Thirteen quick links for Monday morning

I’ve been sitting on some of these for a quite a while (and I have enough in the backlog for checks notes another 8 of these posts!):

Reward collaboration, not individual work. Focusing on collaboration over individual credit leads to faster work completion at a sustainable pace without accumulating technical debt.

From reactive to creative leadership. Reactive leadership operates from a place of fear and defensiveness, while Creative leadership operates from openness, possibility, and passion.

The cult of the founders. While potentially inspiring, the prophetic leadership style is immature and inadequate for leading a company at scale.

5 tips for leading successfully in a global environment: Embrace change; Master async comms; Empower local employees; Amplify customer voices; and Build relationships.

Some hard truths about soft skills. Hard skills might get you a job, but soft skills like curiosity, emotional resilience, and learning ability can help you excel in the job.

The strategic benefits of randomized decision-making. In highly ambiguous environments, random decision-making can provide strategic advantages like: getting to market sooner, faster learning, less predictability, and reduced biases.

Obliquity as a strategy for learning. Focusing on helping people understand how they learn, rather than deep strategy or techniques, may help people thrive in complex situations.

How software companies can avoid the trap of Product-Led Growth. Eventually even the best PLG companies will need an enterprise sales strategy, which takes years to develop properly.

The hidden potential of eliminating failure demand. While some types of failure demand are simply unavoidable, reducing failure demand can improve customer satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and increase employee job satisfaction.

Value engineering and build vs. rent. Companies should focus their engineering efforts on building capabilities that are strategically important to their core business and customers, rather than generic systems that are readily available from vendors.

Are OKRs improving or inhibiting decision making? OKRs are not a substitute for strategy, and may be less effective in complex domains with low validity or predictability.

Do OKRs hinder decision making in radically uncertain environments? Goal setting constrains decisions to a “known end, unknown means” scenario and boxes thinking into a single approach rather than exploring alternatives.

Are OKRs overprescribed? Goals can trigger escalation of commitment and overinvestment even if the initial assumptions prove wrong.