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 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 […]
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, […]
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Sinking Car Syndrome: When Bad Architecture Is Terminal
The Sinking Car Syndrome: When Your Architecture Is Terminal There are two types of post-incident reviews in technology. The first type is genuinely useful, where you learn something, fix something, and sleep better. The second type is an elaborate ritual in which intelligent adults spend considerable time and money figuring out why a car sank, […]
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Why Forced Regular Stability Work Beats Reactive Fixes
Why do Companies Get Stability So Wrong? Most companies do not fail because they cannot innovate. They fail because they misjudge stability. Some organisations under invest. They chase features, growth, and deadlines while stability quietly drains away. Outages feel sudden. Incidents feel unfair. Leadership asks how this happened “out of nowhere”. Other organisations over invest. […]
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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 […]
Read more →Bonuscide: How Toxic Bonus Schemes Destroy Organisations
bonuscide noun Definition of bonuscide: Bonuscide is a term used to describe incentive schemes that progressively poisons an organisation by ensuring the flow of discretionary pay is non does not serve the organisations goals. These schemes can be observed in two main ways, the loss of key staff or the reduction in client/customer base. Bonuscide […]
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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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Why Visible Technology Leaders Build More Trust Than Silent Ones
1. The Corporate Voice Is Losing Credibility A strange thing is happening in executive communication. The more polished it becomes, the less believable it feels. For years, large organizations trained executives to communicate through multiple layers of lawyers, communications teams, governance forums, media handlers, and reputation specialists. Every statement became progressively safer, flatter, and more […]
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The Courage to Be Honest: Why Giving Hard Feedback Is the Kindest Thing a Leader Can Do
Leadership · Technology · Strategy | Andrew Baker | May 2026 | 12 min read There is a diagram I keep coming back to. It is deceptively simple: two lines, two colours, one axis of time and one of system health. The blue line, labelled Unkind Truth, dips before it rises. Every truth telling moment […]
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 […]
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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 […]
Read more →Centralised vs Federated Tech Teams: How to Fix Flow
I have seen many organisations restructure their technology teams over and over, but whichever model they opt for – they never seem to be able to get the desired results with respect to speed, resilience and quality. For this reason organisations will tend to oscillate from centralised teams, which are organised around skills and reuse, […]
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