Biweeklycast

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Dima and Slava discuss the spreadsheet mentality and the general difficulties of making data-driven decisions while not loosing the forest for the trees.

• Theme corner: Dima's season of decoupling

Spreadsheet mentality (sometimes called "spreadsheet thinking") refers to an overly mechanistic or reductionist approach to decision-making and management that relies too heavily on quantitative metrics while ignoring qualitative factors and nuance.

• Improving a number while loosing track of why we started this in the first place.

• Measure = quantify, at least for the purposes of this discussion
• Cult of data-driven decisions
• Biweekly 52: Needs Analysis
• The “Traffic Light” Approach to Problem Solving

Quotes on the topic

"What gets measured, gets managed.” – attributed to Peter Drucker or W. Edwards Deming

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." – W. Edwards Deming

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Goodheart’s Law

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behaviour.” – Eliyahu Goldratt

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Dima and Slava discuss all the so familiar ways in which business meetings can fail and share their thoughts on how to prevent meetings from failing.

• Theme corner: Slava's winter of nucleus and spring of connection
• Magic of longer vacations

Meeting is when people get together to achieve a specific purpose

• Meetings have a goal. Effective meetings achieve their goals.
• How meetings fail
• Goal or purpose is not defined
• Meeting setup is not fit for the goal it tries to achieve
• People, who are needed, are not in the meeting
• The purpose of a meeting is misplaced
• Lack of focus in a meeting
• Wrong pacing of meeting: too fast or too slow
• Lack of follow-up
• Are there kinds of meetings that absolutely must happen face to face? Is it possible to hold any kind of meeting remotely?
• Is there a best duration for a meeting?
• The Surprising Secret of Synchronisation
• Episode about results chain 52: Needs Analysis

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Dima and Slava discuss the ineffable concept of thought leadership and politely disagree with the author of publication that sparked the discussion.

• Dima's contribution to the pile of undead documentation
• The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership
• "Thought leadership is content" – how can that be?
• Martin Fowler
• Serhiy Haydaychuk
• Cortext podcast
• Meta-discussion: last-minute praparation and different ways approaching multi-step tasks

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Dima and Slava discuss documentation for systems, processes, and so on, and debate how to prevent it from crossing the line from being helpful to being actively misleading.

• Dima's January of putting one foot in front of the other
• Hacker News
• Fighting undead documentation
• Documentation evolves independently of the systems/processes it describes
• Put date of last update in the document to signal that it may be outdated
• Doing something vs documenting something
• Finding a updated document can also be a challenge
• How often and how much to document?
• Ideally, documentation is integrated into the system is documents
• 1-2-3 rule for automation writing documentation
  

Just feel it!

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Dima and Slava kind of follow up on the discussion of Customer Development in the previous episode and talk about chains of results in assessment of customer needs.

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Dima and Slava read and discuss "The Four Steps to Epiphany" – a classical book for entrepreneurs and startup founders.

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Dima and Slava follow up on the conversation they started in episode 47 and Dima tries to articulate more precisely what he means by people not being specific enough and gives example of common pitfalls of obscure communication.

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Dima and Slava dive into wonderful season of strategic sessions and try to deduce why everyone does them in December and how to make working on strategy a time well spent.

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Dima and Slava discuss "Founder Mode", an essay by Paul Graham about differences between more founders and hired managers in tech companies.

"An argument can be perfectly biased in two different ways."

"Care about what you do."

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Dima shares his longing for the necessary details and the right level of abstraction, while Slava tries to persuade him that all the details aren't always necessary and everything can be fine anyway.