Leadership insights, thoughts from lived experiences and readings
I finished The First 90 Days by Michael D Watkins today. I don't think it's very relevant for me but at higher level of leadership, this will be a good book to check. In this book Michael elaborates below 9 points for successful transition of leaders into new jobs with new responsibilities. 1. Promote Yourself… Continue reading The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
Here are main points of The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz. 1. Be impeccable with your word Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. 2. Don’t take… Continue reading The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz
What about starting the weekend in a light mode? How busy our techies in bay area are in their day to day work? Here is a sample.
Last week I finished reading Patrick Lencioni's wonderful book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. When I started the book, I couldn't leave it and finished in a single day (as an audiobook). It's short and captivating all throughout. Update: I finished it for a second time in July ahead of a management book club discussion in… Continue reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
I am glad I stumbled upon An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson last week while listening to a podcast. I immediately took audible monthly subscription to read it. While listening to the book, I felt as if Will Larson has been talking to me over a fireside chat and sharing his… Continue reading An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson
This weekend I finished a fantastic Udemy course on Strategy by Executive Coach Ron Carucci. All Marqetans get free Udemy for Business account, so I didn't have to pay for this. Here is the link if you want to consider taking this course. I am also putting my notes and learnings from this course below.… Continue reading Being Strategic: Thinking and Acting with Impact
A lively engineers' meetup with nearly 60 attendees including engineers from Bay Area software companies was held at Marqeta's Oakland Headquarter on the evening of January 29. Cockroach Labs Solution Engineer Roko Kruze gave an engineering talk on how CockroachDB delivers resilient, consistent, cloud native, distributed SQL at scale. He described how CockroachDB lets developers… Continue reading Marqeta Hosts Cockroach Labs at First #eng-meetup
I finished today Ben Horowitz's latest book that was published last month - What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture This is another good book from Ben although I would rate his classic The Hard Thing About Hard Things much higher. He talks about business culture and how to shape… Continue reading What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
There are plenty of resources on how to succeed as an engineering manager. But there is not enough to tell you about how not to fail. I read the article by Brad Armstrong recently which outlined some very important ones. I recommend you read and try these out. Here is the list which mentions, DO… Continue reading How not to fail as an Engineering Manager
Last year I finished 2 books that told the stories of Sillicon Valley startups in ways that I liked very much - The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and Zero to One by Peter Thiel. This April another book came up but I couldn't make time to read it until now. I just finished the… Continue reading Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
Leader's Whiteboard 