malvasian links

This really nails down what I see all the time with respect to women getting promoted or even just getting recognized for their achievements.

To paraphrase it, women tend not to compete for recognition as much as men, for whatever reason. Maybe they’ve been socialized not to, maybe it is a simple question of testosterone. I will go into why I think this happens below. But for now let me just say I get super pissed when a system has been set up to diminish the success of people simply because of this personality issue.

Choosing to be a manager without being a leader is like choosing to drive across the country without a map. Choosing to be a leader without having management skills is like choosing to be a fish without gills. You have to know where you’re going, and you have to know how to breathe in your environment.

Managers set the strategy and the vision, so everyone knows what is going on and can work on the most important work. Managers create the environment so that the people all over the organization can succeed, including the managers. They are not the only people who do this, but they are the leaders who must do this. If managers do these things in a command-and-control way, they might succeed. If they choose servant leadership, they are more likely to be successful.

Managers must be leaders. We cannot choose between management and leadership. We must have both.

Not the easiest, but the quickest:

Don’t demand authority.

Eagerly take responsibility.

Relentlessly give credit.

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net.

Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

But all the little bits of complexity, all those cases where indecision caused one option that probably wasn’t even needed in the first place to be replaced by two options, all those bad choices that were never remedied for fear of someone somewhere having to change a line of code…they slowly accreted until it all got out of control, and we got comfortable with systems that were impossible to understand.

We did this. We who claim to value simplicity are the guilty party. See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places were we could have stopped and said “no, don’t do this.” And even if we were lazy and didn’t do the right thing when changes were easy, before there were thousands of users, we still could have gone back and fixed things later. But we didn’t.