Periodically I have observed people complain about their employees or co-workers, and occasionally I have complained myself. Sometimes people at work act as if they are either ignorant of who their customer is, or as if they don’t care about their customer, it sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.
Leadership
One Neck to Ring
This post is an extension of What Did The Boss Say. In that post, we explored why executives and managers tend to want a single point of control or responsibility, as well as some of the things that must be delegated to that single point. But there are disadvantages to the single point strategy.
Don’t BS Yourself During Your Job Search
Read this great line from Johanna Rothman’s Hiring Technical People blog: When you are unemployed, your job is to get a job. If you do other work, you better have a great reason. It so correlates with the book I just finished on Friday “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield which completely expands the…
What Did The Boss Say?
Last year, two goofballs from Norway released a song they thought would be funny, called “What does the fox say?” that turned into a viral hit. The concept for the song is that we know all the sounds the animals make, but not the fox. Today, I want to talk about things our bosses say.…
Enterprise Innovation
I recently read an article “Ted Talks are all Lying to You” wherein the author was opining that our standard literature around creativity and innovation in the business domain is complete rubbish. The article is an interesting read, but at the end of the day, creativity is not what most people in business do –…
A New Aspect of Talent
Seth Godin’s Post: Your Alphabet is a reminder to me about something that I thought while writing these two posts describing the aspects of talent IT Staffing Talent and IT Staffing Strategy Considerations. These two posts talk about talent and about the impact of talent on IT Staffing Strategy. Seth’s post reminded me of one…
A Quick Planning Primer
This post is for those of you who are having to plan your own activities, or the activities of others for the first time. Or maybe you just want an easier faster way to think about creating a plan. Maybe you want something simple – because all the complex project management body of knowledge ideas…
Six Things I Have Learned About Staffing Software Development Teams
This is a collection of observations about things that managers and leaders of software teams encounter or trip over. This post comes out of a series I am doing about IT Staffing Strategy, but these are localized to the software team, not the larger strategy picture. These are very similar to Johanna Rothman’s excellent Management…
What are you leading?
Differences Between Classes of Leadership What are the essential differences between the act of leading an initiative and the act of leading a staff, a team, or an organization. Hypothesis: the differences center around the goal against which that leadership is expressed.
Normalized Perspectives
As software professionals, our beliefs about what qualifies as “best practices” often depends on our experience and our expertise. This is one of the reasons that it is so very difficult to run the self-organizing software teams, frequently described in agile literature. The fact is, teams cannot be self-organizing, until the members share mental maps…