𝐀𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞! It was @nntaleb that drove home to me that aging should not be seen using the distance from birth, rather through the estimated distance from death. I like to visit and walk the cemeteries whenever I’m in a new city to remind myself of the eventuality and give me the courage to speak truth to power. I recently went back to Japan after 20 years. Here is me walking the cemetery in Kyoto. Well, why am I talking about this now? I wrote a book! A book that I wrote knowing that I’m going to be dead one day and that I must come clean about the mistakes I made as a Tech. leader. Failed executives don’t write books about their failures. They just go on to make millions and fail elsewhere. They may appear to be a success if you just look at quantifiable metrics like their net worth or the share price of their company. But they are miserable failures if you look closely at what they did to the lives of their employees - bureaucracy, burn out, forced relocations, layoffs, etc. So I decided to write a book that catalogs and details many of my mistakes. On thinking deeper, they are not just my mistakes, but the mistakes of mainstream management in general - I simply took them for granted without questioning their validity and effectiveness. As much as I have become skeptical of anything prescriptive (what to do) that ignores the unique context in front of us, I think it is important to talk about what NOT to do. So, I made sure this book is full of negative advice (what NOT to do) - traps and pitfalls you must avoid. Why negative advice? I go back to Nassim Taleb, who explains the why elegantly: “I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for - - ” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid.” Grab a copy here: cyb3rsyn.com/products/mmm-bo… #leadership #systemsthinking #complexity #cybernetics #philosophy

First replace everyone in HR, Compliance and Procurement with AI. Then switch it off completely, leaving people free to do their jobs.

This week's Cyb3rSyn Newsletter is a guest post by @Decafquest. Mahmoud shares his reflections from our May Tech Leaders Salon discussion on Daniel's Coyle's book, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐞. Checkout the full post here: cyb3rsyn.com/p/reflections-t… #leadership #culture

Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. - @rorysutherland

last week i ran the third annual philosophy retreat, this time in vienna. here i share an overview about it, with some glimpses into what we did, and a general reflection about the topics discussed, including ai, power, civic responsibility, & meaning. decafquest.com/vienna-philos…

A Common Failure Mode in How Consulting Firms Do Strategy by Tanzo medium.com/p/a-hidden-failur…

Uno scienziato che non capisce (o non vuole capire) la differenza tra stock e flow. Andiamo bene.

“The baker makes 300 loaves a day. The typical American household would need to work several months to make that many. We need a bread tax.”

Let’s take the fiction out of science fiction 🚀

some reflections on daniel coyle's the culture code. we discussed this last month in the tech leaders salon, co-hosted with @laraghavan decafquest.com/programs/tech…

Is it effective to always conduct Mob work? I'd like to know if there are any points to consider when deciding on the ratio of Mob work to individual work. This is a frequently asked question, so please let me reply here for anyone who is considers this question: A: Individual work may be faster in the short term. But the only way to increase cross-functional skill is group work. And the most effective way to prevent siloed knowlege is group work. And the fastest way to increase engineering skill and find the most creative solution is AI assisted group work. So, ideally, there is only AI assisted group work. This is what the fastest companies do. But maybe your developers are scared or nervous. So I recommend starting with 1 hour of AI assisted group work each day.

Where are the gold bugs? Isn’t gold supposed be the “hedge” against inflation 🤣

you either have to *be* mildy berserker on a topic or *become* mildy berserker on a topic I've found it helps to be mildy berserker

Wild stat. "France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes." theatlantic.com/magazine/202…

“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” - @nntaleb

Psychological safety is quite a precise phenomenon says @tom_geraghty! It not just a sense of general wellbeing or it's not a sense of comfort necessarily. It's certainly not an absence of conflict. A highly psychologically safe team may actually exhibit more greater conflict, but it'll be healthier, more productive conflict than in a less psychologically safe team... Listen to the full podcast: cyb3rsyn.com/p/psychological…

Tired: Prompt Engineering Wired: Loop Engineering

Parenting is not "parenting". For it is rarely effective to attempt to perfect a child. Far more effective Is the perfecting of Oneself In plain view of the Child. - @KapilGuptaMD

Ok totally true. I am lucky enough to have experienced nearly all of those “arrival” moments, and my conclusion is the same. And, just look at Musk. What arrival plateau has he not cleared? And he looks happier, stressed and frazzled too, but also happier, than all the rich-and-retired people I have ever met combined.

There is no arrival. That coveted Ivy League degree, that promotion, that overseas job, that wedding, that dream vacation, that long awaited retirement, etc. All feel dull after achieving it. Real happiness is in the journey - striving to achieve something meaningful to you, continuously improving yourself, continually learning and unlearning. Find the journey that you enjoy. Build a life that you don’t need a vacation from.