Fly by Notes
One thing that kept me focused during the learning period was to maintain a document that captures everything I learned. It’s like the Cliff’s Notes of a private pilot course, and I decided to make it available to other student pilots.t
How-to
Why Managers Should Learn to Fly
Many of the qualities that make a good pilot also define outstanding managers and leaders. Product managers in particular can benefit from learning to fly. Taking your product off the ground is not an easy feat, and learning to fly can hone your skills and help you excel. Here’s a list of ten skills you’ll get better at while learning to fly.
Explaining Expletivists
You know those people who use curse words not to insult anyone but to emphasize their message? Like a respected business man who says f%$! every few minutes in a conversation about oil futures or hiring or saving panda bears. A young mother of three living in a posh neighborhood who spices up her endless blurb about shopping and nail salons and house maids with an occasional curse.
Accuracy Doesn’t Imply Usefulness
Accuracy can easily be mistaken for usefulness. If you hire a consultant and pay them a hefty sum to come up with a detailed analysis of some key business function, the results may be impressively accurate but can also be utterly useless.
On Managing Chaos
Management is the art of creating order in situations that would otherwise become chaotic. Managers do this in various ways, most of which (at the lower rungs, at least) fall in the spectrum between micromanaging and letting employees manage themselves.
The “i” Word
In a job interview a while back, I mentioned the one word you don’t want to say in a job interview (especially when the interviewer is an ex-Googler): “intuition”. Interviewers want to hear about your analytical and well-reasoned thinking skills, not about nebulous concepts like intuition. Was mentioning “intuition” a mistake? yes. Does intuition have a place in the workplace? absolutely.
Love Logo Design
I was “commissioned” by my wife and her business partner to design a new logo for their business.
Why Write
I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.
How to Surf the Green Wave
Synchronized green lights are designed to enable streamlined traffic flow in major traffic arteries. When you hit the green wave you know it – it feels like all the lights are turning green just for you. Nice as this may be for your ego, it’s just a coincidence. After commuting on a such a road for a while, I found a way for making this work almost every time.