Category: Corporate Culture
Data vs Wisdom: Why More Information Isn’t Enough
Why More Information Doesn’t Mean More Understanding We’ve all heard the mantra: data is the new oil. It’s become the rallying cry of digital transformation programmes, investor pitches, and boardroom strategy sessions. But here’s what nobody mentions when they trot out that tired metaphor: oil stinks. It’s toxic. It’s extraordinarily difficult to extract. It requires […]
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Why Outsourcing Fails the Infinite Technology Game
1. Technology Is an Infinite Game and That Is the Point Technology has no finish line. There is no end state, no final architecture, no moment where you can stand back and declare victory and go home. It is an infinite game made up of a long sequence of hard fought battles, each one draining, […]
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DR Exercises Are Broken: Why Most Disaster Recovery Fails
Disaster recovery is one of the most comforting practices in enterprise technology and one of the least honest. Organisations spend significant time and money designing DR strategies, running carefully choreographed exercises, producing polished post exercise reports, and reassuring themselves that they are prepared for major outages. The problem is not intent. The problem is that […]
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The Last Mile Fallacy: Why Organisations Misvalue Work
1. Introduction Organisations like to believe they reward outcomes. In reality, they reward visibility. This is the essence of the Last Mile Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the final visible step in a chain of work is where most of the value was created. We tip the waiter rather than the chef, praise the presenter […]
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Incompetence Asymmetry: Why Managers Override Engineers
There’s a peculiar asymmetry in how humans handle their own incompetence. It reveals itself most starkly when you compare two scenarios: a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, and a project manager pushing delivery dates on a complex technology initiative. Both involve life altering stakes. Both require deep expertise the decision maker doesn’t possess. Yet in one […]
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Vibe Coding Risks: Why AI Cannot Own Architectural Decisions
AI is a powerful accelerator when problems are well defined and bounded, but in complex greenfield systems vague intent hardens into architecture and creates long term risk that no amount of automation can undo. 1. What Vibe Coding Really Is Vibe coding is the practice of describing intent in natural language and allowing AI to […]
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Domain Isolation: How It Creates Better Software Architecture
Darwinian Architecture Philosophy How Domain Isolation Creates Evolutionary Pressure for Better Software After two decades building trading platforms and banking systems, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself countless times. A production incident occurs. The war room fills. And then the finger pointing begins. “It’s the database team’s problem.” “No, it’s that batch job from […]
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Corporate Humility: Why It’s a Leadership Survival Trait
Most organisations don’t fail because they lack intelligence, capital, or ambition. They fail because leadership becomes arrogant, distant, and insulated from reality. What Is Humility? Humility is the quality of having a modest view of one’s own importance. It is an accurate assessment of one’s strengths and limitations, combined with an openness to learning and […]
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South Africa Banking Consolidation: Costs, Pressure & Trends
I wanted to write about the trends we can see playing out, both in South Africa and globally with respect to: Large Retailers, Mobile Networks, Banking, Insurance and Technology. These thoughts are my own and I am often wrong, so dont get too excited if you dont agree with me 🙂 South Africa is experiencing […]
Read more →OSPF vs Human Workload Routing: A Technical Guide
1. Introduction In networking, OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a routing protocol that ensures traffic flows along the shortest and lowest cost path through a network. It does not care about hierarchy, seniority, or intent. It routes based on capability, cost, and reliability. Modern engineering organisations behave in exactly the same way, whether they […]
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