Month: August 2023

Strategic ambiguity

I heard a good reflection on ambiguity that employees experience when it comes to the company’s direction / strategy.

As a manager, it often happens that you are confronted with employees who say they do not understand the business strategy. As a manager, your reaction is often to clarify the strategy again. Clarifying through 1:1 explanation, or by creating the next version of your strategic PowerPoint that you then put on the agenda in a team meeting.

Usually the problem is much simpler.

The employee understands the long-term direction of the company, but does not know how he/she can contribute to it today. As a manager, it is therefore often better to focus on the next action(s) for the employee (and yourself) instead of getting back to work on the next version of your strategic plan.

Filtering Mastodon posts in Ivory

Just like in the old days on Twitter, I have been applying filters to my Mastodon timeline since today. Not because I follow annoying people, but because I notice that some discussions, especially about politics and political parties, irritate me and are polarizing.

These are the Ivory RegEx filters that I have applied.

Annoying topics and people

(?i)(donald|trump|elon|musk|twitter|amazon|bezos|thierry|baudet|wilders)

Politics and Current Affairs

My political preference is in the middle. I prefer to read political positions on the left and right of the political spectrum in the newspaper and through columnists.

(?i)(extinction|rebellion|PVV|Groenlinks|PvdA|PvdD|SP|Bij1|FVD|JA21|Volt|BBB|OPNL|extreemrechts|domlinks)

Filter posts with more than 4 hashtags

(#[A-Za-z0-9]+[ ]*){4,}