7 Types of Companies You Should Never Work For

 @glassdoor "And just say no to places who define “hard work” as 15-hour days and long weekend email threads."

 7 Types of Companies You Should Never Work For

1. The High Turnover Outfit

Red flags: Key roles pop up consistently on a company’s job site.

2. The Culture Clash Corp

Red flags: Negative employee reviews, lack of focus on a true employee experience, recruiters evading your questions.

3. The Curb Appealer

Red flags: Pristine and ideal image in marketing materials and publicity, however, the day-to-day operation is far from glamorous. Only the leaders have what can pass as offices, staff is dispersed amongst shoddy cubicles, lighting is awful, technology is from the ’90s, and let’s not get started on the break room.

4. The Top Heavy Business

Red flags: Too many executives brainstorming, too few employees tasked with executing.

5. The Perpetual Promisor

Red flags: Unfulfilled corporate expectations, employees report a lack of trust in CEO, inability to live up to brand promises.

6. The “Stagnator”

Red flags: Lack of learning opportunities, fails to promote mentorship, offers little more than the role you’ve applied for.

7. The Directionless Ship

Red flags: No clear plan for the future, employees don’t know long-term goals, senior leadership fails to adequately communicate.

The Simple Secret To A High-Performing Team

 How To Build A High-Performing Team
The Simple Secret To A High-Performing Team

1. 1. Build Trust On Your Team

   
   

2. 2. Build Psychological Safety On Your Team

   
   

3. 3. Set Ambitious Goals

   
   

4. 4. Work On Communication Skills

   
   

5. 5. Help Employees Build Confidence

   
   

6. 6. Listen To Your Employees

   
   
   
   
   

3 Lessons learned and tips from a young VC’s perspective

My Summer in the Venture Capital World – Philipp Handel – Medium
via @daphnipolis

Lesson 1: Designing a good sourcing strategy is key

Looking back to the inception of our sourcing strategy, the idea was to 1) reach out to "country here" investors, 2) attend startup events, and 3) reactivate and formalize existing connections.

power of events to bring together the startup ecosystem. 

TIP 1: Discover your hunting instinct

TIP 2: The power of extroversion

Lesson 2: Learn to ask the right questions

trade-off between being efficient at screening and being open-minded to new creative ideas, thus not missing the “crazy bets”. It requires a very entrepreneurial mindset: Looking for strengths instead of weaknesses at first.

During the call you want to find out about the “raison d’être” of the startup, hear its founding story, usually starting with a) the problem they saw in the market, b) the solution they developed and c) the vision they have for the future.

If sounds exciting: 1) the product,  2) the market, 3) the team, 

A big trap would be to rely too much on a rigid framework or a checklist when assessing an opportunity. 

TIP 3: Build a trust relationship with founders

TIP 4: Develop proficiency in technology

Lesson 3: Go beyond executing the investment thesis

you evaluate an investment opportunity not only in itself but also relative to the fund’s investment thesis.

It was key for me to fully understand what we are investing in instead of only executing a checklist of criteria. 

TIP 5: Spot the value of contrarian views

14 metodologías de innovación

 vía @NonoRegaa retuiteando a @Virginiog…
Metodologías innovadoras para crear la empresa del futuro

1. Design Thinking 2. Lean Startup 3. Agile 4. Scrum 5. SAFe 6. Kanban 7. Kaizen 8. JTBD 9. OKR 10. Teoría U 11. Kotter 12. Forth Innovation Method 13. Metodología 3D 14. Design Sprint

Abundance… Why the World Is Better Than Ever & Will Get Better Still

Why the World Is Better Than Ever—and Will Get Better Still

In the last hundred years, we’ve seen the average human life expectancy nearly double, the global GDP per capita rise exponentially, and childhood mortality drop 10-fold.
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“In the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.”

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This means making sure every single person in the world has adequate food, water and shelter, as well as a good education, access to healthcare, and personal freedom. 

This might seem unimaginable, especially if you tend to think the world is only getting worse. But given how much progress we’ve already made in the last few hundred years, coupled with the recent explosion of information sharing and new, powerful technologies, abundance for all is not as out of reach as you might believe.

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The Path to Abundance

Eager to create change, innovators armed with powerful technologies can accomplish incredible feats. Kotler and Diamandis imagine that the path to abundance occurs in three tiers: 

• Basic Needs (food, water, shelter) 
• Tools of Growth (energy, education, access to information)
• Ideal Health and Freedom

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Many people don’t believe it’s possible to end the persistent global problems we’re facing. However, looking at history, we can see many examples where technological tools have unlocked resources that previously seemed scarce. 

Technological solutions are not always the answer, and we need social change and policy solutions as much as we need technology solutions. But we have seen time and time again, that powerful tools in the hands of innovative, driven change-makers can make the seemingly impossible happen.

The Coming Software Apocalypse

The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.
The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic

The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.” Dijkstra meant this as a warning. As programmers eagerly poured software into critical systems, they became, more and more, the linchpins of the built world—and Dijkstra thought they had perhaps overestimated themselves. 

“The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work. “Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors,” she says, referring to IDEs. “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.” 

In a recent essay, Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,” he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers—as he put it to me, “these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.” Exciting work of this sort, in particular a class of tools for “model-based design,” was already underway, he wrote, and had been for years, but most programmers knew nothing about it. 

“Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”