Friendly discussions about life, business, engineering, and learning between Dima Malenko and Slava Rudnytskyi.
Friendly discussions about life, business, engineering, and learning between Dima Malenko and Slava Rudnytskyi.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss the spreadsheet mentality and the general difficulties of making data-driven decisions while not loosing the forest for the trees.
Spreadsheet mentality (sometimes called "spreadsheet thinking") refers to an overly mechanistic or reductionist approach to decision-making and management that relies too heavily on quantitative metrics while ignoring qualitative factors and nuance.
Quotes on the topic
"What gets measured, gets managed.” – attributed to Peter Drucker or W. Edwards Deming
"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." – W. Edwards Deming
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Goodheart’s Law
“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behaviour.” – Eliyahu Goldratt
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss all the so familiar ways in which business meetings can fail and share their thoughts on how to prevent meetings from failing.
Meeting is when people get together to achieve a specific purpose
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss the ineffable concept of thought leadership and politely disagree with the author of publication that sparked the discussion.
📺 Watchthis episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss documentation for systems, processes, and so on, and debate how to prevent it from crossing the line from being helpful to being actively misleading.
Just feel it!
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava kind of follow up on the discussion of Customer Development in the previous episode and talk about chains of results in assessment of customer needs.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava read and discuss "The Four Steps to Epiphany" – a classical book for entrepreneurs and startup founders.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava follow up on the conversation they started in episode 47 and Dima tries to articulate more precisely what he means by people not being specific enough and gives example of common pitfalls of obscure communication.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava dive into wonderful season of strategic sessions and try to deduce why everyone does them in December and how to make working on strategy a time well spent.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss "Founder Mode", an essay by Paul Graham about differences between more founders and hired managers in tech companies.
"An argument can be perfectly biased in two different ways."
"Care about what you do."
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima shares his longing for the necessary details and the right level of abstraction, while Slava tries to persuade him that all the details aren't always necessary and everything can be fine anyway.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
From the discussion it is not entirely clear if Dima and Slava talk about procrastination that gets in the way of them accomplishing creative endeavours or all the creative they find to postpone working on hard and important things.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava play literary critics and discuss "Starter Villain" – a book by John Scalzi.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss different facets of having fun, discover the golden pentagon of productive state of mind, and nearly form a consultancy to preach that around the world.
Slava shares his latest idea and initiative to create a space for EdTech companies to talk and work together on socially important projects. Dima, naturally, gets to ask questions to test the thinking.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava have read "How Minds Change" by David McRaney and discuss how relatively diverse set of stories come (or do not come) together to give a practical framework for influencing others.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava talk about distractions, different ways to categorize them, and discuss how to prevent any kind of distraction from derailing an otherwise productive day.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube.
Dima and Slava discuss their experiences with LLMs, Slava's recent forays into trainings on using AI technologies, and prophecies about the future of AI, some of which were probably generated with the help of AI.
"Critical thinking skills are going to continue to be critical"
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Dima and Slava have read and now discuss "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!", a memoir by the renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Dima and Slava discuss whether focusing on working faster can translate into improvements in the quality of the produced results and why or why not this may be the case.
📺 Watch this episode on YouTube
Slava started a new podcast called STRATsphere Talks about all things strategizing. In this episode Dima and Slava discuss thinking behind this new endeavor and learning after launching first episodes of the new podcast.
