John Cox

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Steedicons

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pieratt.tumblr.com

Varsity Bookmarking In Praise of Quitting Your Job

You argue that some people—particularly creative types—experience depression and burnout in jobs where they lack genuine ownership and agency over their work, and that this isn't a personal failing but a mismatch between their nature and their environment. You contend that creativity requires the ability to see tangible results from your efforts and make meaningful decisions without constant compromises, and that staying in a job where you can't exercise these capabilities wastes both your talents and your employer's resources. Rather than viewing the desire to leave as entitlement, you reframe it as self-awareness about where your strengths actually lie, suggesting that the cultural norm of "just stick it out" is increasingly at odds with how creative work actually functions.

Permalink workmental healthcreativityadvice

www.nytimes.com

Corner Office - The 5 Habits of Highly Effective C.E.O.’s - NYTimes.com

Based on interviews with over 70 CEOs, this piece identifies five teachable qualities that distinguish high-performing leaders from their peers: passionate curiosity, battle-hardened confidence, team smarts, a simple mind-set, and fearlessness. The author argues these traits are not innate but developed through attitude and discipline, and that CEOs actively seek them in employees they hire and promote because they directly correlate with success across different types of organizations. Rather than proposing novel management theory, the piece draws on concrete examples and anecdotes from executives to illustrate how each quality manifests in practice—from asking unconventional questions to handling adversity to cutting through complexity to embracing productive discomfort.

Permalink leadershipadvicebusinesscareers

Freakonomics

The Strange Economics of Water, and Why It Shouldn’t Be Free: A Guest Post

Charles Fishman illustrates the paradox of water economics through the Cleveland Cavaliers' removal of drinking fountains to boost bottled water sales, showing that consumers pay thousands of times more for bottled water than tap water despite buying the same product. He argues that while bottled water succeeds by selling convenience and branding rather than the water itself, the real problem is that underpriced tap water creates no incentive for maintenance or conservation of critical infrastructure—the U.S. spends nearly as much annually on plastic bottles as on maintaining its entire water system. Fishman contends that water needs appropriate pricing to signal its value and fund the modernization of aging systems, not the false message of being free and unlimited.

Permalink advicewaterbusinesseconomics

Freakonomics

Freakonomics » Ten Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today

Altucher draws lessons from his early career at HBO to offer ten rules for succeeding at a new job: love your company's product and watch/study it obsessively, learn the company's history and executive origins, arrive early to support your boss and give them full credit for your work, cultivate relationships with secretaries and HR staff who control information flow, regularly test your market value by interviewing elsewhere, study marketing campaigns and industry dynamics, adopt an ownership mentality by saying "we" instead of "I," and plan your exit from day one by identifying gaps you can fill as an entrepreneur. Woven through personal anecdotes about witnessing a fatal accident on his first day and struggling with imposter syndrome, he argues that mastery of corporate culture combined with entrepreneurial thinking transforms a junior employee into someone who can eventually leave to start their own competing or complementary business.

Permalink productivityleadershipadvicebusiness

innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com

Innovate on Purpose: Innovation does not start with idea generation

The author argues that innovation does not begin with idea generation, as commonly claimed, but rather requires three prerequisites: understanding organizational strategy and goals, anticipating future trends and market conditions, and identifying genuine customer needs. Only when these three factors converge—what the author calls "ideating in context"—can brainstorming and idea generation produce valuable, relevant ideas aligned with both business capability and market opportunity. The widespread overemphasis on idea generation itself reflects that it's the easiest phase to organize, when the real innovation work lies in the strategic thinking and customer research that should precede it.

Permalink strategyadvicebusiness

MyVenturePad.com

3 'once-and-for-all' business growth decisions you can nail down this weekend | MyVenturePad

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Innovation, New Ideas and How The World is Changing

Innovation begins when the system is stuck - Game Changer

Innovation emerges when someone recognizes that a system—company, industry, or market—has become rigid and frozen, unable to adapt to new opportunities or threats. The rigidity typically stems from mental constraints rather than physical limitations: systems get trapped in unquestioned beliefs that make change seem impossible, or in narratives that promote inaction. The article uses examples like BankSimple challenging traditional banking's outdated technology infrastructure and Apple challenging music industry assumptions to show how innovators succeed by questioning what competitors and customers have accepted as inevitable, and offering a fundamentally different approach.

Permalink leadershipadviceapplebusiness

jabaldaia

Crossing spaces and ideas « jabaldaia

The piece argues that innovation emerges from cross-pollination—connecting ideas across diverse disciplines, cultures, and backgrounds rather than developing them in isolation. It uses the metaphor of bees and gardeners to describe how organizations can become "idea pollinators" by hiring diverse talent, hosting interdisciplinary meetings, inviting external speakers, and working across varied projects, as exemplified by IDEO's systematic approach to sharing and combining knowledge from different fields.

Permalink leadershipcreativityadvicebusiness

Percona

Caching could be the last thing you want to do - MySQL Performance Blog

A popular PHP ecommerce platform required caching to achieve basic performance (10 pages/second), exemplifying a common architectural mistake where developers reflexively add caching to mask underlying inefficiencies rather than fixing them first. The author argues caching should be a last resort because it creates unequal user experiences (some users hit cache misses repeatedly), obscures real performance bottlenecks, and introduces complex management problems like cache stampeding. Before implementing caching, developers should exhaust simpler optimizations: understanding query execution plans, eliminating SELECT * queries that fetch unnecessary columns, and verifying that every query on a page is actually necessary.

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Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

10 Reasons Not to Copy Amazon | Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

Copying Amazon's design and business practices is risky because Amazon operates under fundamentally different conditions—massive scale, diverse customer base, complex marketplace model, efficient logistics, and deep pockets for experimentation—that make its strategies unsuitable for most retailers. The article argues that Amazon's apparent success often masks poor user experience that only loyal customers tolerate, and that design decisions Amazon makes for business reasons (like removing reassuring text to free up page space) get mistakenly adopted as best practices. Rather than benchmarking against Amazon, retailers should test their own site elements against their specific customers and business model.

Permalink designadvicebusinessmarketing

asserttrue.blogspot.com

assertTrue( ): Nine Questions to Ask during a Job Interview

Job interviews are a two-way process where you should actively assess whether the employer is right for you, not just answer their questions passively. A hiring manager pays close attention to the quality of candidates' questions as a measure of their preparedness, enthusiasm, and research—and good candidates invariably ask good questions. The piece offers eight strategic questions to ask (about your team, success metrics, management style, career advancement, and your predecessor's fate) while warning against early inquiries about time off, work-from-home flexibility, or compensation that signal poor work ethic or entitlement.

Permalink advicebusinesscareersjobs

Forbes

How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story - Forbes.com

Mark succeeded by becoming indispensable to his organization as a whole rather than by competing with peers or self-promoting to management. He started by systematically learning how every part of the company operated—what people did, how they worked together, and where inefficiencies existed—then made unglamorous improvements like ordering lunches and organizing supplies that genuinely helped everyone do their jobs better. His colleague Ted, by contrast, worked frantically to outpace his peers and impressed senior managers with his speed and ambition, but because he never moved beyond excelling at his assigned tasks or understood how the broader organization functioned, he remained stuck as a top performer rather than advancing into management and leadership roles. The article argues that Mark's approach of building institutional knowledge and facilitating others' success is more effective for career advancement than the traditional school-tested formula of individual performance and self-promotion.

Permalink productivityleadershipadvicebusiness

www.aaronsw.com

How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

The author proposes an alternative hiring process for programmers that replaces traditional interviews with three main steps: evaluating past work through code samples and demos, assessing intelligence through casual conversation (not formal interviews), and checking compatibility through informal team activities, followed by a final sanity check of assigning a small project. He argues this approach reveals whether candidates are genuinely smart, can execute, and work well with others better than standard interview questions do, though he acknowledges it requires a small sanity-check project to verify candidates haven't misrepresented themselves.

Permalink programmingadvicebusinesshiring

taoyue.com

taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

The author argues that he avoids hiring purportedly "brilliant" men because they are typically fast-talking con artists who start projects enthusiastically but lack the discipline to finish them—the real problem being not intelligence itself but the combination of overconfidence and inability to handle repetitive work. Drawing on personal experience with charismatic failures like his former partner Carroll, he illustrates how such men generate excitement around grand schemes, then lose interest when faced with practical details and modest execution. Instead, he advocates for hiring ordinary, steady workers who possess five simple qualities: good health, thriftiness, clear communication, attention to detail, and courage—arguing that business success comes from extracting consistent effort from reliable people rather than depending on the erratic brilliance of talented misfits.

Permalink historyadvicebusinesshiring