The world as I see it
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
– Trillian (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
In her post the writer Alida Miranda-Wolff discussed How Cultish Language Shuts Down Conversation in DEIB. However, I feel that the same applies to team dynamics in general.
We want a competitive but aggressive team. The thin and sometimes vague distinction between competitive and aggressive often causes friction among team members and damages positive team dynamics. One of the sign of aggression I often observed is the cultish language and gesture.
What makes up team culture? How to grow and evolve it? How to spot a misfit before joining a team?
Good culture signs
Not so good signs
From the book “Extreme Ownership”, the authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin stated that “It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.” What you’re willing to tolerate sets the tone for your company culture.
Other interesting books about team cultures
To debug and tune the app, I cannot do it myself. I can only talk to an engineer and ask him to do what I want. Watch the result, then repeat. It’s so hard and waste of time.
Like when I was in the service, where I have no access to a computer. I would “write” the code in my head and code it into computer when I am home on leave.
In the TV show, Fringe, the observers are human from the future came to conquer the present day earth. They love eating super spicy food because they have lost sense of taste and smell in the future. Coincidentally, those are the COVID symptoms. Is that another attempt to warn us about the pandemic from our future self?
Registered this domain about a year ago, hoping that I will use it once the world is back to some level of normalcy. After November and January, I felt a greater hope of reaching that goal.
If you don’t have a plan, don’t expect thing to work itself out.
A plan is nothing, the planning is everything.
Put on my sunglasses and realized that I have the earbuds in and mask on. My ears are overloaded.
Something is wrong when there is an on going heroic act within a team. One or a handful of people keep working overtime to keep the team moving forward, or just running to stand still. The one person knows how the critical system works can be very efficient, yet also the bottleneck for scaling the product and teams. However, we do need heroes once in a while to get us out of a jam, push project forward.
So much was lost during the 2020 pandemic, including the Zappos founder Tony Hsieh. I have heard and read many stories surrounding Tony, like how he put company culture as the first and foremost important thing in driving Zappos success. Story about the Las Vegas Downtown Project, about how he intentionally create collisions for people to run into either other. Also, the dark side of the Downtown Project involving several suicide of the founders.
Reading his book “delivering happiness” learned that he was born in Urbana, IL to parents of UIUC graduate students from Taiwan. He absolutely shined brightly during his lifetime.
A really sad lost.
Was on an interview at 11 am and the first thing the candidate said was that we have a new President at that moment.
It was so tense in the last few days, the storming of the Capital Hill on Jan 6 and the rumor of possible armed protests across the county on Inauguration Day. Yet, the day turned out to be uneventful. Such a strange overwhelming sense of relief that all is quiet. A collective sigh of relief across the country.
Normality.