I wrote this way back in 2018, after a month at a company. My goal was to flag potential issues that could lead to org/culture debt down the line and proactively prevent these through our actions. Fast forward 3 years, and I’d say, with 20/20 hindsight, that this list was spot-on. And that we were…

I have an idea. In brief, FAANGs should partner and invest in small startups to cultivate a future hiring pipeline. It’s such a simple idea. Pharmaceutical companies and other innovation-driven organizations do this with academic research centers — essentially invest in them and have some kind of arrangement that gives them the rights when a…

People who know me, know that I work a lot. And that I love what I do for a living. This means I think about my work, how to improve, where I’ve messed up, where I might mess up, what else I can contribute, etc., during my ‘free time’ — weekends, early mornings, late evenings….

Over the past 2 months, I’ve been running in the morning instead of commuting to work.  Rather than listen to music, I just listen to the sounds of the street and think about work and my career. Two thoughts I’ve been having a lot these days: “Culture debt is what happens when companies don’t do…

A few weeks ago, I published this blogpost on my company’s Medium site: View at Medium.com   If you’ve read my post about Competency Matrices, I think this one is better.  My thinking has evolved somewhat.  Curious to hear what people think of it? View at Medium.com View at Medium.com

I spoke on a panel regarding Performance Management at early-stage startups yesterday, and there was a question from the audience that I’ve been mulling over since.  The question was, “As a startup CEO whose company just raised seed funding and has a handful of employees, how much should I really care about fostering an environment…

I was recently on a panel at Stacklist’s Stack Summit.  Topic was Performance Management.  We were given the questions a few days in advance, and I jotted notes down.  They are below. What’s the measure of a good manager? How do you evaluate yourselves? → The health of their team — health = productivity +…

In keeping with my personal promise to write more, I published this post (https://medium.com/petal/fostering-a-culture-of-kindness-1b53bfa21854) for my company. Everything in the post is true from my perspective, although I admit that these kinds of posts are more for employer branding than for anything else. Sue

It’s been ages, right? I generally have a hard time writing blogposts while working at a company because a) people automatically assume that I’m writing about my current experience, and b) I don’t really have the time. It’s too bad because I really love writing to think. I arrived at a solution: to make writing…

My blog is kind of disorganized and random.  For those who want to skip to my favorites and/or the ones that readers have indicated are helpful, here is a list of the Top 10: Why Call It People versus Human Resources? Scope of the People Function Being a PM When Your Product is People Maximizing…

When I started writing this blog about a year-and-half ago, I worried that people might take my words to be representative of the company I was working for at the time.  This fear has prevented me from publishing many of my ideas; I have a catalogue of half-written posts lost in a swirl of ‘Untitled’…

I get a bit irked whenever leadership consultants use the terminology, ‘superpower’, as in “What’s your superpower?” because it builds up the question too much, especially knowing that the answer will likely be a let-down, like, “I’m a great organizer” or “I’m very analytical”.  That’s not really a ‘superpower’ based on my understanding of what…