#work (66 quotes)
One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.
— , Empire of Pain But what else can he do? This is the problem with not having a real job; when you want to look for another one, nobody knows what you’ve done. His only currency is in the people who interacted with him directly.
— , Infomocracy Sometimes, we have to move forward knowing that other people tried to make sense of this mess and failed. We may need to shine the light brighter or longer than they did. Perhaps now is a better time. We may know the outcomes of their fate, but we don't know our own yet. We can't until we try.
— , How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody Easy’s fast, and hard takes all the time.
— , The Mercy of Gods This I learned, meatbag, this and nothing more: when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.
— , To Sleep in a Sea of Stars A goal without a plan is just a wish.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry There are two meta lessons after twenty years that keep coming up. Word of mouth is unreasonably effective. You get what you do.
— , Laptops should work in the rain It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
— , Inspired It was something he’d seen plenty of times in his job, the way that kind of mindset worked, spiralling inwards into itself. Until at some point, the necessity of doing bad things for a good cause became, by the inexorable ratchet of cognitive dissonance, the insistence that doing things the bad way was a virtue in itself. Because otherwise how could one justify all the bad things already done?
— , Lords of Uncreation Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.
— , Red Team Blues If that work is meant to generate a million dollars a month in revenue, and you can decrease the time it takes to finish that work from 12 months to 6 months, the work you're doing is the most important work that could be happening.
— , How to Make the Case for Slowing Down to Speed Up One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.
— , The Mountain in the Sea If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.
— , Four Thousand Weeks “When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”
— , Leviathan Falls Lord Acton said power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
— , The Delirium Brief The best tools enable collaboration that was previously unthinkable.
— , Why Figma Wins We often forget that the purpose of the tools we use at work isn’t to increase our individual productivity, but the entire team’s productivity. Companies themselves often forget this.
— , Why Figma Wins That’s how you measure real skill, Solveig. Reliable repeatability, not peak performance.
— , Ballistic While the digital team is there to act as an agent of change for the organisation, that does not mean it has carte blanche to be ignorant of the current rules, much less rip up or ignore them all. If you go back to first principles, many of the most frustrating aspects of working in a bureaucracy – the paperwork, the delays, the acronyms and language – are grounded in perfectly reasonable intent. Often there are very good legal, security or moral reasons lying behind the way things are. The problem arises when wise intent is smothered by many layers of abstraction. As experienced hands within the organisation, the job of the bureaucratic hackers is to get to the bottom of the intent behind the rules, explain this to the digital incomers, and ensure that the new teams follow them to everyone’s satisfaction.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale Good digital work is a million silent nods of approval, not one loud round of applause.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale In the early days, it is more important to build good services that ship even if they don’t translate easily into common components. A service made of near-perfect parts that never actually sees the light of day is the most imperfect service of all.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale Digital transformation saves money – lots of money. It thaws frozen markets and creates new ones. It brings clarity and beauty to a jumbled mess. It delivers rewards, applause and validation. But far more important than all of those things, it makes things simpler, cheaper and faster for citizens, businesses and users.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale The digital team must avoid falling into the trap of rule-setters everywhere, which is to impose a way of doing things without providing any practical help for how to go about it. You should accompany the stick of digital standards with the best carrot you can provide, and make it easier to follow the rules than to ignore them.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale The one advantage we had, which is a thing I brought to the enterprise, was the understanding that the plan was not the goal. The goal was the goal, and we were going to get to it however we could. And if it meant changing our plans, sometimes in the middle of executing them, then we would.
— , The Consuming Fire There are plans that come off the rails as soon as they start moving, and plans that get you frightened because they seem to be going too well, too smoothly, picking up a scary speed…
— , Revenger