I heard about a personal chef the other day, who provides a prepared meal delivery service for a clientele. They had observed that their goal was not to grow their business and branch out, but instead to stay with their passion for artisanal cooking. When I heard this, it reminded me of the story in […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Image by Barrie Taylor from Pixabay Once upon a time, a company was hired to do some landscaping. There was a large yard, and when meeting with the customer the only user story given was, “Make this backyard look pretty!” OK, easy enough. The landscaping company had done these hundreds of times before. They had the […]
Let’s face it, if you’re in any sort of business today, you’re in the technology business. Whether you think it or not, technology is critical to your business. Information technology, software, social media marketing, business to business integration, it’s all technology. If that’s true, then we are all faced with a dilemma. Tech is an […]
Security Doesn’t Have to be Hard Security. Even just hearing the word can make any IT engineer wince. In most big enterprise environments, when you think “security” you think about that compliance engineer who every month brings you a list of vulnerabilities they found that you need to fix by next month. Inevitably, some portion […]
If you want your company to be agile, then your organizational chart is critically important to your ability to execute. (This is assuming you believe in Boyd’s Law: “Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration”.) But why does the Org Chart matter? What does that have to do with an organization’s agility? Let’s start with […]
I think they are, when used properly. Many companies and organizations have wonderfully generic and blank mission statements. “We synergize technologies to provide innovative solutions!” Well, great. So does everyone else. But what do YOU do? A useful, good mission statement has to start at the top, and should be the driving strategic goal of […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 