Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
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Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
Funds Transfer Pricing in Banks: How FTP Destroys Client Centricity
Every bank of any size runs on funds transfer pricing, and every bank of any size will tell you, if you catch someone honest in a quiet moment, that FTP is also quietly poisoning the organisation. Funds transfer pricing was supposed to be a plumbing mechanism, a way of fairly allocating the cost of funding, […]
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Why You Keep Doing the Wrong Thing Even When You Know Better
Why the hardest system I have ever tried to upgrade is myself Over the past three years I have been getting a lot of help with something far more important than technology: how to be a better dad and a better husband. Here is the strange part. Almost from day one, what I was being […]
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Your Budget Is Not Permission to Spend: How to Build a Lean Organization Without Starving It
One of the easiest ways for a large organization to become bloated is to confuse an approved budget with an obligation to spend it. The pattern is familiar: someone arrives with a request for another person, another team, another vendor, or another piece of software and says, “It is already in the budget. The headcount […]
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Not Everything Is a Product: Why Confusing Products and Capabilities Quietly Wrecks Your Organization
One of the more expensive mistakes I have watched organizations make, again and again, is assuming that anything worth building must automatically be a product, and that assumption alone has spawned more unnecessary teams, more artificial ownership structures and more bloated roadmaps than almost any other single habit of thought in technology leadership. Here is […]
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Gross Risk vs Net Risk: A Technology Leader’s Guide to Why Freezing Change Doesn’t Make Legacy Systems Safer
I have been parachuted into a number of troubled technology environments during my career, and they usually shared the same characteristics: too many incidents, nervous business stakeholders, old technology, fragile architecture, and a technology team that had gradually lost confidence in its own ability to change anything. One of the first things I learned was […]
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The Escalation Trap: Why “Just Ask Your Manager” Is Quietly Wrecking Your Team
Somewhere in your organization right now, a capable adult is sitting on a decision they already know the answer to, because they are waiting for someone with a fancier title to say it back to them. That is the pointless escalation, and it is not the kind that surfaces a real risk or a genuine […]
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The Trophy Case Is a Marketing Budget, Not a Scoreboard
1. The pitch that arrives every week If you run a technology function at any size of company, you will eventually receive an email that follows a familiar and well rehearsed pattern, one that opens warmly and almost personally, as though a magazine or a research boutique or an awards body had noticed your work […]
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Why Technology Teams Resist New Technology and What Actually Gets Them to Adopt It
Every technologist eventually meets the same moment. The team agrees that an existing technology has reached the end of its useful life. Everyone agrees the replacement is the right direction. And then, month after month, the team keeps building on the old platform anyway. This is not usually laziness, and it is not usually stubbornness […]
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Why Nothing Is Future Proof: The Infinite Game in Technology Strategy
Every vendor pitch eventually arrives at the same promise. The platform is future proof. The architecture is built to last. The investment you make today will still be paying off in ten years, so buy now and stop worrying about tomorrow. It is a comforting sentence, and it is also completely false, and I think […]
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False Lights: How Thin Customer Feedback Can Steer Executives Onto the Rocks
There is an old maritime story about wreckers who placed false lights along dangerous coastlines. Sailors believed they were following a safe navigational signal, steered towards it, and ended up on the rocks instead. Historians dispute whether these stories happened in the way folklore describes them, but the metaphor still earns its place here, because […]
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Wise Counsel vs the Corporate Leaf Blower: Why One Note Leadership Fails
There is a sound most of us have learned to tune out, the drone of a leaf blower a few gardens over. It never surprises you and it never says anything new. It just moves the same pile of leaves from one lawn to the next, burns through its fuel doing it, and drones on […]
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The Hidden Cost of a Toxic Workplace: When Your Job Changes Who You Are
Why the gap between who you really are and who you need to be at work may be one of the clearest signs that it is time to leave. I grew up on a farm, and a lot of the things that are fundamental to who I am were probably formed there. I like quiet, […]
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