The Laboratory

Great article about how Berkshire does things a bit differently and how important trust and long-term thinking is to its success.

Leaders in the tech industry could definitely learn from this model to better understand how to redistribute decision making and focus more on trust and empowerment of well-hired individuals than over-architecting processes.

This article from Cennydd Bowles paints a very clear picture of the challenges that an over dependency on data (especially quantitative data) have created in the tech industry. 6 years from posting, it's still very relevant and a required read for folks working in tech.

And idea I've been toying with as we have been exploring Design Tokens at Slack is how you could use tokens as way to allow for graceful overrides.

One of the fundamental problems with design systems is that they're often too rigid and folks end up needing to add extra props, make !important CSS overrides, or fork the component entirely just to get it to work how they want.

By creating a way for folks to "break" a component in a more direct and approved way, the code becomes easier to maintain, it's easier to track what overrides people are making, and it reinforces tokens as a mental model for styles.

This snippet explores how you could use a wrapper of sorts to change token variables (something you could also do with a class in theory) but in a more structured way in React.