Marton Trencseni - Fri 23 June 2023 • Tagged with leadership, mental, models, first-principles
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.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 19 May 2023 • Tagged with leadership, mental, models, first-principles
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.
Marton Trencseni - Tue 16 May 2023 • Tagged with leadership, mental, models, first-principles
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.
Marton Trencseni - Sun 14 May 2023 • Tagged with leadership, mental, models, growth-mindset, eisenhower-matrix, tuckman, cynefin, scarf
I describe the following mental models useful in leadership and self-management: the Growth Mindset, Eisenhower Matrix, Tuckman Model, Cynefin Framework, SCARF Model.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 12 May 2023 • Tagged with leadership, mental, models, iceberg, thinking-hats, trust-euqation, ooda
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.
Marton Trencseni - Thu 15 December 2022 • Tagged with book, management, engineering
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.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 23 September 2022 • Tagged with culture
I wrote a Culture Doc for the Data Science team I lead.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 22 July 2022 • Tagged with book, management, culture
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.
Marton Trencseni - Sun 10 July 2022 • Tagged with amazon, book, management, writing
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.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 08 July 2022 • Tagged with hbr, book, management, writing
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.
Marton Trencseni - Sat 18 June 2022 • Tagged with culture, facebook, netflix, valve
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.
Marton Trencseni - Tue 26 April 2022 • Tagged with startups, theranos, wework, scalien
Theranos, WeWork and the startup hustle.
Marton Trencseni - Sat 12 February 2022 • Tagged with peter-principle, gervais-principle, dunning-kruger, dilbert
Five delightfully cynical half-truths about organizations: the Peter principle, the Dilbert principle, the Gervais principle, Negative selection and the Dunning-Kruger effect. 
Marton Trencseni - Sat 06 March 2021 • Tagged with business, experimentation, book, amazon, management
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.
Marton Trencseni - Mon 22 February 2021 • Tagged with personal, interruptions, notifications
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.
Marton Trencseni - Fri 10 January 2020 • Tagged with planning, teams, goaling
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.
Marton Trencseni - Sun 22 December 2019 • Tagged with self help, goaling
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.
Marton Trencseni - Mon 23 July 2018 • Tagged with warren, buffett, self, help, physics, haskell
Warren Buffett says deciding what not to spend time on is just as important as deciding what to spend time on.
Marton Trencseni - Wed 09 November 2016 • Tagged with data, science, product, analytics
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.
Marton Trencseni - Wed 06 January 2016 • Tagged with systems, books
Thinking in Systems, written by the late Donella Meadows, is a book about how to think about systems, how to control systems and how systems change and control themselves. A system can be anything from a heating furnace to a social system. The gem of the book is the part about system traps. System traps are ways a system can go wrong; examples are drift to low performance, seeking the wrong goals, shifting the burden, etc.