David

  • New publishing cadence

    Since last fall, I’ve been considering relaxing my firm commitment to the weekly cadence of publishing the blog. I started the blog as an experiment and committed to shipping weekly for at least a year. Having now written weekly for over two years and shipped over 100 posts, I consider it a highly successful experiment. I have had a lot of fun with it. It’s catalyzed many interesting and unexpected conversations with family, friends, and professional contacts, and been excellent validation for how highly I value synthesizing thought in writing. Looking back at my initial goals I feel I’ve satisfied all of them.

    The motivation for writing the blog has always been intrinsic. More recently, the number of times I have started to feel writing the post is a chore has grown to a higher proportion than I would like. It’s certainly not a burden every week, and I never expected writing a weekly post to feel exclusively joyous as no meaningful work ever really is, but the ratio is currently too lopsided.

    This past week, I didn’t ship for the first time. It wasn’t a mistake or unintentional. I simply decided, I don’t want to ship something forced and it’s time to make a change. My biggest fear with dropping the weekly commitment, and what has prevented me from taking action to date, is sacrificing a hard and fast rule means I run the risk of de-prioritizing writing and it never happening. The perspective I’ve seen shared by professional authors on writing is unanimous: great writing cannot be achieved unless practiced often and consistently, and it’s not exclusively a joy. Sometimes it sucks and that is part of the process. But I am not a professional writer, and this is only a creative passion.

    So with that, I am dropping my commitment to ship on a weekly basis but will maintain the blog and ship something when I have an urge to do so. I’m not certain how frequently that will be. This decision feels right and as with all experiments, I’ll change course over time as needed. Thank you to everyone who has engaged with me on the content. That has been a motivator for me over time.

  • Big C

    This week, Julia, Henry, and I are off on vacation to Vienna and Barcelona in celebration of my mother-in-law Catherine’s (aka ‘Big C’) retirement and 60th birthday. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have Catherine as my MIL; I genuinely enjoy spending time with her, and we have always gotten along splendidly. Our shared love of Julia, and of having a good time, gave us a solid foundation to build on.

    Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time with Catherine and learned a great deal. She has a unique ability to get along with and immediately befriend everyone without restraining her strong opinions on many subjects. That is a rare and nuanced skill, and she’s mastered it. Additionally, I give credit to Catherine for making me a more empathetic person and holding less judgement than I might have ten years ago; “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”, as she says.

    Catherine has always seemed keenly aware of her own mortality and placed a high value on the pursuit of a good time and living in the moment; life is short and she takes advantage. I have always respected that and look forward to continued good family times.

  • Reference calls

    I’ve found recruiting managers have varying views on reference calls: proponents swear they provide insight into making the right hire and critics believe a reference shared by a potential candidate is almost certainly going to be a sugar-coated positive call and can’t be relied upon.

    Many years ago, Amin introduced me to a variant of the reference call, which I have found to be consistently high value: the post-hire reference call or maybe better described as the “set up for success” call. This involves asking a HIRED candidate (i.e., post job offer signed) for 2 references, ideally their most recent bosses. I’ve done this for every senior (VP) level hire we’ve made for the past six years, and it’s been a unanimously positive experience.

    A “set up for success” call begins by stablishing with the reference that the candidate has already been hired and anything shared will have zero impact on their prospects of joining the company. This takes away the fear of negatively impacting a former direct report’s career opportunity, which most people don’t want to negatively influence, regardless of whether they like them or not. Instead, you explicitly state your intent to set this person up for success and seek feedback on their strengths, opportunities for improvement, and look to better understand how to manage them from someone who has already had that opportunity.

    Most former bosses want to help their ex-employees, particularly at the executive level. As a result, I have found people particularly forthright about watch outs and strengths, which genuinely help set someone up for success as part of their onboarding. Even now, looking back at notes from previous calls I’ve participated in, I believe much of what was shared reflected accurately upon finally working with those individuals. Onboarding new employees is a critical determinant of their ability to be successful and a ‘set up for success’ call is an excellent tool to incorporate in the process.