Leadership on Aneesh Sathe

The Kernel and the Ark

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:28:42 +0000

I. The Wall and the Infinite #

It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.

On Protocols, Wagons, and Associated Acrobatics

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:03:32 +0000

Years ago, maybe a decade even, I fell in love with this software called Scrivener. I could never justify buying it because I didn’t actually write. But having that software would represent a little bit of the identity I would like to have, a writer. The Fourth of July long weekend gave me a running start. The plan was to write every day for a month. If I did, I would buy Scrivener. This was going quite well, then I couldn’t write for two days.

My Road to Bayesian Stats

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 06:32:55 +0000

By 2015, I had heard of Bayesian Stats but didn’t bother to go deeper into it. After all, significance stars, and p-values worked fine. I started to explore Bayesian Statistics when considering small sample sizes in biological experiments. How much can you say when you are comparing means of 6 or even 60 observations? This is the nature work at the edge of knowledge. Not knowing what to expect is normal. Multiple possible routes to a seen a result is normal. Not knowing how to pick the route to the observed result is also normal. Yet, our statistics fails to capture this reality and the associated uncertainties. There must be a way I thought.

What do platforms really do?

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 05:51:44 +0000

In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

Hack, Hacky, Hacker

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 06:21:48 +0000

A few days ago I wrote about the beauty of great documentation; this is the evil twin post.

The spectrum of meaning across the words hack, hacky, and hacker form a horseshoe when thinking about postures toward life. On either ends are the most difficult options. Being either a hack or a hacker requires dedication and both approaches narrow your world. Being hacky, taking imperfect shortcuts, in the world is immensely satisfying. It is play disguised as problem solving.

Divine Documentation

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:20:46 +0000

Dad was about my age when he said that reading the manual was better than hypothesis driven button pressing. For teenage me, that took too long. Sure, I may have crashed a computer or two but following my gut got me there. Of course my gut isn’t that smart. In the decades preceding, devices had converged on a common pattern language of buttons. Once learned, the standard grammar of action would reliably deliver me to my destination.

Jan 11, 2025 - Leading with Kindness

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:06:00 +0000

Leading with Kindness #

PDF kindly made available by the author, Steve Swensen - via Helen Bevan on Bluesky.

Steve Swensen held leadership positions at Mayo Clinic ensuring not just improving care but also preventing burnout. This paper from May 2024 provides leaders with a framework to help colleagues do better and “Kindness is helping people do better.”

That colleague or work environment that creates stress and anxiety have a very real impact on your health and long-term well-being. An organization can improve team health by creating space for “nurturing human conditions” to emerge:

Strategy sits on a pyramid of hearts

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 23:00:47 +0000

There is a fetishism around management artifacts, handbooks, spreadsheets, memos and more. People who like the idea of being a leader but lack experience look at these artifacts and think that whatever goes into the artifacts is how the world will function. This micromanagement flavour of command and control forgets that there are people involved. Leaders must remember that the people who you are leading are just like you and, crucially, that they are closer to the problem. Strategies crumble when they leave out the team’s intelligence, insight, and input. Therefore, building a culture of mutual trust and an intuitive mode of operation is crucial for success. Winning hearts is not trivial.

Leadership is solitude, leadership teams are introspection

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 05:46:59 +0000

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Summary #

Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.