It seems like many business never actually decide which business they’re in. They drift into one. You start selling IT products or services, you pick up some customers, and one day you look up and realize your pricing, your team, and your cost structure have quietly committed you to a model you never consciously chose. […]
I was in a meeting yesterday and realized partway through that the outcome was going my way. The decision was landing where I wanted it to land. At the same time, I noticed several people in the room whose mental models I disagreed with. Their reasoning bothered me. Their framing was off. Part of me […]
I did the job of three people last year and still only got “Meets Expectations” on my performance eval! I see this complaint constantly. And my first instinct is sympathy. It has happened to me, several times, and its super frustrating. But the other day I was thinking, well, what did your manager, your performance […]
A team goes out and installs a new lawn at a customer’s property. They’ve been there since 6am, it’s now 8pm, and they’ve finally got all the sod laid. The last step in the runbook says to program the sprinkler system. But the sprinkler system is broken, and nobody on the team can get it […]
You change a config file. The behavior doesn’t change. “That’s impossible. I literally just changed it.” But did you? Is DNS pointing where you think it’s pointing? Did you forget to restart Apache to reload the config? Are you even SSH’d into the right server? Is your code maybe hitting a different JDBC connection string […]
After I published my last post about Power Tools (er, I mean AI), a reader asked me a fair question. “OK, so what do you do with your expensive workers who are being paid more than the current market will bear?” It’s a good question, and I think the answer is actually the flip side […]
I used to think this was just a cranky saying from impatient people who couldn’t delegate. Now, after three decades in the industry, I realize it’s uncomfortably true. But not for the reasons I originally thought. Here’s the pattern. A team is struggling. They reach out for help. I come in, assess the situation, and […]
Years ago I worked on a software project for specialist users. They hated it. Absolutely despised this application. When I finally got the chance to visit the dev team in Long Beach, what I discovered what that almost none of them had ever actually used the software they were building. Some had never even seen […]
We’ve all been in this meeting. Someone presents an idea. It’s not perfect, but it’s solid and it could work. And then that guy raises his hand. “Well, have you considered…” What follows is fifteen minutes of edge cases, hypotheticals, and thinly veiled condescension. The idea gets picked apart. The presenter gets demoralized. The meeting […]
Once upon a time, there was a small business owner who hired workers and crafters to do carpentry work: framing houses, roofing, all kinds of construction. These workers spent their days swinging hammers and driving in nails to get the job done. Then one day, the business owner discovered a new tool: the nail gun. […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 