Category: Thinking

No more comments on this blog

Last night I turned off comments on this blog. This post you’re reading now shouldn’t have the option to comment on it at the footer of the post. Years ago I read a book called Naked Conversations, by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble that was really the first thing that inspired me to consider blogging in the first place. It was reading that book that inspired me to ping Ross and ask for his help to set this blog up originally and it was out of those conversations that I came to begin using Twitter. Indeed, I owe a lot to those years! I love small-s social, to coin a new (?) term. In it’s most pure form, it’s what happens when people contribute their thoughts on a great variety of topics into the public discourse. It makes us all smarter. Whether it’s messaging, Social Media (big S, lol), or something else this desire to speak into the commons is something that will not go away. Arguably, it’s been with us for all time. The more responsive we are to it, the better things tend to get.

And so, I turned off comments.

As things progressively move to being more mobile and more product and/or platform based, the old comment system familiar to blogs has become less relevant to me. Open conversation now happens on Twitter, mostly. My posts have never really generated a large swath of comments, anyway. My writing has never seemed to spark it like other bloggers have done. Most of my conversation today now happens in Yammer, Facebook Messenger (which is how I communicate with close friends) and Twitter. The conversation seems to have mostly moved on. It remains on some blogs; AVC is still one of my favourite blogs and it has a huge community following it.

Even so, there’s still something romantic and unique to me about writing in long-form and I that’s what I’m enjoying about reading and writing more at the moment. I’m really enjoying being a subscriber (do sign up!) to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, mostly because he writes terrifically well about a topic I’m passionate about. But he also generates a lot of discussion on Twitter to colour in the grey areas of the posts he writes, which is excellent to follow along with.

So, what will happens to the conversations that take place around blogs? Could we see a return to conversations on blogs in a different and even more traditional sense? Here’s what I think is shaping up. For many reasons, we’re seeing more and more places pop up where the product and/or platform you’re using not only offers you features that help you write the blog, but also help you distribute it. Medium and Tumblr are the archetype here. Medium has a beautiful feature that seems newer than most that allows you to respond to a post with your own post. I did this a couple of weeks ago when I wrote this response to Andy Swann and found it a great experience.

Medium Response

I’m really enjoying using WordPress.com at the moment because I can feel that it’s maintaining the a place for me to build up a life’s work, similar to how Fred Wilson describes it here. But I can also feel that it is getting better and better to use for following and responding to others with long-form writing. So much so, I think it will stay ahead of places like Medium in the long run.

So. No more comments but not necessarily no more conversation. If you’d like to chat about anything I’ve ever written here, I’d love to keep the conversation going either in your own blog post (by simply linking back to a post), reblogging my posts on WordPress.com or mentioning me on Twitter. I look forward to chatting with you sometime soon!

A look at The Alliance and Adam Nash’s latest blog post

A little while ago, Adam Nash – the CEO of Wealthfront – posted a great tweetstorm on why hiring new people was so important for companies. I remember seeing it and retweeting a number of the posts. Today, he posted a simple blog post outlining much of what he said on Twitter, but with more context. It’s a great read.

Every new employee bets on the company, and the company bets on them.  It’s one of the most human and yet often overlooked aspects of technology careers at startup companies.

It reminded me to post quickly about a book I recently finished. The book is called The Alliance and is written by Reid Hoffman. Given Nash came from LinkedIn prior to Wealthfront, it’s no surprise that there’s a strong feeling that the post and book are cut from the same cloth. There’s two quotes I want to share that have stayed with me since reading it.

Remember the underpinnings of the alliance: the company helps the employee transform his career; the employee helps the company transform itself and become more adaptable.

Essentially, in the book Hoffman outlines three different buckets that both companies and employees can use to categorize how they’re growing their career at any given time by completing one of three types of Tour Of Duty: Rotational, Transformational, Foundational. This makes a lot of sense to me. This Slideshare is a great primer for the book so check it out in more detail.

As Nash points out, every employee is taking a bet on the company when they join and vice versa. Being honest about that and being cognisant of how much each party is actually risking by working together allows the approach espoused by The Alliance to work.

As the average time that someone spends working at one company continues to diminish, we can no longer risk being unclear about what we’re looking to get from our employees as employers. We must provide more clarity about the important work that needs to be done in our organisation and how our people can help carry that out. In the same vein, as an employee, it’s on us to bring this mindset into our careers and current jobs to express what growth we’re looking to achieve, and have a conversation about how we can do that together. Which brings me to the final quote I wanted to share from The Alliance.

Never before in human history have so many people been connected by so many networks.

Being a member of the ‘Yam-Fam’ I can relate to this one. Networks exist everywhere now. We’re becoming more and more connected, everyday – be it to the people we work next to, to our less immediate colleagues, to our vendors/partners/suppliers, to our customers and finally to the citizens of the world. Connecting with various communities in a relevant way that adds value to all parties is now, I believe, a core skill of any knowledge worker.

There’s subtlety to this point. To me, this does not mean that it’s healthy to jump from job to job because opportunities continue to abound. For me, this means that the time you spend in one place should be determined by how well you feel you’re able to add value to that community. If you’ve only been around a short while, then the value you’ve provided to that community is probably low. However, if you do find a group of people that resonates with you in the present moment that allows you to grow your own skills and consciousness, along with the continued growth of the company, then you’ll have those connections for life. People like to work with great people. And people move on to new opportunities all of the time. If you’ve been a part of a high-performance team then it’s likely that you’ll get to join those folks again at some point in your career, when the stars align again.

Anyways, the book is great as is Adam’s post. I hope you enjoy reading them. In the meantime, we’re hiring here at Yammer in a number of roles in our Engineering and Product organisation. If you want to work in a high-performance team that’s truly looking to help organizations become more responsive to their staff, partners and customers then please do get in touch on Twitter or email me.

Writing and Responding: Reflections on taking some time out

My parents, Janet and Doug, came and visited Rose, Edith and I in San Francisco earlier this month. They were with us for two weeks, which was terrific. To celebrate their visit, and to make the most of it, I took two weeks of annual leave. In that time, I disconnected from ‘work’ things and just focused on being in the moment as much as I could with my family. But a strange thing happened along the way. I got the urge to write here on this blog again. It felt good to be back.

And so, I connected again but in a different way. In coming back to work at Yammer early this week, I caught up with Matt Partovi to sync about a few projects we’re working on. In the early minutes of our catchup, I explained what I think is the difference. Whilst on vacation, I wasn’t focusing on ‘processing’ all of the various things that come at me each day. Don’t get me wrong – I love what I do – but the processing bit can consume me during the days. Whether it’s responding to yammer messages, emails, instant messages or calls there’s a lot to consume. Without that, I was more able to focus on doing some writing. I wouldn’t say the posts of the last week were particularly terrific, but there are a couple I am proud of and that have continued to give me pause for thought here and there. The difference is that you’re not writing, or spending keystrokes, on responding to stimuli but pausing and considering the world and producing something to try and explain that. To try and take what’s in your head and describe it for people. To create.

None of this is particularly earth shattering or new. Indeed, it’s mostly the same kind of thoughts that echo through the famous GTD series. Jason Shah also nailed today with this tweet.

We’re fast approaching the end of the year, which brings with it that special time when often our minds turn to thoughts of creation. What do you want to create in 2015?

My experience of high-performing teams – “What People Who Worked At Google Know That You Probably Don’t”

I read this great article from Hunter yesterday and wanted to revisit one of the two main points he makes in it about high performing teams.

“2. Know what high performance teams feel like”

I’ve been a part of teams I’d class as high performing, as well as others I’d class as not. Reading the post made me reflect on what separated those different experiences. There is definitely a palpable sense you get when you join a team that’s really pushing itself. You get this sense that the people you’re around are all smarter than you. Not only that, but that everyone is busy DOing, too. In a work sense, they reply to your messages, quickly. Generally, they use more open tools (like Yammer, Twitter, Blogs etc) and so you can also see their communication cadence with others, on top of yours. You get this sense that to make the grade in this new environment, you’ll need to really work hard to ‘return serve’ to a lot of the incoming stimulus that enters your world. That you’ll need to not just do what you know, faster – but learn what you don’t know faster than you may have before.

When I joined Yammer a few years ago, it was certainly this experience that I felt. I remember my first few days at our old HQ in San Francisco at 410 Townsend Street. The Customer Success team I had joined was small, but growing quickly. I walked in the first day I was there and everyone came over the greet me and say hello. We chatted casually for a bit, introduced ourselves, then it was back to it. I was then showed where all the work happened. We had our own group on Yammer, which is where everyone posted about the work they were making progress on with their clients. That group sat within the Yammer network itself, which moved at a tremendous pace. It was awesome, in the truest sense of that word.

After I had the ‘tour’ and was left to my own devices, I stared at the screen in the customer success group. It was daunting. What could I possibly say that would be useful for these people? Luckily, I was distracted by someone asking for more of a chat so got stuck into that instead. In the end, it took me about 3 days to start posting on our Yammer network. I felt lost for words, but resigned myself to just getting started and getting some momentum on my side. Momentum is a funny concept like that. I believe it’s why high performing teams focus so much on being responsive to each other. Because if you loose that momentum, that mojo, as a group it’s very hard to get back.

It’s just one example, but that’s how a high performance team felt to me. Many people have left the Yammer Customer Success team in the years since and gone into bigger roles within Yammer or Microsoft itself, or have flown our nest for director-level roles elsewhere. But the high-performance culture amongst both that group of people and the teams they’ve left behind has mostly been maintained.

Hunter Walk

Ok, that was a totally troll title. What I want to share though is a subtle advantage that people who’ve worked at transformative tech companies have over people who haven’t. It’s not that the average employee from Google, Apple, Facebook, etc is necessarily smarter or more capable than any other person. I mean, maybe they are on average, but I’m not making the case that just because they passed a hiring screen that makes them worthwhile. There are certainly ineffective people who made it into Google and many, many special talents that haven’t yet been part of a rocketship. But there are two learnings that I’ve generally found to be more highly concentrated among those with experience at transformative companies versus those who haven’t. And I think it’s learned/reinforced in those environments, not just magically inherent to the people attracted to these opportunities. It’s like athletes who have been on championship teams pick…

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Making friends

Sarah just wrote a great post over on her blog that you should check out about how hard it is to make friends in adulthood. Especially, these couple of sentences really resonated with me and what I’ve found with moving cities over the last few years.

As an adult, in everyday life the people you generally come into contact with are settled, established and adding people to their circle takes effort. They have routine, they have stability and are more than often not looking to disrupt their bubble.

Sarah writes so well (!), I’m not going to add too much. Just to say that building a sense of community around yourself when you move is hard. It feels to me a little like the sort of thing that is different each time. None of the ways you made your last close friends ever seem to work that well a second time around. Which means when those lonely days come about, you’re also left with a sense of frustration with yourself that you don’t know quite what to do. And as Sarah mentions, the bar to clear to be someone’s friend often feels much higher in adulthood.

I’ve resolved myself with being patient and letting time do it’s thing. In my time in Sydney I made some of the most terrifically close friends I could hope for. The list is small, but those relationships mean a lot to me. I could certainly do a better job of keeping them more alive. The fact they exist gives me hope for where we are today and where we’ll continue to explore throughout life. But it is hard. Thanks for writing the post, Sarfos 🙂