One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.

When the Vent begins, you might confuse [it] for a conversation. It's not. It's a Vent. It's a mental release valve and your job is to listen for as long as it takes. Don't problem solve. Don't redirect. Don't comfort. Yet. Your employee is doing mental house cleaning and interrupting this cleaning is missing the point. They don't want a solution, they want to be heard.

Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.

Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency.

Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.

Your work speaks for you.

If we're 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don't have anything sitting in my back pocket, I'm going to turn it into a performance review.