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.
AI Supercharges Confidence, NOT Judgement: Why AI Is Making Technical Leadership Harder, Not Easier
Put ten surgeons in a theatre. Each has twenty years behind them, thousands of procedures, and a working memory of every time an apparently simple decision went wrong at hour four. They examine the patient and arrive, independently, at the same conclusion: this operation is a bad idea. Standing next to them is a man […]
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Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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Management vs Leadership: Why Promoting Managers Fails
Management and leadership sound so similar that they are often used interchangeably. True, they are both a sport. But details matter when you want to win. Nowhere is this more visible than in financial services. Banks today do not compete inside a known, stable competitive set. The threat landscape runs from a two-person fintech with […]
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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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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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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 […]
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AI Engineering: How Small Teams Now Build at Scale
I have started writing production code again. Not prototypes. Not proofs of concept. Real systems. Real risk. Real consequences. At Capitec, a very small group of engineers is now tackling something that would historically have demanded hundreds of people: large scale rewrites of core internet banking capabilities. This is not happening because budgets magically increased […]
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Federation vs Centralisation: Stop Burying Tech Talent
There’s a question that quietly shapes the fate of technology talent in almost every organisation, and most businesses never ask it directly. Instead, they stumble into an answer through a series of incremental org design decisions, budget cycles, and leadership preferences. The question is this: is technology a support function to the business, or is […]
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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 […]
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Corporate Tech Models: Engineer-Led vs Manager-Led
There are two fundamental ways to run technology inside your company (and various states in-between)
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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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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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