negotiation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frederic Laloux presents his research on self-managing, purpose-driven organizations, followed by Q&A. He summarizes the findings of his book Reinventing Organizations and examples such as Buurtzorg.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.

Eric Brechner, a Microsoft Xbox development manager, presents his Kanban approach for agile project management at Talks at Google. He covers using sticky notes to organize work, estimate and meet deadlines.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, gives a talk at the LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses Valve's hiring and pay, its flat structure and an open-office anecdote.

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

Joel Spolsky's 2012 Google tech talk on the cultural anthropology of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. He explains how the software was designed to shape community norms and curation standards.

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.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Rich Hickey's Clojure Conj 2023 talk on design in practice, covering problem statements, decision matrices, choosing precise words and making decisions in a team.

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.

Erik Meijer gives a provocative talk presenting what he calls a rational alternative to Agile, arguing against Scrum-style practice. He also touches on the tenth-man concept.

Mike Monteiro's CreativeMornings talk on getting paid for creative and freelance work, covering contracts, working with lawyers, and refusing to work for free. It is delivered with blunt humor.