Category: personal AnGoL

A New Style of Leadership According to the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, “It is a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations, and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.”
The founding principles include nine behaviors:

1. serve first,
2. add value to others,
3. build trust,
4. listen to understand,
5. think about your thinking,
6. increase your influence,
7. demonstrate courage,
8. live your values, and
9. live your transformation.

4. Listen to Understand

It’s not about listening to decide when to chime in with your own opinion, it’s about listening to ACTUALLY understand. Leaders should practice active listening, and make sure they’re not interrupting people during meetings or 1:1s. Try these two questions to listen to understand: “Tell me more” and “Help me understand.” These questions open the door for others to share their perspective, without feeling like they’re being undermined or doubted.

5. Think About Your Thinking

Servant leaders evaluate how they think about messages, situations, behaviors that they experience. Is input or feedback received in a negative way or as a positive opportunity for improvement? The trick is to differentiate between useful thoughts and non-useful thoughts, and re-frame negative beliefs. For example, don’t use absolutes like “always” and “never” when describing situations or behaviors.

Source: The 9 Traits of Highly-Effective Leaders – DZone Agile

Two key messages — and their caveats

These stories and our research findings reveal two key messages: First, when it comes to effects on health, working long hours is not as bad as obsessing over work. But this warrants an important disclaimer: The employees in our sample worked a maximum of 65 hours per week, and therefore we do not know the health outcomes of working longer hours. It may be quite difficult to detach from work, engage in recovery activities, or get enough sleep if one works 70 hours per week or more. Still, it seems that more than hours, our thoughts and feelings about work impact our subjective well-being and health risks.
The second key message from our study is that workaholics who love their jobs are somewhat protected from the most severe health risks, and this may be because they feel that their work is worth all the hard work they put in. But this brings up another caveat: Although we found that engaged workaholics had lower physiological health risks (lower RMS) than non-engaged workaholics, they still reported more depressive feelings, sleep problems, various psycho-somatic health complaints, and a higher need for recovery than non-workaholics. These are all signs that well-being among workaholics, regardless of how much they love their job, can be impaired.

Source: How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours – Harvard Business Review – Pocket

This suggests that loving your work can mitigate some of the risk associated with obsessing over it. We also found that engaged workaholics reported having more resources at home and at work compared to non-engaged workaholics. Engaged workaholics reported receiving more social support (e.g., advice, information, appreciation), from their supervisor, co-workers, and their spouse, than their non-engaged counterparts. They also scored higher on communication skills, time management skills, and general work skills, and they reported much higher intrinsic motivation for work than non-engaged workaholics.

Source: How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours – Harvard Business Review – Pocket

What Is Workaholism?

The term “workaholic” was coined in 1971 by the psychologist Wayne E. Oates, who referred to “an uncontrollable need to work incessantly” as an addiction. Workaholics are characterized by having an inner compulsive drive to work hard, thinking about work constantly, and feeling guilty and restless when they are not working. Workaholism often goes hand in hand with working long hours, but the two are distinct: it’s possible to work long hours without being obsessed with work, and it is possible to be obsessed with work but only work 35 hours a week or less.

Source: How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours – Harvard Business Review – Pocket

Because Alan focused on important questions, others often contested his answers. But that is what good science is all about: getting many people to work on the most important questions and hashing things out. Someone like Alan, who gets others to focus on the most important questions, accomplishes great good both when others confirm a result and when others show that a seeming result is wrong. And it matters. Too much of economics is either addressing minor questions or addressing big questions with tools t

Source: In Honor of Alan Krueger — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

Innovation moves in cycles Carlota Perez subscribes to the long wave economic cycle theory, known as Kondratiev Waves, in which technological innovation occurs in 45–60 year waves. According to Perez, these innovation waves consist of three phases:
Installation
Collapse
Deployment

Source: The ICO Bubble Explained in Three Moments – Hacker Noon

Develop a system of note-taking.

Parrish calls his system The Blank Sheet: Before he begins reading a new book, he takes a blank sheet and writes down what he knows about the subject. Then, as he’s reading, he uses a different color pen to write down new ideas and connect them to what he had originally written, hanging the new knowledge on the old knowledge.
“Use a different color every time, so you can visualize what you’re learning as you’re reading,” says Parrish. “Then before you start your next reading session, to ease your brain into it, you just review the mind map. That gives you the context of where you left off… Then when you’re done with the book, you have this summary of the book.”
Say, for example, that you’re about to read Annie’s Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (which made it onto his 2018 recommended reads). Make a sheet detailing what you know about decision-making, even if it’s just the stages of making a decision: narrowing, analyzing, and evaluating your options; avoiding cognitive biases; making a commitment to whatever you ultimately choose. Then, as you read, fill in those stages as you learn Duke’s insights.
But, really, it doesn’t matter how your system works. It only matters that you have a system. Why? So that you can have a catalog of ideas that you can revisit. Parrish organizes his blank sheets by putting them into topic binders (the notes on Duke’s book would go in a “decision-making” binder), and then sits down to look at his binders about once every two months. Over time, he finds himself remembering things and making connections he may not have otherwise, mastering these various subjects.
“Not only do you understand the book at a different level, but you’re writing it down. It’s tangible. Instead of rereading all these books, you can just pick up this binder. ‘Oh, this is great. I want to go back to this story. Maybe I missed something [here].’ You’re connecting things across different domains or different situations. That’s effectively how we improve our thinking.”

Source: How to Read 80ish Books a Year (And Actually Remember Them) – GQ

Comment of the Day: Graydon: Insecurity Management: “I think you’re missing the central thing about Drake’s writing. It is not so much that, yeah, these are not the best circumstances and our feels are in abeyance; that happens, that’s depicted. But among that depiction you get what I think of as the essential Drake thing, which is a vehicle crew. They may not like each other much; they may not, in some senses of the word, trust one another. But they are entirely predictable to one another, and reliable. And it’s that obligation of reliability that lets people get their head out of hell, whether as imperfectly as Danny Pritchard does it or as entirely as the protagonist of Redliners does. (You can see much the same flavour of reliable between Gunnar and Brennu-Njáll.)…

…In terms of common elements, Drake’s characters are moderns or post-moderns; they are there in an environment with state and post-state actors. Their battles are in that anonymous impersonal context of abstractions like commodity prices. If they are to have anything in common with Odysseus or Telemachus, persons of a time when the notion of “king” was doubtful and all authority was personal authority, it has to be something basic.
I think the notion of insecurity management is more fundamental than basic; it’s much or most of why we’re a band-forming primate. (Orangutans are not, most gibbons are not; band-forming is not a primate requirement.) In Heroic Age—any heroic age—societies, your insecurity is—if you are not one already—how you stay out of “women, cattle, and slaves”, because in there, anyone can do anything to you; your insecurity is vast. (It’s pretty silly to pretend that the slave women had an option of refusing the suitors; the idea being reinforced its that it’s better to get yourself killed turning the suitor down, because when the master returns you will as surely die, and less honorably. I doubt the slave women thought was a sensible construction of their circumstances.)
You don’t get an understanding of anything important about insecurity management—that fear is in you, so killing fear means killing yourself; that you are helpless, but maybe not hapless; that it is not so much “bare is back without brother behind it” as “lone monkeys die”—in the abstract, by study, or by reading. You get it by doing actually dangerous things[1] in groups. Much effort has gone into preventing any such thing for anyone we’d call “educated” for a few generations now, and this is a mistake. If you have no personal experience of the whole band-forming process, this might benefit the randite myth of the individual and it certainly benefits the corporate desire to prevent any ganging up on problems by the prey animals, but it does not benefit you at all.
Education could do with much, much more of “theory informs; practice convinces.” If you want people to exhibit empathy for those whose state is not theirs and whose expertise is different, you need to make most of education involve failure; do this material thing at which you are unskilled. Allowing education to be narrow, and to avoid all reminder that the world is wider and that to a first approximation everyone is utterly incompetent, just encourages arrogance. Arrogance is terrible insecurity management; it makes the other monkeys less inclined to help you. (Yes of course we should overtly teach both insecurity management and band forming best practices in simple overt language.)

[1] I do not mean “fight in a war”; I mean “use power tools”, “split wood/use an axe”, “build something to keep the rain off and sleep under it”, “assemble a pontoon bridge”, “portage in haste”, “use a wood-fired oven”, “make jam” (think about the failure modes for a minute), and such like; all of these things can hurt or kill you, and at group scales you can’t possibly take sufficient care of yourself by yourself. Such activities don’t usually do us any harm because we’re pretty good at being a band-forming primat

And I think: The science fiction/horror/fantasy author David Drake very effectively and rightly, I think, puts it thus in the mouth of one of his characters, the Goddess Athene Danny Pritchard:

Force accomplishes a lot of things. They just aren’t the ones you want here. Bring in the Slammers [Regiment] and we kick ass for as long as you pay us. Six months, a year. And we kick ass even if the other side brings in mercs of their own–which they’ll do–but that’s not a problem, not if you’ve got us. So, there’s what? Three hundred thousand people….
So, you want to kill fifty kay? Fifty thousand people, let’s remember they’re people for the moment…. You see, if we go in quick and dirty, the only way that has a prayer of working is if we get them all. If we get everybody who opposes you, everybody related to them, everybody who called them master–everybody…. They’re not dangerous now, but they will be after the killing starts. Believe me. I’ve seen it often enough. Not all of them, but one in ten, one in a hundred. One in a thousand’s enough when he blasts your car down over the ocean a year from now. You’ll see. It changes people, the killing does. Once it starts, there’s no way to stop it but all the way to the end. If you figure to still live here on Tethys….
What do you think the Slammers do, milady? Work magic? We kill, and we’re good at it, bloody good. You call the Slammers in to solve your problems here and you’ll be able to cover the Port with the corpses. I guarantee it. I’ve done it, milady. In my time…

Source: Hard Power, Soft Power, Muscovy, Strategy, and My Once-Again Failure to Understand Where Niall Ferguson Is Coming From: Live from Le Pain Quotidien

Philippe: You need to take baby steps. I want to clarify one thing; these types of decisions are not solely an issue for mainframe or legacy systems. It can be a monolithic Java or .NET applications. It’s really any application which is difficult to segment. So then after their struggle on how to start, and because these applications are mission-critical, you need to enhance and you need to transform that application, but you need to be sure that this system will not collapse, or still provide services and value.
So for that you need to understand the as-is architecture, how it’s structured, to be sure that if you don’t know a specific layer or specific aspect, you will be able to investigate, define a plan, and then execute this plan. It doesn’t have to be a long approach, to rewrite from scratch into a microservice. Maybe begin by defining specific baby steps in a way to transform the presentation, as an example, and then after decouple different sections or modules.
That’s all for Part 1! Tune back in tomorrow when we’ll cover ‘as-is’ architectures.

Source: Should Every Application Leverage Microservices? Part 1 – DZone Microservices