Startups and failure
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of …
Job Titles
Job titles don’t matter, because it’s the work that counts. But job titles matter because they get you meetings with partners, interviews for next jobs, etc. They send signals that can be …
Lesson: Moats and Flywheels
It’s bloody hard to build something new into the world. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy: there’s a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can …
NZ Herald's "News" Is Shit and Lazy
tl;dr: Today’s NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant. I’m giving the damn thing up and will get my news from other sites, Radio New Zealand and NewsHub. You should too. I can’t …
On Villains
[I posted this on a Slack recently, and would like to give it a longer life than Slack’s 10,000 line scrollback. –Nat] Socially constructed roles like “douche-bro” and “rock star teacher” …
Art and Education and WTF is Engagement Anyway?
This post is prompted by The engagement era - and the artist’s place within it, written by Courtney Johnston (director of the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt). She has been pondering the shifting …
The Best You Can Be
I write a short daily series for O’Reilly Media, Four Short Links, which I’ve done for years. I recently posted a link to someone’s “10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better …
Lesson: Presume Good Intentions
Teamwork shares a lot of good practices with parenting. This lesson was no exception …. I realised fairly early on in my time as a parent that I had a tendency to fail, bigtime, by blasting my …
Lesson: Track What You Learn
When I was recruiting the fabulous Chris McDowall for a job, he asked me “why do YOU work here?” I replied that I was learning lots. He then said the most important thing anyone has said …
Kiwi Startups in Silicon Valley
I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley. He built a nice little article, in which “Torkington says” features …