How's your free/busy cal for the “Discuss Options for Uncle Frank’s Casket” meeting?
Trying to hack work meetings, The Myth of “You Build It, You Run It,” how Alex Williams finds links, Oracle cloud momentum, and OpenStack collectables.
Suggested theme song: that’s some real-deal wigglin’.
Meetings
It’s that time of year again: lots of planning meetings. In my role, I’m usually so far out to sea and into terra incognita that I don’t get to many corporate meetings. But, I have recently. Here’s four things I’ve been thinking:
1. Categorize meetings into two types: brainstorming and deciding
Brainstorming meetings are intended to be open ended, almost feeling like a waste of time. But, you’re there to come up with and gather information. You have no idea what a problem is, how to solve it, or what’s going on.
A risky variation of brainstorming meetings is the “feedback” meeting. In this type of meeting, you have some ideas and you want to get feedback from other people. This can be great, but you have to watch out for the people in the meeting taking over the agenda and, most often, complaining about something tangentially related. I’ve found that you have to make sure to wrangle people to be on track, focusing on the topic of feedback. This is hard to do without being a jerk, but possible.
A feedback meeting is often actually another type of meeting: I need to run this by you so you’re not surprised and piss all over my idea and try to stab in the back meeting. You know “politics.” That’s not a cool meeting.
Decision meetings are where a decision will be made. At the end of the meeting, something will be different and stuff will be done. You might spend time going over the status of something, describing the problem, and even debating various states of reality, casting blame, whatever. All of that is irrelevant to this meeting: a decision must be made. This is the most valuable type of meeting.
Outside for the meeting itself, the utility of the decision meeting concept is to ask: did we make a decision in this meeting? If you have a meeting that follows the format of a decision meeting: we have a problem/opportunity, here’s details on it, here are possible solutions, here are people who could do things, here’s whatever…and you leave the meeting but there’s no decision, that’s not a cool meeting. More than likely, this means that there wasn’t a person in the meeting who could make the decision. It sounds stupidly obvious when you point it out, but if you’re gong to have a decision meeting, you need someone in there who has the authority and will to make a decision.
This leads to one of two tactics for optimizing the time you spend in meetings.
2. Only go to meetings that have executives in them
Only go to meetings that have senior executives in them. These are people who can and should be making decisions. If an executive is in the meeting, a decision will probably be made and the meeting will probably be valuable.
3. Start with the proposal
Start a meeting with a proposal of what to do, discuss details if needed. After about 30 years of doing all sorts of big time corporate meetings my feeling is that most people in the room know what needs to be done before they sit down. They have an idea of what should happen. There will be at least one person who has an idea. If you start with the end, what actions to take, you can do some crude Poppering and figure out why not to do it. The idea can be “stupid,” but it probably won’t be: I don’t think I’ve ever been in a meeting where the people were genuinely without a good idea. The other advantage is that you can anchor and frame the rest of the meeting around this original proposal. That is, when you start with a concrete proposal, you do a mental trick where you narrow the scope to that idea and similar ones. This can be a negative bias, of course, but I suspect that most likely it’s better much more often than worse.
Of course, this doesn’t 100% eliminate not cool meetings. But, I don’t know, maybe it’s something.
4. Be kind
The idea of “not showing up to meetings” always has a distasteful feel to it. For productivity, meetings can be bad. But, for social-gardening, they’re often good. The next time you don’t want to show up for a meeting because you don’t need to be there, change the name of the meeting to “Discuss Options for Uncle Frank’s Casket” and see if you can afford the social debt to skip it.
5. Optimizing Meeting Optimization Advice
There’s a lot of advice about doing better corporate meetings. We all know you should have an agenda, someone should take notes. We’re familiar with the Amazon six page memo thing and PRFAQ stuff. The problem with a lot of meetings advice is that it’s hard to put in place, it’s not practical enough. The evidence is: we still have mostly bad meetings and people keep complains!
Like advice for anything, advice for meetings has to be simple and easy to do. It should require just incremental change, not big changes.
My Content
What’s going on in Chicago? - Software Defined Talk #402: This week we take a critical look at DHH’s plan to move HEY! out of the cloud and the 5 values driving the decision. Plus, some thoughts on residential fiber. Here is the video of the live recording if you prefer that.
Two talks I can’t do because I don’t know the relevant tools well enough to demo them
These are talks I’d like to give, but am too technically deficient to give.
Making Shift Left Real for Developers - Shifting from Marketing Malarky to Helpful Reality
Lean-think teaches us that moving decisions closer to the person doing the work is beneficial. When it comes to software in large organizations, this has resulted in the idea of “shift left” where tasks like security and governance are moved “left” in the pipeline to the developer. The term “DevSecOps” is another favorite. Without the proper systems-thinking and tools in place, shifting left results in more work for developers and can actually lower the quality the work done on security and governance. In this talk, we’ll talk about the changes you need to make in how you work and the tools you use to make “shift left” possible and beneficial.
The Myth of “You Build It, You Run It” and Full Stack Developers
Developers write applications, they don’t run them. We’ve spent 16 years ignoring this reality. Instead, developers have been subjected to managing how their apps are configured, released, and managed in production. If you believe in the concept of a “full stack developer,” the rise of kubernetes has made this situation worse. Developers are meant to be writing applications, moving pixels on the screen. But…there is something to that idea original idea. We’ve just pushed developers too far down the stack. In this talk, we’ll cover what it actually means to “run it” for developers and how it is beneficial with the right approach.
Speaking at Scale on March 11th
I’ve always wanted to go to the SCaLE conference and I’ll finally get the chance this year. I’m giving a talk on building and running platform teams in large organizations on Saturday, March 11 at 6pm. We’re also arranging a live recording of Software Defined Talk (Sunday at noon), and if we can get out act together we’ll have a podcast meetup as well. If you’d like to attend the conference, they’ve given us speakers a discount code for 50% off! It’s SPEAK.
Wastebook
“all you’ve done is replaced the bullshit you know with the bullshit you don’t” Amazing. I feel like I should read this every morning, twice a day as needed.
“I always grow with nature.”
“I need a drink and a quick decision.”
“In the 1960s Starkist Tuna started an ad campaign with a hipster, jive talking, cartoon character named Charlie the Tuna. He wore sunglasses and a beret and always talked about having ‘Good taste.’ He wanted, for some reason, to be caught and turned into tuna fish by Starkist, but always got told ‘Sorry, Charlie.’ Starkist didn’t want tuna that had good taste, it wanted tuna that tastes good.” Knowledge.
The Link Gourmand
I like links, you like links. How do other people find links? I asked them! This a new series where people tell me how they find stuff they read, their links, and thoughts on the life of the Link Gourmand. Thanks to Alex for kicking it off!
Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack:
I look for links whenever I need clarification on something I am writing about. I found this early on in my enterprise reporting life – circa-2008., It was the only way I could make any sense of things. And it’s still that way today. In many ways, I find links through the writing I am doing or prepping for interviews It’s in this way that I often find links.
Twitter is my go-to source. I keep columns in Tweetdeck that relate to terms I am researching or want to follow. WebAssembly, for example, is a topic I am following that has linked me to so many nifty sites! Then there are the lists I keep such as “every day favorites,” or more specific topic-related lists.
Relevant to your interests
The shallow branding of shortform video - “shortform creators have a more shallow relationship with their viewers. It’s just simply difficult to connect to a person when you’re spending less than 60 seconds with their content. Longform YouTubers and podcasters, on the other hand, are spending upwards of a half hour or longer with their audience”
Navigating The Economic Headwinds Of 2023 - “Sales reps only spent 22.8% of their time on direct selling activities in 2022, compared to 25.1% pre-COVID.” And: “Internal communications and emails continue to take selling time away from reps. Pre-COVID, reps spent an average of 2.5 hours on emails/comms; this was cited as the number one time-saving area. In 2022, while the amount of time spent is the same, it dropped to the fourth position for time savings.” // People obsesses over sales people’s productivity.
ShareGPT: Share your wildest ChatGPT conversations with one click.
AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology - You can’t copyright AI generates images, but you can copyright how you use them and write about them in books and stuff. Presumably, for film, because you’d edit it, you could copyright it. // "The office said on Tuesday that it would grant copyright protection for the book’s text and the way Kashtanova selected and arranged its elements. But it said Kashtanova was not the “master mind” behind the images themselves.
It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive - Memories of the brick and mortar says. ChatGPT would like to add this: “the author is saying that old countercultures were cool because they stood up against oppressive elements of society, whereas new subcultures are not as cool because they are more focused on complaining about imagined mainstreams in a therapeutic manner. The author misses the days when people were irreverent and rebellious instead of being emotional and complaining.”
Ask This Question at Your Next Meeting - “The question: What are you stuck on?”
JPMorgan Restricts Employees From Using ChatGPT - “In addition to JPMorgan, other organizations have also blocked access to ChatGPT. Last week, Verizon Communications Inc. barred the chatbot from its corporate systems, saying it could lose ownership of customer information or source code that its employees typed into ChatGPT.”
Oracle Cloud Made All The Right Moves In 2022 - “Oracle reported outstanding Q2 earnings (which ends on Nov. 30), with total revenue for the quarter reaching more than $200 million above the high end of the guidance range and growing 25% in constant currency. The solid overall revenue growth was primarily due to Oracle’s infrastructure and applications cloud businesses, which grew 59% and 45% respectively in constant currency. OCI consumption revenue (realized on a pay-as-you-go basis by usage) was up 88%. Oracle now has 22,000 infrastructure customers, with several customers who signed contracts exceeding $1 billion last quarter.”
The Top Metrics You Should Be Modeling In Competitive/Market Intelligence (CI/MI) - As it says. You have to scroll through a bunch of story first - kind of like recipes on the internet.
Logoff
There are two things I want to look into more:
Artifact. I looked at this a little bit this yesterday and deleted it because it just seemed like Apple News. But then heard a Dithering episode that made it sound good. Maybe it’d be good.
Notion. Yeah, that one. You know that I cycle through note-taking things. The introduction of AI stuff makes it look more interesting. Where do I even start comprehending how I’d use it. I use Apple Notes now, Reminders sometimes, Drafts app. I’m guessing it could all be jammed into there, and their privacy stuff seems OK…?
