Rands Quotes

#1. Your work speaks for you.

Rands

#2. Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I'm wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.

Rands

#3. One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.

Rands

#4. You have no idea if your idea matters until you share it.

Rands

#5. I am a firm believer that you need a well-defined leadership role to deal with unexpected and non-linear side effects of people working together. You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.

Rands

#6. I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.

Rands

#7. Good design isn't about making decisions for your users, it's about making those decisions irrelevant.

Rands

#8. Criticism is the best sign you're onto something.

Rands

#9. Managers tell you where you are, leaders tell you where you're going.

Rands

#10. A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.

Rands

#11. If we're 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don't have anything sitting in my back pocket, I'm going to turn it into a performance review.

Rands

#12. A milestone is less date and more definition.

Rands

#13. Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency.

Rands

#14. Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.

Rands

#15. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It's messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.

Rands