MGMT Newsletter #35: July, Week 5 2020

From Middling Management this week:

• A Price of Success

Tricky Situation of the week:

Ambition on the Management team

It's a fact of life that most of your peers will be ambitious at the management level. Some will be talented and ambitious, some will be...less so.  How do you work best with the super ambitious archetypes that think their way is going to be a really great way of doing things? How do you foster an environment that promotes the best ideas and keeps workloads well distributed? Favoritism and politics can abound in ambitious environments. Balance, as with any other environment, is likely key.

From the Internet:

• How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner — Tactical Frameworks for Leveling Up by First Round Capital Review

• Intel ‘Stunning Failure’ Heralds End of Era for U.S. Chip Sector by Ian King @ Bloomberg

• SAP Plans To Spin Out Qualtrics, Its $8 Billion Acquisition From 2018, For An IPO by Alex Conrad @ Forbes

• Big Tech Capitol Hill Testimony - July 29th Statements

  • Tim Cook Statement

  • Jeff Bezos Statement

  • Sundar Pachai Statement

  • Mark Zuckerberg Statement

• Did Hearst’s Culture Kill Hearst’s Biggest Magazine Story? by Ben Smith @ NYT

From Twitter:

The Daily Coach @TheDaily_Coach

“Treat energy the same way you treat money. It’s a finite resource that needs to be wisely managed and invested.” — @DandapaniLLC

Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh

This = MASTER CLASS. A must-read (or hear if you wait until tomorrow when Bezos reads it to Congress) in entrepreneurship, leadership, value-creation, invention, immigration, philanthropy, environmental stewardship. The team alongside Jeff Bezos writing this is 💯 LETS DIG IN

Devon ☀️ @devonzuegel

California has one of the highest income tax rates in the country, but one of the lowest property tax rates (especially once you take Prop 13 into account) We're essentially punishing productivity while rewarding non-productive property ownership. C'monnnnnn 🤦🏽‍♀️

Kate O'Keeffe @Kate_OKeeffe

Theory: if the many otherwise very educated people who repeatedly draw absurd false equivalencies between the U.S. and China actually started reading Chinese propaganda, ie exactly what the state *wants you to know*, they'd have a measurably worse view of the CCP

Eugene Wei @eugenewei

Spoke to realtor about selling my condo in SF today and it confirmed that I'm going to take a bath on it because of the pandemic, and that's if I can even unload it. I missed the great migration out of SF. I'm like Werner Herzog's nihilist penguin, left behind.

Catch ya next week! -MC