This post provides a practical Individual Career Plan template you can use to guide self-assessment, prioritize your professional development, and set meaningful goals that align with your vision for the future. By outlining clear objectives and action steps, you create a framework for continuous improvement and more informed career decisions. I use this same template for the data organization I lead, filled it out myself, and shared it with others to inspire them to do the same.

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The Hero's Journey, or Monomyth, is a narrative pattern identified by scholar Joseph Campbell that appears across a wide range of cultures and eras, and is also a useful mental model in Leadership.

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In this post, I describe the Pareto Principle, the Peter Principle, the Rumsfeld Matrix, Servant Leadership and Pygmalion Effect, and finally Goleman's Emotional Intelligence Model.

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I describe Elon Musk's First Principles Thinking model through several examples: SpaceX, Warren Buffet's Berkshire, Google's organization design, Python's language design, Random Forests and Convolutional Neural Networks.

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I describe the following mental models useful in leadership and self-management: the Growth Mindset, Eisenhower Matrix, Tuckman Model, Cynefin Framework, SCARF Model.

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I describe the following mental models useful in leadership and self-management: Iceberg Model, Six Thinking Hats, Trust Equation, Circle of Influence and OODA Loop.

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I reflect on the core points of Fred Brooks' seminal book, The Mythical Man-Month, that I often recall and apply in my daily work.

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I wrote a Culture Doc for the Data Science team I lead.

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The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is a system of 8 scales which can be used to determine how cultures vary along a spectrum. The scales can be used to analyse one culture relative to another and decode how culture influences your international collaborations. I find the considerations in the book helpful irrespective of cultural background; the 8 scales can be applied to individuals as well, irrespective of where they are from.

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Amazon established a set of principles and mechanisms, enabling the company to grow from a single founder to several hundred thousand employees while remaining stubbornly true to its mission of obsessing over customers to create long-term shareholder value.

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If your writing is sloppy and artless people will think you are the same. They won’t care about your message, they won’t do business with you. It’s not true that only ideas matter. Good writing gets ideas noticed.

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Many companies have some sort of "Culture Doc", a booklet or similar, which explains to new joiners what the company is about. I received Facebook's "Little Red Booklet" when I joined in 2016 February, and I was amazed how good it was. Recently I was researching other companies' Culture Docs, and found a version of Netflix's and Valve's online. It's interesting to compare and contrast what these different companies choose to put in their Culture Doc. Facebook's Culture Doc is very mission and execution oriented and serious, Netflix is analytical and HR-focused, and Valve's is a lighthearted explanation of how the company works.

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Theranos, WeWork and the startup hustle.

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Five delightfully cynical half-truths about organizations: the Peter principle, the Dilbert principle, the Gervais principle, Negative selection and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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These are the best parts from the book "Invent and Wander: the Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos". The book is a collection of the annual Amazon shareholder letters that Jeff Bezos has been sending out since 1997, and speeches he has given over time.

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I love using apps, email, social networking and messaging. But I want to do use them on my own time. So many years ago I decided to not let my phone interrupt me.

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I’ve worked at 5-10 different organizations, most of them were startups or startuppy companies. I’ve done a lot of planning in small teams, and also taken part in company-wide leadership planning. Here I will describe what has worked well for me in small team settings, focusing on time estimation.

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The meta-goal of goaling is to stretch yourself to achieve more, and to feel good about what you’ve achieved. Whatever happened this year, it’s always possible to achieve a lot more and feel better about yourself next year. To hijack a Feynman quote, there is plenty of room at the top.

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Warren Buffett says deciding what not to spend time on is just as important as deciding what to spend time on.

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I used to think that a good analogy for using data is the instrumentation of a cockpit in an airliner. Lots of instruments, and if they fail, the pilot can’t fly the plane and bad things happen. There’s no autopilot for companies. The problem with this analogy is that planes aren’t built in mid-air. Product teams and companies constantly need to build and ship new products.

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