Boss: wow this web portal is really fast, light and responsive
Me: of course it was 100% developed on Train WiFi it had to be light 😂

Maartje

Leading with Integrity: Why the Best Leaders Are Models of Values

• 🎯 Integrity isn’t just about honesty — it’s about a deep congruence where a leader’s actions, words, and core values are all in alignment. They truly “walk the talk.”
• 🤝 The ultimate outcome is trust — integrity is the bedrock upon which trust is built, leading to higher employee engagement, increased loyalty, and a healthier organizational culture.
• 🤔 An important distinction is made — leadership integrity doesn’t mean being perfect or universally popular. It means having the character to own up to mistakes, which can paradoxically reinforce trust.
• 🪜 Developing integrity is an active process — it requires leaders to first consciously define their core values, then consistently model that behavior, and finally hold themselves and others accountable to those standards.

Stop apologizing for reasonable business decisions

• 🙅‍♀️ We often use “sorry” as a conversational filler when making reasonable requests or stating facts — like our pricing, policies, or availability.
• 📉 This habit undermines authority and signals a lack of confidence. Apologizing for your price, for example, frames it as an inconvenience rather than a fair exchange for the value you provide.
• ✨ The better approach is to state your decision directly and neutrally. Instead of “Sorry, I can’t make that time,” a simple and more powerful alternative is, “That time doesn’t work for me. How about…?”
• ⚖️ The key takeaway is to distinguish between a genuine mistake that requires an apology and a reasonable boundary that does not. The goal is to reserve apologies for when they are truly warranted.

Picking your battles when you are hyper-rational

• 🧠 The article advocates for a “hyper-rational” approach to professional disagreements — you should only engage in battles that materially affect your ultimate goal.
• 🏆 It highlights the critical difference between being right and being effective. Winning a minor argument might make you feel correct, but it can cost you goodwill and energy, ultimately making you less effective at achieving the larger objective.
• 🧘‍♀️ This means consciously letting go of small things — like minor factual errors or perceived slights that don't impact the final outcome. It's about conserving your “disagreement budget” for issues that are truly important.
• ♟️ The goal is to become more strategic, not just technically correct. By ignoring trivial friction, you save your time, energy, and political capital for the fights that actually matter, making you a more influential and focused professional.

Exploring for Strategy

• 🧭 The article contrasts two fundamental modes of operation — execution, which is efficiently following a known path, and exploration, which is searching for a path when the territory is unknown.
• 🔎 The core argument is that robust strategy is not a grand plan conceived in a boardroom — it's an emergent outcome discovered through deliberate exploration. You find the strategy by trying things, not by thinking about them in isolation.
• 🤝 This model requires a shift in leadership — instead of prescribing solutions, leaders must define valuable problems and empower autonomous teams to place numerous, small “bets” to discover what works. Trust is essential.
• 🧠 In an “exploring” organization, the primary output isn't just features or efficiency, but validated learning. Tolerating failures from well-reasoned experiments is critical, as these learnings are what ultimately illuminate the correct strategic direction.

Software Quality

• 💎 The article argues that “software quality” is too vague — it should be broken down into four distinct dimensions: External Quality (for the user), Internal Quality (code health), Product Quality (solving the right problem), and Process Quality (how the team works).
• ⚖️ These four dimensions are in constant tension — there are always trade-offs. For example, prioritizing shipping speed (Process Quality) might temporarily sacrifice code maintainability (Internal Quality). The key is to make these trade-offs consciously.
• 💬 Using this framework provides a shared language that transforms vague complaints like “our quality is bad” into specific, actionable discussions — for example, “Our Internal Quality is suffering, which is slowing down our Process Quality.”

That’s all for this week’s edition

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