Manager quotes that I like
A breathing list of quotes and thoughts that can help every-day managers make decisions and drive business results
Over my career, I have had the fortune to work with great leaders. I have a habit of documenting specific interactions where I feel that I learnt something. It can be something small and momentary, or something big and foundational. Sharing a few of those here.
“What is the purpose of this meeting?”
This one seems too obvious, but I find that it is not used as often as it should be. This simple question at the beginning of every meeting can transform the meeting into a productive one, focus all attendees on a common goal, or spare some time for those who might not need to attend. Very powerful, so simple, much recommended.
“Let’s separate between what’s right, and what we can do”
Sometimes, when we need to make hard decisions, we constraint our thinking to only the things we believe are possible to implement, inside our organization’s culture, rules, norms, budget, etc.
That’s why it is so important to make sure you separate between what you can do, and what you should do. Culture and norms evolve with time, and it takes some of these bold moves to shake up the organization by saying “I know this is not an easy choice to make, but it is the right one”. In many cases, you’ll see that by challenging the norms, you can transform and improve the organization.
“Quality is our #1 feature”
This is a beautiful quote which puts what’s most desirable by our customers in the front-and-center — products that work well. We sometimes rush into adding more features to our service to get more traction to it, but end up losing the market if our service is not reliable enough. This kind of perception is really hard to change.
“At the scale we are operating at, the improbable happens every day, and the impossible happens every week”
This quote is attributed to the head of Azure, Jason Zander. What I like about it is that it hits you with the massive scale and the challenge you have when building something that has millions and billions of instances.
At this scale, you must not only get your service’s quality to the far right, but actually deal with failures, packet drops, server meltdowns, etc. as if they are nominal scenarios, and have automated processes to address those.
With billions of VMs, for example, even if your script is seven 9’s reliable (which is extremely difficult to achieve), it will statistically leave a few faulty VMs every time you run it. That’s a whole different level of scale and quality requirements.
“A bad hire is worse than no hire”
This is a conflict that many managers have, and I personally learnt the hard way. You are sometimes struggling to find a good fit for your team, possibly for months, and you start contemplating whether we should hire that candidate, which has some red flags but is generally a good problem solver.
In my experience, culture fit is more important than everything. A bad hire has a damage potential which is far greater than leaving that seat empty for a few more weeks. Don’t get tempted, if your gut tells you it’s not the right person for the team.
