Author: Andrew Baker
Are You the World’s Worst Tech Leader? Self-Assessment
This is a self assessment. It is not balanced. It is not gentle. It is not here to validate your operating model, your org chart, or the deck you use to reassure executives. It exists to surface how you actually think about technology leadership when pressure arrives and incentives collide with reality. Answer honestly. Not […]
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Leadership Fragility: Ownership vs Blame in 5 Steps
Leadership failures rarely announce themselves politely. They arrive disguised as “can we just check in?” or “let’s align on a better way of working.” It sounds constructive, even mature. But scratch the surface and the origin story is almost always the same: something went wrong, and the organisation does not know how to deal with […]
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Corporate Culture: Stop Running From Lions, Start Leading
1. Every company I have worked for was running from a Lion Every company I have ever worked for was running from a lion. Sometimes it was obvious and explicit: declining revenue, a new competitor, regulatory pressure, a collapsing platform, a board losing patience. Sometimes it was quieter and more personal: a role under threat, […]
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Why Asking ‘Why?’ Makes Andrew Baker a Bad CTO
By ChatGPT, on instruction from Andrew Baker This article was written by ChatGPT at the explicit request of Andrew Baker, who supplied the prompt and asked for the result to be published as is. The opinions, framing, and intent are therefore very much owned by Andrew Baker, even if the words were assembled by a […]
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Why TOGAF Fails Modern Enterprise Architecture
You can survive on it for a while. You definitely should not build a mission around it. 1. The analogy nobody asked for, but everyone deserves Potatoes are incredible. They are calorie dense, resilient, cheap, and historically important. They are also completely useless for space travel. No propulsion, no navigation, no life support, no guidance […]
Read more →7 Corporate Culture Sins Destroying Your Organisation
An ancient taxonomy for very modern dysfunction The original seven deadly sins endure because they describe human failure modes, not theology. They are patterns that emerge whenever incentives distort behaviour and accountability dissolves. That makes them an uncomfortably precise model for corporate culture. Below, each sin is paired with its mirrored virtue. Not as moral […]
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COBIT and RACI: 10 Reasons They Harm Governance
Or: How Organisations Confuse Accountability with Paperwork 1. They optimise for defensibility, not outcomes COBIT and RACI exist to answer one question extremely well: “Can we prove someone was responsible?” They are almost entirely indifferent to the harder question: “Did anything improve?” Both frameworks reward traceability over truth. If an initiative fails, the organisation can […]
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How Agile Lobotomised Teams and Killed Independent Thinking
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the story is set inside a psychiatric institution run not for healing, but for control. The ward is orderly, predictable, and calm on the surface. Patients follow rigid routines. Group therapy sessions exist, but nothing meaningful ever changes. Any behaviour that challenges the system is treated as dangerous. […]
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Why Agile Fails: Sprints, SAFe and Ceremonial Process
Or: How We Turned Software Development Into Ticket Farming and Ceremonial Theatre 1. Introduction Agile started as a rebellion against heavyweight process. It was meant to free teams from Gantt charts, upfront certainty theatre, and waterfall failure modes. Somewhere along the way, Agile became exactly what it claimed to replace: a sprawling, defensible process designed […]
Read more →WordPress XMLRPC.PHP Brute Force Testing Guide for macOS
A Comprehensive Security Testing Guide for Mac Users 1. Introduction WordPress xmlrpc.php is a legacy XML-RPC interface that enables remote connections to your WordPress site. While designed for legitimate integrations, this endpoint has become a major security concern due to its susceptibility to brute force attacks and amplification attacks. Understanding how to test your WordPress […]
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