Tools and Operators

A great conversation over the new year got me thinking about the types of consumption that we have, as individuals. There is a kind of spending and investment of time that is really about improving our productivity and career outcomes: training, reading in certain areas, buying tools, and spending on enabling technologies like cars or personal task trackers. 

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Portable Benefits

Part of the larger social contract forged over the 20th century was a set of a benefits: unemployment insurance, healthcare, workers compensation, and paid time off for vacation or for illness.

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Maturity Levels

There are quite a few organizational maturity levels, but I’ve generally found them either too specific to a certain domain, or too speculative to apply properly. I recently read a Miller Heiman Group publication that included the one they have developed for sales enablement processes. It seemed to strike the right mix between practicality and useful, and I’ve found it helpful in getting an orientation on a few process-related questions.

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Right People, Right Bus

Churn is, generally, seen as a bad thing within an organization - teams wants stability and predictability. These help make the organization more legible, and they are part of generating the feelings of psychological safety and mutual trust that are needed for groups to be effective. Churn also produces work which does not feel productive: recruiting, staffing, training and so on. 

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Portfolio rebalancing

Financial portfolio theory has the idea that owning too much of a particular stock is bad as it exposes you to greater company-specific risk, which unlike systemic risk is not generally compensated for by higher returns (assuming investors are demanding proper risk premiums etc.) This leaves room for a particular kind of human error: you have to sell things which are doing well, as they come to represent a greater proportion of your portfolio that is optimal. This is emotionally difficult. 

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