Duct Taping Your Org Chart, How to Use ‘Code-Yellows’ at Your Startup, Do AI Meeting Assistants Make You More Present, and MORE+++ [link blog]
Eat the leftovers, read the blog posts. Oh and follow me on Bluesky.
The Art of Taking It Slow [Anne Wiener/The New Yorker] — Profile of Grant Petersen, founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works.
Petersen has become famous for making beautiful bikes, using materials and components that his industry has mostly abandoned, and for promoting a vision of cycling that is low-key, functional, anti-car, and anti-corporate. He has polarizing opinions and an outsized influence.
A fun piece about making, commerce, lifestyles and contradictions.
Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works [Nilam Ganenthiran/Beacon Software] — If you read my previous blog post [ an interview with Nilam], then you might have already encountered this essay. It’s a great summary of ‘code-yellows’ from his time at Instacart.
During a code-yellow, a leader can escalate a project/situation to a war room situation, pulling people out of their day-to-day work to focus entirely on the problem at hand. It is alluring because it allows for existing plans to be deprioritized, removes any/all ambiguity around what is most important at the moment, and strongly encourages the team to sacrifice the ‘L’ and ‘B’ from Work-Life-Balance.
My personal belief is that the ‘correct’ frequency for Code-Yellows is not frequently but also not never.
Duct Tape [Molly Graham/Glue Club] — Molly’s a great operating exec who makes frequent appearances in my link blogs. This one is about ‘duct tape,’ interim org decisions that won’t hold forever, but can sustain itself long enough to focus on other urgent needs first.
Examples of duct tape include:
- a super talented learner leader paired with an outside advisor (make sure you set clear expectations up front that you’ll eventually layer the learner leader)
- an external fractional leader (someone who has done the job before at bigger scale so they can easily do your role with 1/2 or less of their time)
- bundling two orgs together under one leader that you will eventually split apart (eg, your eng leader can run product or vice versa, your marketing leader can run sales or vice versa, etc)
Using AI to be more present and effective in your meetings thanks to Granola [Alex Rainert] — I too have found myself less distracted during meetings as a result of AI notetakers like Granola. Sometimes my hands don’t even touch the keyboard and I just rely upon the AI to produce a summary of key points. I’ll verbalize a specific thought or expand on a question just to get it ‘heard’ by the bot, in order to ‘mark’ a place in the summary that’s important to me, so it does lightly start to shape the meeting in a way, not just a passive collector. We’ve definitely hit a tipping point and you should now go into every video meeting assuming you’re being recorded. That might feel icky but it’s the new normal.
The Observer [a great free Substack about strangeness, UFOs, things that go bump in the night, etc] — If something titled “Killer Kodaks and Soul-Snatching Shutterbugs” (about horror films and myhts involving the idea a camera can have mystical properties) increases your heart rate then this email newsletter might be for you.
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Originally published at https://hunterwalk.com on November 29, 2024.
