#13 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

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The Management Skill Nobody Talks About

tl;dr: The most undervalued management skill isn't avoiding mistakes, it's repair. When you inevitably screw up (and you will), owning it, focusing on impact rather than your excuses, and actually changing behaviour builds more trust than being perfect ever could.

Going Direct

tl;dr: Bypass the org chart for communication while keeping it for authority. Let people talk directly across teams instead of playing telephone through management layers. Set clear guardrails about what decisions need escalation (one-way doors) versus what can be handled peer-to-peer, then coach people on how to make requests that actually get answered.

I Sat Down with Werner Vogels

tl;dr: Amazon's CTO shares the mental models that built AWS: classify systems by failure tolerance (not everything needs 99.999% uptime), distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions to move fast on the right things, and remember that AI can accelerate you but you're still responsible for the output. His framework of Security > Operations > Cost provides a clear hierarchy for technical trade-offs.

Why 'No' is a Complete Sentence is Dangerous Advice

tl;dr: Just saying "no" without context makes you the jerk, even when you're right to decline. Instead, use "but yes" framing ("I can't do X, but I can do Y"), surface trade-offs, ask for more context, and add "because" to explain your reasoning. The extra five seconds of explanation builds relationships instead of burning them, especially when the request has legitimate business reasons.

Frameworks

tl;dr: Mental frameworks are "handrails for thinking" that reduce cognitive load and help navigate complexity, but the real skill is adapting them rather than following them blindly. They work by freeing up mental bandwidth for creativity and helping combat cognitive biases through structured evaluation. Best used as starting points that you test, iterate on, and sometimes completely rebuild based on what you learn.

Most popular from last Sunday

The Ultimate Sprint Retro: My 10 Years of Software Engineering

What did you read recently that you would like to share?