| CTO ACADEMY Happy Fathers Day (here in Spain!) Happy Friday everyone.It’s Fathers day for me in Madrid and a public holiday as well, so this newsletter intro will be my final task of the week.This week our main blog article looked at why early stage CTOs can be bad for an investors wealth unless they’re provided with pro-active support and leadership training.Elsewhere it’s our regular batch of recommendations on articles, books and videos – enough to keep you entertained during your “5 Minute Tech Break”.Have a good one. |
| LEADERSHIP ARTICLE Early Hire CTOs – Can Be Bad For Your Wealth We work with a lot of fast growth companies to provide leadership training and coaching for the founders and/or early stage tech hires grappling with rocket ship growth. These are often pro-active requests by investors and CEOs. Alas we’re also asked to step in when chaos has already taken over and the tech management challenges being faced by the leadership team have already out-stripped their incumbent skill set – process, hiring, product being all over the place and a major task to get back on track. This weeks article looked at the issue and how founders and early hires need effective support to help execute that fast growth road map. Read the article here. |
| NEWS & VIEWS Articles Catching Our Eye This Week The Fundamentals of Transforming from Matrix to Agile… Born in the 1960s and popularised in the 1970s, the matrix organises employees into grids, with each employee answering to at least two managers – functional, product or project, divisional or geographical. The matrix was envisioned to break down silos, foster lateral coordination and improve efficiency. But the matrix’s heyday appears to be over in the age of disruption, not least for businesses in fast-evolving sectors… Serverless Functions for Microservices? Probably Yes, But Stay Flexible to Change… While designing and planning for a new (micro)services based architecture, there are moments when architects have to think about a deployment strategy and therefore ask themselves; “Shall we deploy this (micro)service as a serverless function or is it better to place it in a container? Or maybe on a dedicated virtual machine (VM)?” Enrico Piccinini and Thomas Betts provide valuable insight on modern architectures – do not miss this out! Yes, good leaders are authentic leaders — but here’s what that actually means… If you go on Amazon, you can find over 40,000 books on how to be more authentic. Clearly, we have a problem if we have to spend so much money just to be ourselves. And the cost is not just in our pocketbooks. Mrs. Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organizational Behavior in London Business School, believes that the way we think about authenticity poses a real danger to our capacity to grow and learn… Too Many Organizations Get Public Cloud Wrong… The cloud has been getting a lot of press in the past few years—and with good reason. The elasticity and flexibility of resources are transformational for businesses. However, there are also drawbacks. Modern applications today are rarely self-contained entities. The typical enterprise manages hundreds, or even thousands, of interconnected components and services, forming a complex web of dependencies… |
| BOOK OF THE WEEK Thrive: The Leader’s Guide to Building a High-Performance Culture Andrew Freedman is a lifelong advocate for maximizing human potential and creating positive change. For over 25 years, he’s been a driving force in designing strategies that provide leaders a foundation to translate individual, team, and organizational talent into tangible business growth.His book provides leaders with a clear blueprint for building a high-performance culture. Drawing on extensive experience in change management, organizational development, and performance consulting, Andrew Freedman and Paul Elliott share their systematic approach, known as the Exemplary Performance System (EPS), in a way that enables leaders to take immediate action to shift workforce engagement and performance. Thrive teaches leaders how to create clarity and alignment around what high performance looks like and how to replicate it at scale, identify and eliminate barriers to performance excellence, effectively align individual and team priorities with those of the company, and build organizational systems and processes that accelerate business and financial results. “If you aren’t leading change, you are going to be changed! Andrew and Paul live what they write with relentless assessment and problem solving in order to move organizations forward and create competitive excellence in the work environment. This book will provide you with the tools you need to move forward and lead change within your organization.” – Steve Pruett, Executive Chairman, Cox Media Group |
| VIDEO OF THE WEEK The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance | Shawn Achor |
90 Things You Need To Know To Become an Effective CTO
In this post, Jason Noble, Academy’s Chief Technology Officer, explains the design of highly relevant CTO KPIs and shows you how to a) track them and, more importantly, b) use them to improve performance. Now, the odds are that you’re either a CTO in a start-up or fast-growing company or soon to become one. That […]
Price’s law (competence is linear, incompetence is exponential) pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject and the number of authors in the subject area, stating that half of the publications come from the square root of all contributors. If 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 […]
I’ve been asked to write a short piece on the impact of confidence in leadership. 1st, how do I keep it short? 2nd, which angle do I start with for this many tentacled topic? Because whether we talk about true confidence, projection, self-doubt and/or the ever present Imposter syndrome, how we deal with these issues […]
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