As I was doing a Bible study group one time, a thought struck me. Bible study stories are always about these front-and-center great heroes and heroines. King David, Esther, Moses, Ruth, and so forth. It was never about “King David’s Third Spear-Carrier on the Left”. This thought stuck with me and it eventually began to […]
I’ve read in several places about the strategy of forming habits. That you have to do the same thing for 30 days in a row to start to form the habit of doing the thing all the time. And that takes discipline to do that thing consistently to form that habit. I’ve talked about this […]
Today I’m going to be “that guy”. I’m going to tell a “back in the day story”. You know, “back in the day we walked uphill in the snow both ways”, etc. Anyway, back in the day, my first couple of jobs in the tech industry were as a Unix and Linux system administrator. There […]
My first “real job”, part-time in high school, was at a pizza restaurant. I ended up working there for several years, even into college. I eventually was promoted to assistant manager! When I was working there in my early 20s I had reached a point where I could do any job in the store faster […]
In my last post, I talked briefly about measurement. I related a common management saying that goes something like this, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t tell if you are improving.” I don’t know who said it so I went trying to research and find out. Fascinatingly, I never did find the actual original […]
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Management by Walking Around. One time, when I was a manager, I was wandering around doing my management thing and I was sitting at a desk with an engineer who was working on a project. As they showed me what they were doing, I realized the solution they […]
I heard a statement one time that introverts make good developers and extroverts make good managers. This preconceived notion stems from the fact that people tend to think of developers as sitting by themselves in front of a computer with headphones on, and managers on the phone or in meeting rooms all day. Thus, the […]
I heard about a concept this week that I like, which is the phrase, “Dealing With Ambiguity”. Now, this is a pretty straightforward phrase, but the context in which I heard was very interesting. It was the idea of this being a very specific skill that can be practiced and trained. In the area of […]
I have an analogy I like to use a lot. Have you ever felt like you’ve painted yourself into a corner? Or you see someone who thinks they have? This is a well-known analogy, but I’m going to take it one step further. Frequently when I see people who are convinced they have painted themselves […]
I remember one time, I was in the breakroom getting a cup of coffee. The counter seemed kind of dirty so I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wiped the counter down. As I was leaving the breakroom, a cup of coffee in hand, another person passed me entering the now-empty breakroom. I heard […]
