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.
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 […]
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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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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 […]
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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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 […]
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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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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Corporate Productivity: The Hidden Cost of Too Many Meetings
Most professionals do not have a time management problem. They have a contact currency problem. The distinction matters enormously because one is a scheduling challenge while the other is a fundamental misallocation of the only cognitive resource that cannot be replenished or extended. They spend their days converting high bandwidth execution time into low yield […]
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, […]
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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Stop Email Threads: 5 Rules for Smarter Team Collaboration
Email trees are not an accident. They are the predictable outcome of organisations repeatedly using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Despite decades of evidence, email is still treated as a collaboration platform rather than what it actually is: a slow, lossy message delivery system. The result is wasted time, fragmented thinking, and an […]
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Banking Complexity: Leadership Failure or Inevitable Growth?
If you look back over time at all once great companies, you will see that eventually simplicity gave way to scale. What are some of the risks that drive this? This is where many great banks lose their edge. But is this really a shared destiny for all banks, or did the leadership simply fail […]
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