Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
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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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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The Lazy AI Strategy: Stop Hiring Young People
If AI Means You No Longer Hire Juniors, You Are Doing AI Wrong I recently read TechCentral’s article, “South African tech juniors squeezed as AI reshapes hiring.” It describes a disturbing shift in the technology labor market. Junior developers are struggling to get into the industry, entry level salaries are under pressure, and companies increasingly […]
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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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They Don’t Want Control, They Want Technology That Works
How CIOs Rebuild Trust After Repeated Technology Failure 1. The symptom, and what sits underneath it When you walk into a technology area that has lived through repeated instability, failed projects and a long run of operational incidents, you will very often find the business insisting on signing everything off. Every release, every change and […]
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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Keep Your Heart Open: The Leadership Discipline of Delaying Judgement
In my earlier article on harshness and firmness in leadership, I argued that you can hold people accountable without being cruel to them. There’s a related discipline that I think matters just as much: holding off on judgement about who someone is for as long as you possibly can. That isn’t the same as holding […]
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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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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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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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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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