Just like you can’t make good management decisions without understanding your environment, you can’t make good personal productivity decisions without understanding yourself and your own productivity problems. One of the…
Year: <span>2014</span>
At the risk of turning this blog into an odd sort of tumblr… I have two more articles I want to share with you. I promise to get back to…
I really enjoyed When G.M. Was Google, a New Yorker article about Google, GM, and management books by Nicholas Lemann. It is worth reading for the survey of management books…
One of my favorite parts of managing people is helping them grow their skills and get even better at their jobs. I think a lot of managers have a limited view of…
Status reports have a bad reputation these days, conjuring up images of the useless boss in Office Space asking for the TPS reports. I’ve certainly seen status reports used more for…
I was recently asked to take over the management of a project that was already running. This wasn’t a rescue mission- the project wasn’t failing, exactly, but it wasn’t finishing…
I’ve been making vague promises to write about project management techniques I learned in the Agile software development world that I think would translate well to science. This post is…
I came across a post yesterday that really made me think. Giles Bowkett posted a take-down of scrum (a popular form of agile software development) and in fact of agile…
I occasionally get asked for advice by people who are about to make the transition from academia to industry: they’ve successfully navigated the path to industry and landed their first…
We all know micromanagement is bad. It leads to a loss of autonomy, which decreases motivation, which in turn decreases productivity. (The research on this is summarized in Daniel Pink’s…