Leadership highs, leadership lows

Scolding

Dare commented recently on RTO:

The worst part of RTO is how it forces managers to become hall monitors, nagging people about time spent in the office instead of business outcomes.

Amazon has doubled down on that by giving managers dashboards showing how many hours employees spend in the office. Micromanagement on steroids. 

And I had a flashback to the very early ‘90s.   Microsoft was fiercely competing with Novell in the LAN market; NetWare was the clear market leader at the time.  But as a great example of “coopetition”, the companies had to work closely together, because every customer was putting Windows PCs on NetWare LANs.  So we met regularly with Novell executives to address customer issues.  

On one occasion, Ray Noorda, the CEO of Novell, flew into Redmond for a day of meetings.  He came in early in the day, around 8 AM, and the Microsoft parking lots were full.  He left around 6 PM, and the Microsoft parking lots were full.   And this just gave him fits, because Novell was a strict 9-5 culture, and he couldn’t get people to work long hours.

So he decided to take action.   And he started stationing himself in the Novell lobby just before 9 and just after 5, writing down the names of people who were just coming in or just leaving.  

Some ideas never go out of style, apparently.

Inspiring

Even earlier in my career, while at Booz Allen Hamilton, we had a review meeting on a Friday afternoon with the senior partner on the assignment, Paul Branstad.  We were 3-4 weeks into the client assignment and not ready for this review — our data and analysis were incomplete, and we had a mess of half-finished ideas.  And so we presented it all to Paul, and it was embarrassing, and he was very quiet.  

After a moment, he stood up, looked at us all, and said, “I understand that you are just partway into this assignment, but what I have seen here today just makes me realize how great your work can be.”  And he then asked a lot of questions and suggested some directions, and it was a great discussion, and we left supercharged. We were willing to punch through walls for Paul, and we worked three times as hard over the next several weeks.  His tone and optimism were infectious.

And he never once tried to police what time we came into the office or what time we left. 

Shorts

The median American read 2 books in 2025.   And that is probably generous since “not sure” responses were discarded. Stunning to me.

Tokens are collapsing in price.  We will see AI even more pervasively in products and services.

Biotech stocks lose more often than any others. The median (50th percentile) biotech company has delivered an annualized return of -15% in contrast to the median US company’s 1% annualized return.  I think I made one biotech investment in my lifetime, and it was a mistake.  All biotech investments sound great to me; I just don't have the standing to discern between them.

I love the promise of this country -- the forever unfulfilled promise, but the promise.  Well said.  You can love the country and be very critical of aspects of its current culture and governance.

The way to defeat the Trump policy is at the ballot box, not by obstructing agents in violation of the law. There’s an election in nine months.   This is nonsense.  Politics happens every day; citizens should absolutely take to the streets to express their views about government behaviour.  

Antinote.io — I really don’t want another notes app, but gosh, they suck me in.

a new AI Sound Controller tool will let users independently adjust the volume of dialogue, music or sound effects on this year’s TVs — I love the idea of letting users remix and create their own experience.  I wish I could get all the camera feeds for a football game and decide for myself what angle I want to see the play from, or what angle to see the replay from.