leadership

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2017 talk on leadership and organizational principles, ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and Amazon. He argues for the difference between principles and values and criticizes vague corporate principles.

Climber Chris Warner talks at Google about his book on high altitude leadership and the 2007 K2 expedition, where eighteen climbers summited and two died.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

Sacha Baron Cohen's speech accepting the ADL International Leadership Award, in which he criticizes social media companies for amplifying hate and propaganda. He argues that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

Simon Sinek's 99U talk on why leaders earn trust by putting their team's safety ahead of their own, drawing on biology and anthropology. It distills the ideas of his book Leaders Eat Last into about 46 minutes.

In a six-minute TED talk, Derek Sivers uses footage of a dancing man at an outdoor festival to show how a movement starts. He argues the first follower is what turns a lone nut into a leader.

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

Filmmaker Max Joseph's 35-minute video essay asks whether you have to be a jerk to be a successful leader. It draws on Adam Grant's givers and takers, Robert Greene and famous demanding directors.

Nickolas Means tells the story of United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all flight control yet saved more than half its passengers. He draws lessons on teamwork, crew resource management and leadership for software teams.

A short clip of Steve Jobs arguing that the best people are self-managing and that professional managers who cannot do the work add little. He says leadership is about a shared vision.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project speaks at Google about managing energy rather than time. He draws on The Power of Full Engagement and his work on stamina and sustained performance.

A conference presentation by Bert Hubert on how companies lose their technological edge and become outsourcing hubs. It argues the same dynamic applies to whole countries and continents, and ends with suggestions for reversing it.

Thomas Ricks's Nimitz Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley asks why US generals did better in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Afghanistan. A central point is the WWII practice of quickly reassigning or relieving underperforming generals.

A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs arguing that great products come from people who care about content rather than process. He says process-focused people take over and cause decline, citing IBM as an example.

A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining how sales and marketing people take over mature companies from product people, leading to product decline.

Retired submarine captain David Marquet explains, with drawings, how he turned the USS Santa Fe around by treating his crew as leaders rather than followers. It summarizes the ideas of his book Turn the Ship Around.

Scene from episode 2 of HBO's Chernobyl in which an official who once ran a shoe factory is put in charge of a critical role. It shows how unqualified appointees end up in charge of technical matters.

Stanford Blitzscaling class session where Reid Hoffman interviews Eric Schmidt about structuring teams and scaling Google. Topics include Alphabet, hiring, and how Chrome and Android operated inside the company.

A clip from The Wire (season 4, episode 7) in which a former mayor tells Tommy Carcetti about having to "eat shit" from each constituency during his term. It is a parable about the unpleasant compromises of political leadership.

CGP Grey's animated adaptation of The Dictator's Handbook, explaining how rulers stay in power by keeping a small group of key supporters happy rather than ruling fairly. It lays out selectorate theory and how resources shape regimes.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

An RSA Animate whiteboard adaptation of Dan Pink's talk on what motivates people at work. It argues that beyond simple tasks, autonomy, mastery and purpose drive performance more than money.

Casey Muratori's lecture, originally given at the Technical University of Madrid, arguing that Conway's Law is the only viable candidate for a true law of software architecture. He explains how software mimics the organization over time, using examples like Windows' multiple volume controls.

CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure. He recommends creating separate spaces and routines for different activities to stay balanced.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman argue that the 'genius programmer' ideal harms collaboration. They advocate trading ego for growth, sharing work early, and understanding how tools shape social behavior.

An excerpt of Simon Sinek on Inside Quest discussing millennials in the workplace. He covers parenting, technology, social media dopamine and what that means for managers.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

Adam Savage answers viewer questions on dealing with condescending colleagues, focusing on dismissive phrases such as 'why don't you just' and 'I would have'. He explains why such language undermines the person receiving it.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

A podcast episode of Arrested DevOps with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill, featuring Cantrill's rant on integrity in companies and technology.

A short Moneyball clip showing a manager telling a player he has been cut, directly and without softening the news.