late, and you might wish you had said it more. It’s free.
Crawl, Walk, Run retweeted
My friendly reminder, after Microsoft software caused billions in damage due to benign features being chained together (ILOVEYOU) and then a bunch of Windows Server ecomm apps went down over holidays (and more), Microsoft just said:
"So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve. A good example of this is the changes we made in Outlook to avoid e-mail-borne viruses. If we discover a risk that a feature could compromise someone’s privacy, that problem gets solved first. If there is any way we can better protect important data and minimize downtime, we should focus on this. These principles should apply at every stage of the development cycle of every kind of software we create, from operating systems and desktop applications to global Web services."
Full text: "Trustworthy Computing" January 2002. archive.is/6T7hl
We did this on our own. We did not ask for regulators to tell us. We had the data. We knew the issue was in the software. It was super difficult in the competitive and customer-demanding world we worked but we did it.
It is so confusing to me that the AI companies are acting so helpless and in need of oversight to prioritize making the right product. What do they think regulators would know about building their products that they do not know?
How much more evidence do we need?
