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 […]
How many times have you seen this job listing? Hiring: Expert in Floobabig Version 56.3b. Must have 5+ years of experience. Must be able to hit the ground running. I’ve talked with hiring managers in scenarios like this, and their answer usually is some variation of, “I need someone to be doing the Floobabig Version […]
I always thought it was interesting when, from a people management perspective, there’s all this focus on finding your weaknesses and fixing them. For example, let’s say I took an ability assessment and scored super-way-high 10-out-of-10 on Coding, but super low 1-out-of-10 on Giving PowerPoint Presentations. What do you think a typical manager’s response would […]
Sometimes, you have to work with people that aren’t nice, that are just really, really hard to work with. I try to be self-aware enough to know that it is frequently me. I’m not always an easy person to get along with. I used to be really bad at interrupting people so I got in […]
When you’re in a leadership or management position, being “nice” and being pleasant to work with can be an interesting balancing act. When I have studied management theory and leadership in a formal training or classroom setting, it seems like most modern education leans towards “Beta” leadership, i.e. influence and consensus building, instead of the […]
So as I mentioned a few months ago, I’d made a concerted effort to regularly author blog posts. But, all excuses aside, I was impacted by the hurricane last week and didn’t get a blog post written. Now, to be honest, I’m always a couple of blog posts ahead and I’ve authored a couple of […]
In the past few weeks, I’ve written about engineering management using landscaping as an analogy. I’ve really enjoyed it, so here’s another one. In my last blog post, I talked about Unsolvable Problems, that is, problems that don’t have any easy or good solution. Following up on another post where I talked about Training vs […]
In the past, I’ve studied and attended training specifically for systems engineering and project management, and in both cases, I was struck by an interesting concept, which is that many of the challenges faced by these two roles and disciplines don’t really have good solutions. This ended up being something I encountered again and again in my roles […]
I heard a term fairly recently, and I love it. That term is single-threaded. If you search for this term on the Internet you’ll mostly hear about it in the context of software process execution or CPU execution, where only one task or command is worked on at a time. But I’m not talking about computer […]
I was originally going to talk about organizational change management, and about the challenges faced and how to break down barriers and help organizations mature and innovate. But everything I was writing came across so dry and textbook-like, that instead I sat back and thought of a story to tell. So here it is. There’s […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 