You may have noticed, I basically live my work life from quotes. Memes, too, but that’s another story. Anyways, I thought for today’s blog post I would share with you some of my favorite quotes, why I think they are insightful, and how I apply them. Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration. – John […]
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 […]
Have you ever noticed that pretty much anyone, when looking at something for the first time, or joining a project or new effort, seems to always think it is a big mess? And probably needs fixing, perhaps even a complete throwaway and rewrite? I have a running joke that I frequently use, along these lines. […]
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 […]
I am occasionally asked for career advice by people wanting to get into the industry, for example, high-schoolers deciding on career choices. One situation that frequently comes up in this situation is people who love programming and want to get a job being a programmer. They ask, “How can I get a job as a […]
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 […]
The other day I wrote about executing engineering projects, using landscaping projects as an analogy. I really liked it and realized I wanted to write more about it. In my experience, a frequent issue that managers and leaders encounter is not understanding the difference in training and experience. In fact, I’ve seen many managers and leaders not know […]
