Management by Objectives is the most commonly used methodology in any knowledge worker industry. Especially in the tech industry, a simple framework named OKR is widely used as the current best practice of Management by Objectives.
Andrew Grove introduced OKR in his book “High Output Management”. The framework is pretty simple. Setup the objectives by the following factors:
Here I have to make an interesting question. Why OKR uses these two factors: Objective and Key Results?
Many…
Human beings have multiple ways of communication. We can speak and listen. We can read and write. We can draw. We can convey our emotions by postures. Multi-modal communication is such an efficient way to communicate with people. This is important especially for people who speak a different language. Multi-modal communication helps people to convey their message even with less competency for the common language of the team.
Especially after the remote native era, we have many different approaches. This article introduces one of the approaches called live minute communication.
A live minute communication is effective with people who speak…
In internationalizing organizations, we sometimes have different language speakers in the team. It’s a typical language barrier problem. We have local language speakers and English speakers. Many organizations try to transform the team more on an English base but it takes time. How we can make this transition smoothly but still make the existing team’s output efficient?
Mike Cohn provided us an interesting insight from his Succeeding with Agile. He introduces the concept of deliberately distributed teams.
Day 1 of the internationalizing organization is tough. If the local business relies on local language (like Japan), it’s going to be much harder because of the language barrier. Most of the people getting used to doing their business and engineering tasks through the local language. However, we need to transition to international, English base organization to accept more talents from the world.
How we can achieve that without losing the current working local organization members?
Through my ten years of carrier experience, I believe that how to form an Incubation Team is the key.
The remote interviews became much more usual. Actually, I have never seen candidates face-to-face almost over one year. Initially, I needed to get used to the remote interview. Communication is a bit difficult especially with somebody who you don’t know yet. Some of the existing interviews approaches like whiteboard discussion are difficult to conduct.
However, after I get used to remote interviews, I have found several approaches work well in remote interviews.
In this article, I will share three effective approaches.
The first approach is to use a visual aid to present the potential position to the candidate.
Over the long history of humankind, we have been building bigger and bigger organizations. We are resolving much wider and complex issues as we increase the size of the organization. Most of the organizations applied the form of the pyramid to orchestrate a large number of peoples to achieve unified business goals.
Nowadays, the form of organization is evolving in different ways. They are becoming more networked, just like the internet. Even in a classic type of organization, we rarely see pure pyramids. Instead, we see matrics organizations, dotted report lines, task forces, project teams, and unions. …
How do you like remote work? I do believe that some people like it, and some do not. I am the people who can make more focus on private space. So remote work is the ideal working place for me to focus on the execution of the task.
The problem is that I sometimes forgot about how fast time goes by. I am too focusing on some task and am not aware of how much I spend on that particular task. I sometimes realize that spending too much on a specific task while I have to do other tasks as…
Our lifestyle got changed completed after the COVID-19 pandemic. People try to stay home and avoid commuting. This changed our office working style completely as well. Most companies tried to introduce remote work. Remote work was not special in the IT industry even before the pandemic, however, was not the primary working style in most of the business. Today, remote work became common. Many companies employed remote work as their primary work style, not only in the IT industry but also in other industry as well. Remote work secures employees’ medical safety as well as business continuity.
Several years before…
It’s just one year I started writing on Medium. I have written the following story on Jan 1st, 2020.
This is my first article but also my new year resolution. My goal of 2020, also as my lifetime goal, was to be a global team builder. I spent a lot of my time learning how I can manage a global team better. I have read almost 100+ books and articles. As a result, I am more knowledgeable about topics like engineering management, strategies, and leading a global team. 2020 was the year of input for me.
In 2021, I would…
Strategic thinking is one of the fundamental skills of an engineering manager. You are the general of your team. Your team’s performance is up to you. Your strategic skill multiplies your team’s output.
I have read tens of books related to strategy this year. I would like to pick up three important strategic concepts that are effective as an engineering manager.
Agility is one of the classical strategic concepts. It can be also observed in form of many modern management theories like Agile, Lean, and Britzscaling.
Agility is the concept of how quick to change the move and direction. It…
Global team builder from Tokyo. Engineering manager to build international engineering organization.