negotiation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A This Week in Startups episode in which Jason Calacanis interviews David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. They discuss bootstrapping, company philosophy and views on the tech industry.

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.

Dan Pink's TED talk argues that traditional carrot-and-stick rewards often fail for creative work, drawing on the candle problem and social science research. He points to autonomy, mastery and purpose as better motivators.

Gabe Newell of Valve speaks at UT Austin's LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses in-game economies and how Valve organizes work.

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.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Nickolas Means tells the story of Lockheed's Skunk Works and how its engineers built the U-2, SR-71 and F-117 under tight deadlines and budgets. He draws lessons for modern software teams.

People Make Games interviewed 16 current and former Valve employees to examine how the company's no-bosses, no-titles structure works in practice, and where it falls short.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals, argues that planning is guessing and startups should focus on today. He says constraints are an advantage and that startups can bootstrap profitably in sizable markets.

Allen Holub's keynote arguing that estimation is harmful, particularly in Agile, and presenting planning approaches based on data and flow instead. It covers the distinction between estimation and data-driven prediction.

Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.

Clayton Christensen explains disruptive innovation using the steel industry, showing how mini-mills beat incumbents from the low end. He argues disruption is not about stupid or bad management.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.