I’ve been a fairly enthusiastic Google Pixel owner since the beginning, in spite of the Pixel line’s drunkenly stumbling feature roadmap that makes every Pixel release feel like an episode of “Deal or No Deal.” Since the Nexus 5, I haven’t owned a non-Google phone.

I’ve been really lucky not to have broken any of those phones… Until now. If you are a Pixel owner with an intact, unbroken phone, take my advice: try not to break it.

Have you seen ads for Bright Cellars yet? If you haven’t, you must be one of the lucky ones, because I can’t seem to escape their ads. They’re in my Twitter feed, they’re in newsletters I subscribe to, they’re on LinkedIn for heaven’s sake.

The thing is… Bright Cellars is a grift at best. I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t use any legal terms for fear of committing accidental slander, but once you see what I’m about to show you, I think you’ll reconsider whether Bright Cellars deserves your money.

What does a successful sprint look like? I hope that everyone on your team can answer that question; if they can’t, that is something to talk about right now. Assuming that the team understands what success looks like, why are you, a manager, attending their sprint meetings?

Spoon theory describes a visual metaphor for your daily energy capacity. It was coined by Christine Miserandino in 2003 to help others understand what it is like for her to have lupus. In this representation, you start your day with some number of spoons of energy, and you plan your activities so that by the end of the day you haven’t run out of spoons.

The important part of the message is that folks who are suffering from chronic illnesses have fewer spoons each day, or the consequences of running out of spoons are more dire for them, so they must be cautious and deliberate about their daily commitments.

But we all have spoons, and we can all manage them better.

I don’t really do “book reviews” on here, and I don’t intend to start now, but this is a reaction to the book “Leadership BS” by Jeffrey Pfeffer.

What seems to be the core premise of this book is that there are these “leadership myths” propagating that are doing harm to workplaces and people’s (mostly leaders’ or aspiring leaders’) job prospects.

The framing example is Jack Welch, onetime CEO of GE, who is painted as this great business leader and everyone wants to emulate him, but the story leaves out things like GE’s “rank and yank” performance management policy, stories about “GE jerks” and other examples of fraud, price-fixing, and so forth.

The premise that inspirational figures have flaws that are glossed over or omitted from the stories is a good one, and one which I agree with.

Then it all goes sideways.