This newsletter is defunct. You can subscribe at the new one at the bottom of this page.
All subscribers from the old place work at the new place.
Be kind.
Hey, there. Hope your day is going swell.
A short heads up. I'm moving off Substack in the next week. I'll be moving the Leadership Newsletter to Ghost Pro, which appears to have all the bells and whistles I need. It's also a paid service, which means it has a very obvious business model that I'm supporting..
I'm not currently planning on changing much in this platform. The same semi-erratic posts announcing content on Rands in Repose.
And I hope you'll join me.
Be excellent to each other,
Rands.
I coined the term a holy shit moment a long time ago. There have been many of these over the years. When I first saw the game Doom. Proper drawing software, Corel Draw, that was a holy shit. The silky smooth touch screen scrolling on the first iPhone. Holy shit.
It's been awhile since I've felt a holy shit moment. Yeah, the humans are doing cool things, but… we've been stuck in a rut. Building cool, but iterative works, but nothing which has me sit straight up in the chair and exclaim…
Dinner at the parents’ for the 4th. I brought a good bottle of Silver Oak. A glass and a half in before I jumped into the conversation. I forget the segue, but I remember what I said, "You remember when we realized the potential of the Internet? What's going on with the robots right now… It's bigger." I hit the table for effect.
Content, Memory, and Voice is one of four articles I've written in the past month, but the first one I've published. All the pieces are about how the robots have greatly affected my day-to-day. There's good news, there's bad news, but mostly it's me staring intently at this forthcoming revolution and trying to predict the unpredictable.
Tragically optimistic is how I feel. I am full of optimism, but I've been through enough of these revolutions to know it's not the revolution, but the consequences that are the real…
Holy shit.
The Rands in Repose weblog has been around for 23 years, and I’ve published hundreds of articles over those years. One of the more consistent pieces of layout feedback is “Why do you bury the publishing date at the bottom of the post?” My response is the same: “Why do you care?”
This snarky response is based on my long-term observation that humans care more about content freshness than content quality. Like if it wasn’t recently written, it’s less valuable. A great many of the pieces on the blog have not aged well. They capture an important moment in time, but as that moment has passed, they read… historic. Aged.
I strive to make the writing timeless. The 5th edition of Managing Humans is in progress right now, and I’m pleased how often I need to do very little to piece together what I wrote 15 years ago. Technology is refreshed; important events like the Pandemic often need acknowledgement.
The corpus of writing is available to anyone, robot or otherwise, but I’m always looking for ways to capture the timeless for additional humans.
I present you, the readers of this newsletter, with the BETA of a Rands Cheat Sheet. The design of this artifact is to synthesize and make obvious the significant lessons of an aspect of leadership. In this case, my favorite topics: 1:1s. I’m sharing this with y’all to get a knee-jerk reaction. Tell me what you think, whether you believe you’re the target audience or not.
When it comes to communication with humans who care about Rands, I have many mediums at my disposal. Twitter used to be the dominate medium, but then that guy screwed it up. BlueSky is the most likely replacement, although I like Mastodon’s vibes. There’s also the Rands Leadership Slack (which celebrates its tenth anniversary in San Francisco next week!) and this mailing list.
The shocking consistency of the growth of this rarely used newsletter is baffling. It grows consistently every month, whether I send mail or not. So hi. I will dial up original content to this channel and see what happens.
Three topics you should care about as a leader:
Thought #1: You’ve probably heard it’s really easy to build products in ChatGPT or Claude.ai. It’s not easy, it’s shockingly easy, and whether you’re an engineering leader or not, you should start building a small something in one of these tools to understand what I mean when I say “easy.” As a leader, this is critical homework you must complete to understand the rapidly evolving tool landscape. (PS. You’ve never coded. That’s fine. Tell the robot that, and it will walk you through the process.)
Thought #2: It’s May, and if you’re like many companies, review season is somewhere during the Fall. Save yourself an inordinate amount of time and spend (5) minutes writing about each of your directs. Just (5) minutes to get your head around what feedback you’ll deliver in the Fall. This short exercise will help you prioritize what coaching they might need, alert you to potential complicated situations, and/or prepare you for promotion conversations. (5) minutes. Typing or writing.
Thought #3: I wrote more thoughts about the state of AI. It was a complex, fun piece to write.
Be well,
Rands.
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