Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
Michael Abrashoff was in his mid-thirties when he took command of the USS Benfold, a guided missile destroyer and one of the worst-performing ships in the navy. Despite her potency, the “dysfunctional ship had a sullen crew …
Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. According to poet David Whyte, the key to taking initiative and being proactive is viewing yourself …
Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe. Here’s how the spiral of silence works and how we can discover what people really think. *** Be honest: How often do you feel …
Directing a film involves getting an enormous group of people to work together on turning the image inside your head into a reality. In this 1970 interview, director Jean Renoir dispenses time-tested wisdom for leaders everywhere on …
Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for …
At Farnam Street we believe in the idea that a multidisciplinary approach to big ideas is the best way to form a deeper understanding. Some concepts will intuitively lend themselves to this type of thinking. Something like evolution is an …
Few people know the details about one of the greatest stories in sports history. A classic David versus Goliath story that happened at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid when the U.S. Olympic Hockey team played the Soviets. While the U.S. …
Edward Deci’s work on motivation is so often quoted (Dan Pink’s Drive comes to mind) that we decided to go back to the primary text by Deci himself, a book called Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. The author is …
The Mayo Clinic is one of the top-rated hospitals in the US and enjoys remarkable success. In this post, we consider the reasons for the Mayo Clinic’s success and what we can learn from it to apply to our own organizations. *** …
Most great thinkers have speculated about the kind of leadership that might give rise to a better society, analyzing it through what’s sometimes called a “normative” lens: What should we be doing? In Leviathan, for …
“I am certain in the belief that the average man who scrupulously follows this course of action is bound to win great success.” *** George Marshall must be one of, if not the most under appreciated leaders in American history, …
The author Marshall Goldsmith has a gift for taking classic theories and adding to them, or slightly modifying them, to construct something new and interesting. A good example of this is what he does with Situational Leadership in the book …
Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is an ancient topic that’s no less relevant today. We are in a golden age of information sharing, which means you are swimming in a pool of rhetoric every day, whether you realise it or not. The …
Matthew Frederick teams up with Michael Preis to offer some important learnings from the world of business — which isn’t really a discipline in and of itself but rather, as they write in the introduction to 101 Things I Learned in …
The issue of setting compensation seems to be struggled with in every organization. Most are pretty lazy about it — hiring someone else to take care of it and failing to think through the incentives they’re creating. Some companies …
“The more he kept sweating the details, the less his people took ownership of their work.” *** The most important part of a company’s culture is trust. People don’t feel trusted when you micromanage and this has …
The problem with most management, leadership, and business books is that many of them harp on the same self-evident points, overconfident in the usefulness of their prescriptions for would-be imitators. They tend to vastly underestimate the …
David Ogilvy was an advertising legend and perhaps the original “Mad Man.” The Unpublished David Ogilvy offers a remarkably candid glimpse of the private man behind the public image. Ogilvy was fond of lists. This one outlines the ten …
In 1907 William L. McKnight joined Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co (3M) as an assistant bookkeeper. He rose quickly through the ranks and became president in 1929 and chairman of the board in 1949. His timeless management philosophy …
How many of today’s problems are the result of leadership? What’s lacking, the author of The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership argues, is the lack of real leadership. Here the problem may lie with a lack of deeper, broader …
This is a great tidbit from Elon Musk on how having job applicants explain their thinking at multiple levels helps him figure out if they really worked on the problem. If you just talk to the people on your team you can learn a tremendous …
“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It’s very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair Tony Blair isn’t the only one who thinks that. So does Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. Focus is everything. One of the most …
In this excerpt from Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. says something I wish tech companies would heed. I said something at the press conference that turned out to be the most quotable statement I ever made: “What …
Strategy could be the most over-used word since leadership. How many strategies can one organization have? A lot of people say “strategy” when they really mean a goal or objective. This is a strategy trap. One of the best books …