Betterment

This article explores essential tactics for building a long-term talent acquisition strategy that drives innovation and growth.

Boost your tech team's productivity and innovation with a data-driven skills development strategy. Discover 10 elements for crafting a winning plan.

Yesterday’s post was a little glib. Without a doubt, we add more value when we focus on the emotional labor of important work, leaving others the chance to create commodities. But the repetit…

The hard parts of what you do all day can feel fraught. It’s heavy lifting. Emergencies. Dangerous labor. The stakes are high and the work can be difficult. The important parts of what you do…

Tim Brownson points us to this recent poll of people in Great Britain. About one out of four people surveyed (of all ages) believe that they could qualify for the Olympics if they trained for the n…

Everyone is selfish. We do things that increase our chances of survival, help us achieve our goals and give us a story we can tell ourselves about our role in the community. But short-term selfish …

It’s surprising to realize that they’re the same. They are both places to hide. When we ship average work, it’s not our fault. We’re simply doing what the manual says, and i…

There’s a sale on band saw blades, including a really good deal on one that fits the saw you owned years ago. The folks who live next door to the house you used to live in are having a raucou…

When a group comes together, noise is easy. Just a few people have to make a commotion for noise to happen. But silence requires everyone to be in sync.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again — most of what passes for reviews and coverage on social media is nothing butthinly veiled product placement, with influen…

The standard zeros are a handy set of consistently-numbered 'buckets'. They can store information at the top of areas and categories in the unused space at 00-09.

The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from hi

Don’t listen to oracles, AI or otherwise. Take responsibility for thinking.

Running into a burning building is heroic work. Keeping buildings from burning down in the first place is actually just as important. And it scales more reliably.

“None of the above” is often the best option. We’re regularly confronted with multiple-choice questions. The foundation is already established, the options are already limited, do…

When talking about architecture, in 1948 Winston Churchill may have said it best: "We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us." Ain’t that the

If you don’t know what message to write, it was too long since you last committed.

IBM spent a fortune fighting calls for them to be broken up. So did AT&T and Microsoft. In all three cases, there’s plenty of evidence that they would have been better off if they had sim…

Three gaps in knowledge define the quality of our lives: the difference between objective truth and the state of current science, the gap between science and common sense, and finally between common sense and everyday practice.

New ideas aren’t adopted all at once. A few people go first while the rest of us watch to see how it goes. “Look, Mikey, he likes it!” This is the story of tech innovations, dance…

There’s no water in that river that was there ten years ago. The boundaries have shifted in that time as well, there’s no riverbank that’s exactly where it was. And the silt and t…

Usually modified with “total,” the failure might not be as bad as we fear. The origin of the word probably comes from Italian, a long time ago. The person who loses a round in a game ha…

Make a list of things you used to believe. Fervently, certainly, completely. Things that you were sure of, but now, with the passage of time and the benefit of experience, you know to be incorrect …

In “On The Waterfront,” the classic 1954 Elia Kazan film about a former professional boxer turned low-status New Jersey longshoreman, the protagonist,

Important hills usually get much steeper at the top. 99% of the training in competitive athletics is devoted to the last 1% of performance. A tenth of a second. The same is true for squeezing the l…

Isn't it strange how, once upon a time, our Presidential debates literally sounded like this: “I have no disagreement with the Vice President’s

It feels urgent because it is. But by the time the train is running away, it might be too late. The better strategy is to not sign up for trains that are likely to run away. The first principle of …

Yesterday was my last day working at Moodle, an Open Source LMS that is used all around the world. I joined more than 4 years ago, and for the most part it has been a great place to work. But recently I decided it was time to move on, and today I want to share why and what's coming next.

If I say that a thing costs five dollars but I don’t specify if that’s Canadian Dollars, US Dollars, or Australian Dollars then we might all think we understand the price but we don’t, because I used language that sounded precise and yet was actually ambiguous. What I think I said and what others think I said were substantially different.

We’ve gotten so hung up on famous that it’s easy to forget that there are two kinds of renown. Being known for lowering the standards of discourse, cheating, or whining is a choice, but…