Author: Andrew Baker
Leadership Bloat: When Management Consumes the Business
1. The Shoe Planet Problem In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a planet where the inhabitants become so obsessed with shoes that the shoes eventually take over. The civilisation does not collapse because it lacks intelligence. It collapses because something peripheral accumulates mass until it dominates everything essential. Leadership bloat is the […]
Read more →Technology Leadership Assessment for Business Heads
This is an assessment exists to surface how you actually think about leadership of technologists. Answer honestly. Not as the executive you present in interviews. As the leader you become when the deadline is real, the team is pushing back, and someone senior is asking you for certainty you do not have. Every option is […]
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Logic First Leadership: The Cost of a Ruthless Mindset
1. The System That Built Everything I have spent my entire career inside a single operating system. Logic first. Reality over narrative. Strip the problem down, find the root cause, fix it, move on. Do not waste time on feelings that will resolve themselves once the facts are clear. Do not slow down for comfort […]
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Naked Teams: How to Strip Away Defensive Process
1. The Uncomfortable Silence After the Music Stops Every organisation that runs on defensive process has a soundtrack. Standups hum at 9am. Sprint reviews crackle on Fridays. Retros generate their familiar low frequency guilt. Planning ceremonies fill the gaps. Remove all of it and the first thing you hear is silence, and silence in a […]
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Toxic Ownership Models: How Corporate Culture Fails Clients
1. Ownership Has Been Turned Into a Moral Shortcut Ownership has become one of the most lazily celebrated concepts in modern organisations. Leaders demand it reflexively, teams chase it performatively, and entire operating models are justified by invoking it as if ownership itself produces outcomes. It does not. Ownership is merely a structural choice, and […]
Read more →Why Boredom Drives Innovation More Than Busy Work
1. Fear, Motion, and the Illusion of Progress In the last few months I’ve come up with two of the most powerful fraud controls of my career. Not in a workshop. Not in a brainstorm with sticky notes and a facilitator. I walked to the car park, lay down in my car, closed my eyes, […]
Read more →Technology Leadership Competence: Self-Assessment Guide
A Self Assessment for Technology Leaders This questionnaire explores how you think about technology leadership, systems, teams, and delivery. There are no right or wrong answers. Each question presents four options that reflect different leadership styles and priorities. Simply select the option that best reflects your natural instinct in each situation. Select one answer per […]
Read more →Auto-Recover a Failed WordPress Instance on AWS
When WordPress goes down on your AWS instance, waiting for manual intervention means downtime and lost revenue. Here are two robust approaches to automatically detect and recover from WordPress failures. Approach 1: Lambda Based Intelligent Recovery This approach tries the least disruptive fix first (restarting services) before escalating to a full instance reboot. Step 1: […]
Read more →macOS Screenshots to Clipboard: 4 Steps to Fix Your Workflow
If you’re like me, you probably take dozens of screenshots daily for documentation, bug reports, or quick sharing with colleagues. The default MacOSX behavior of saving screenshots as files to your desktop can create clutter and add an extra step to your workflow. There’s a better way. 1. The Quick Solution Instead of using Cmd […]
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AI First Mover Finality: Why Reaction Becomes Impossible
1. The Physics Makes the Point Brutal Here is the uncomfortable physics problem. If two Death Stars come into existence at the same time, and one fires first, the other never gets to respond. Not because it is slower.Not because its sensors are worse.But because causality itself prevents reaction. A weapon travelling at the speed […]
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