I have yet another new term I’ve started using lately. It’s called, Tightening the Vise. So what does it mean? If you know me by now, you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell a story! So once upon a time, there was a recurring business process in a medium-sized organization. Let’s […]
As a leader in an organization, a concept you need to become familiar with is that of, “High quality, high velocity decisions.” Many, many decisions pass in front of me every day. As I read my emails, watch my text messages, and attend my meetings, there are either specific decisions asked of me, or opportunities […]
Lately, I find myself saying a specific phrase more and more often. If we are deciding whether to take on a new project or start a complex effort, it always seems to come back to this: “Yes, if we can find the right person to do it.” I’m starting to believe more and more that […]
Balancing Freedom of Motion With Guardrails Reviewing my last two blog posts, I realize I still have more to say on this topic. I am greatly challenged by this idea of guardrails and business rules. Generally speaking, I am a fan of The HP Way of management, where the idea is that you empower people […]
Looking back at last week’s blog post, I realized that I’m not done talking about Good Intentions. If you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of administrative controls. If you have business rules, you can’t just tell people to follow them and expect it to happen. There will always be a moment where someone is […]
Looking back through my blog posts, you’ll see that I talk a lot about good developers being less about the ability to write super-awesome-amazing code and more about the attention to detail and quality. https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/04/25/dont-let-the-little-things-accumulate/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/02/20/building-the-habits-that-lead-to-quality/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2020/08/08/motivation-vs-discipline-or-i-only-want-to-do-the-fun-stuff/ The thing about this is, I figured this was more or less the known industry standard. I assumed […]
I was working on a project one time. The project aimed to provide systems engineering, architecture, integration, and test support across a large enterprise, including a portfolio of software products worked on a common platform and shared data. As you can imagine, this is a pretty big job and takes a lot of effort, and […]
One interesting thing about being a leader is dealing with different types of conflicts. I’ve talked a lot about when there are various aspects or different goals that directly contradict each other. How do you deal with that healthy tension between different competing priorities? The reality is that we all have our personal goals. But […]
I’m sure everyone here has heard the expression, “Painted myself into a corner.” The idea is supposed to be that you are in a place where you have no choice but to make a specific decision or perform a specific action, whether you want to or not. Well, as you’ve no doubt figured out by […]
You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. John Lydgate and/or Abraham Lincoln Here is one of the hardest lessons to learn and manage as a leader and manager. […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 