The 5 Minute Tech Break : Mar 1

Welcome Friends

The 1st day of March ... and here in London, we're giddy with the first flush of spring sunshine.

We hope the sun has been shining in your corner of the world this week.

BTW - we're going to undertake another quick survey ... tell us about your beverage of choice, as you consume this '5 Minute Tech Break' ...

Enjoy the read.

Jason & Andrew
https://cto.academy

Article of Week :
What the CTO needs from their Scrum Masters

We're absolutely thrilled with the interest in CTO Academy, this newsletter now has subscribers from 70 different countries.

What's also been noticeable, is a spike in recent sign ups from the scrum master community and so, we thought it an opportune time to pen some thoughts on what a CTO needs from scrum masters and their team ... article available here

Why Start Ups Fail

Many of you are in, or might be considering working for, a start up.

As veterans of multiple start ups, we can confirm there is nothing like that first flush of excitement when launching and making something out of nothing. Of changing the world, creating magic, building growth. Exciting, challenging but rarely stable because every early stage business, is forever close to the cliff edge and gasping for traction and money.

It's therefore no surprise that the numbers of start ups who survive and prosper, is incredibly low. Statistics range from as little as 10% - 30% of start ups surviving 2+ years.

That's before you can even start thinking about exit and reward for all the risk and effort ... the 'el dorado' for most start up founders.

Many reasons why it's such a challenge - bad product, wrong team, shortage of cash, loss of founder motivation, just tough luck and poor timing.

But if you want a deeper dive into the reasons why then, you cast a glance at this article with 289 start up failure post mortems.

Book of the week : Principles

Been around for a couple of years but this book has only just crossed our paths.

Written by Ray Dalio [a seriously successful investor and entrepreneur] his key advice is, to not be a person in the machine, instead be the designer of your machine.

Design the machine, design your life for the purpose you want it to have.

If the machine isn’t producing the results you want, figure out how to fix it, to get the output (the life) you want.

This is as much relevant to the individual, as it is the job, the team, the company.

Great read ... even though I skipped the 1st chapter (as promoted to do by the author himself).

Radical Candor - Time to apply in your team?

One of my other hats is that I lead an accelerator course on how to start and build a business.

A popular and important lecture is based around how to manage and build a positive and engaged team culture. Key to success is effective communication and IMO, the ability to adopt a concept called 'Radical Candor'

Radical Candor is about finding a balance between challenging directly, whilst showing you care personally at the same time. Private criticism, public praise but never about the person, instead it's about the performance.

This video from Kim Scott captures the origins of the idea and for a more detailed read, this article is a good start.

Quote of the Week

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” - Anais Nin

That's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the articles, feel free to circulate and spread the CTO Academy word ....

For the insatiable types amongst you, you can go visit our 'tech break' archives.

Stay happy, heathy and have a super weekend.