Top articles of the week | February 29

February 29, 2020

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

10x Thinking and Cross-Functional Goals: What We Can Learn From Amazon’s Planning Process NOBL Academy (reading time: 7 minutes)

This article takes a sneak peak into Amazon’s planning process and it’s fascinating. At the beginning, there are three questions asked:

  • What outcomes did you achieve last year, in comparison to what you planned?
  • What outcomes can you achieve if your level of investment remains the same?
  • What resources do you need to grow your business by 10x?

It’ a great read that sheds some light into the planning process of one of the world’s most successful companies.

How Software Developers Sparked Management Transformation Steve Denning, Forbes (reading time: 8 minutes)

It is widely accepted that agile is the preferred system of operation for software teams. It has now also become the main goal for many leaders; achieving organisational agility.

“If we want to introduce agility, we need to communicate that this isn’t about fixing a problem. We’re fundamentally changing the way the organization operates in the market.“

True product market fit is a minimum viable company Ann-Miura Ko, Techcrunch (reading time: 3 minutes)

I read this entire post before it went behind Techcrunch’s paywall. I’m still sharing the short publicly available summary because of the value. Many founders chase product market fit but often neglect to focus on core business fundamentals. Ann-Miura argues that you need to develop your value proposition, ecosystem and business model at the same time.

A Management Idea to Watch in 2020 Simone Cicero (reading time: 7 minutes)

We’re now climbing a steep curve that brings the world back to a level of dynamicity, interconnectedness, and unpredictability that simply makes organizations that work according to a traditional command-and-control structure, unfit.

Simone Cicero is a management thinker that I’ve been following for a while. He argues for greater decentralization in management systems. In order to do so, it is not just not systems that are important but rather human values of interaction and communication.

Inside X, Google’s top-secret moonshot factory Wired (reading time: 23 minutes)

I worked at Google for a few years and at the same time Google-X team was being formed. It was quite impressive. Their stated mission was to 1) solve problems on a global scale, 2) find technology that doesn’t exist but that is theoretically possible to solve these problems, 3) create a business that will be sustainable. This piece in Wired covers the 10 year anniversary of the “moonshoot factory”. Even though corporate research labs aren’t favored by investors, the technologies coming out from X are already being deployed on a global scale.