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by Roberto Zoia

You have to build diversity into your company from day one

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Fred Wilson, commenting on how diversity happens:

A few years at our annual CEO summit, Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, told a room full of startup CEOs that you have to build diversity into your company from day one because if you don’t, it becomes so much harder later on. He explained that nobody wants to join a company where nobody looks like them. That really hit home and woke quite a few people up.

All companies and people suffer from back burnering things. You focus on what you must get done and everything else takes a back seat.

That doesn’t work when it comes to hiring and diversity. You have to prioritize it and make it intentional.

Coherence and loyalty

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Coherence, the quality of forming a unified whole, is about our actions matching what we think and what we say.

Pablo Ferreiro and Manuel Alcazar, in their book Managing People, refer to lack of coherence as disloyalty. Although it’s obvious, the term disloyalty gave me a new light on the concept: lack of coherence always has an effect on other people.

Disloyalty. This is the attitude of an individual whose actions do not match his words. Even when truth and veracity exist, action is neutralized. In these cases, the problem is not communication but motivation: the disloyal person knows what he is doing but chooses to continue. This is particularly serious in the case of managers because their disloyal actions are more eloquent than their words and compromise any good communication that may exist in the organization. Unity1 is rapidly destroyed2.

  1. Unity can be loosely defined as the bond of trust and motivation among the members of the organization that makes them willingly go the extra mile for both those members and to exceed the expectations of the organization.↩
  2. Garcia, Manuel Alcazar; Pablo Ferreiro de Babot. Managing People, Kindle Edition, Locations 4208-4212. The quote in Gobierno de Personas, the Spanish edition of the book, reflects better the idea: “Deslealtad: Es la actitud de quien no es fiel en sus acciones a la palabra dada. Aunque haya verdad y veracidad, la acción se torna estéril. En estos casos el problema no es la comunicación sino la motivación: el desleal sabe, pero no quiere. Es especialmente grave en el caso de personas con mando, porque sus acciones desleales resultan más elocuentes que sus palabras y contradicen toda la buena comunicación que pueda haber en la organización. La unidad se destruye de modo acelerado.”↩

Link Roundup

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The Bullshit Web, excellent article by Nick Heer on why some webpages take more time to load than 20 years ago, even if our connection bandwith is 20x better.

An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.

Death to the bullshit web.

Larry King interviews Seth Godin in Communication University.

Personalized Syllabus

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Daniel Goleman, writing about his father Irving Goleman, philologist and professor:

Irving’s signature course, “World Literature: Autobiography of Civilization,” extended beyond the standard cannon to include myths, folk ballads, and oral works from ancient to modern times. The first paper he assigned was an autobiography, with the prompt “Who Am I?” Based on this assignment, he would design a personalized reading list for each student. He chose books that spoke to the issues they faced in life.

There’s a lot that can be said about treating each student differently instead of insisting that everyone should conform to the same mold. More important, this does not apply only to school or college, but also to other situations in life. It’s a kind of empathy that helps us consider the person in front of us as unique and original.

Productivity: less is more

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After using Todoist for managing my task list for more than a year, I’ve decided to change systems again1.

There’s nothing wrong with Todoist. It can organize tasks into projects, and tag them with contexts. It handles deadlines, integrates well with several mail clients and other programs. Syncronization between the desktop and mobile version works flawlessly.

However, Todoist interface somehow gets in the way between me and my task list.

todotxt-apps_lrg

I’ve switched back to Gina Trapani’s todo.txt, which is just a command line interface to a plain text file. Syncing can be done through Dropbox, and there are several apps available for iOS and Android. I’ve used todo.txt before, so its text interface feels natural to me2.

The first thing I’ve noticed is that now I’m relying a lot more on my task list to organize my day.

  1. I’ve used several task managers before Todoist: the powerful, full-GTD capable Omnifocus, Wunderlist, Todo, an Excel file… ↩
  2. If you don’t feel comfortable with the command line interface, there is an extension for Chrome that provides an UI. ↩

Quality through Quantity

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Showing up every day, and doing your work, even though it may not have the quality you expect, will lead you to producing better work.

Austin Kleon quotes this story from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art & Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.