Even though from a software engineer’s perspective, this essay by Rands is one of the best things I’ve read about what it really means to manage people on a day-to-day basis.

The money quote?

Leadership is not just about effectively getting stuff done, but demonstrating through your composure that you aren’t rattled by the freakish.

And I like this on meetings:

You go to a lot of meetings. You already knew this, but Managers Go to Meetings. Meetings are the bane of my existence and I consider it my personal goal to kill as many possible, but I still go to a lot of meetings. As best I can tell, there are two useful types of meeting: alignment and creation. Briefly:

Alignment meetings sound like this: “It’s red, are we all in agreement it’s red? Ok, swell. Wait, Phil thinks it’s blue. Phil, here are the 18 compelling reasons it’s red. Convinced? Done now?”

Creation meetings sound like this: “We need more blue. How are we going to do that? Phil, you’re our blue man. What should we do here?”

Top marks, Rands.

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Amidst all the doom and gloom, the early trains into the City packed with office workers keen to be seen to be keen, the belt-tightening, expense-cutting, travel-slashing and so forth, it’s occasionally worth remembering that there are different perspectives.

Here’s Steve Jobs on how Apple chose to get through the last downturn:

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.

Via Fortune.

That point — they weren’t going to lay off people because they’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — seems to me one often overlooked or forgotten, but very much worth keeping rather nearer the front of management’s mind.

Of course, if you’ve just hired any old Tom, Dick or Harry, it may not matter to you so much — but then your business is probably headed down the tubes anyway.

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