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.
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 […]
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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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Leadership Fragility: Ownership vs Blame in 5 Steps
Leadership failures rarely announce themselves politely. They arrive disguised as “can we just check in?” or “let’s align on a better way of working.” It sounds constructive, even mature. But scratch the surface and the origin story is almost always the same: something went wrong, and the organisation does not know how to deal with […]
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COBIT and RACI: 10 Reasons They Harm Governance
Or: How Organisations Confuse Accountability with Paperwork 1. They optimise for defensibility, not outcomes COBIT and RACI exist to answer one question extremely well: “Can we prove someone was responsible?” They are almost entirely indifferent to the harder question: “Did anything improve?” Both frameworks reward traceability over truth. If an initiative fails, the organisation can […]
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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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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 […]
Read more →Public Cloud Migration: Why Lift-and-Shift Strategies Fail
The cloud is hot…. not just a little hot, but smokin hot!! Covid is messing with the economy, customers are battling financially, the macro economic outlook is problematic, vendor costs are high and climbing and security needs more investment every year. What on earth do we do??!! I know…. lets start a crusade – lets […]
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Anti-Fragile: Why Protecting People from Hard Feedback Makes Them Weaker
Leadership · Culture · Strategy | Andrew Baker | May 2026 | 14 min read There is a distinction that almost nobody in corporate life is willing to draw clearly, and the evasion of it costs organisations more than most technology failures ever will. The distinction is between unkind and cruel, and the confusion between […]
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How Low-Trust Organisations Destroy Delivery With Control
1. The Organisation That Optimised for Distrust I once worked in a company with spectacularly low trust. Everything took ages (like years), quality was inconsistent (at best),costs were extraordinary and there was almost no common understanding of why things were so bad. Clients were charged a small fortune for products that competitors could deliver at […]
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Your Interview Process Is Cloning Your Weaknesses
Most organisations believe their interview process selects for leadership. It does not. It selects for the ability to perform leadership in a low stakes, well prepared, time limited conversation in front of a panel that has already decided what it wants to see. That is a different thing entirely, and confusing the two is costing […]
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Corporate Culture: Stop Running From Lions, Start Leading
1. Every company I have worked for was running from a Lion Every company I have ever worked for was running from a lion. Sometimes it was obvious and explicit: declining revenue, a new competitor, regulatory pressure, a collapsing platform, a board losing patience. Sometimes it was quieter and more personal: a role under threat, […]
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From Demo to Go Live: Why the Last Mile Is Such a Hard Journey
1. The question nobody can answer Four developers, three months, one very convincing product demo, and then the question that makes every engineering leader wince: why does the real platform need to be so much bigger? The executives asking it are not being difficult. They genuinely cannot see the difference between what was demonstrated and […]
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