Expectation Setting

An essential leadership skill is being able to set expectations appropriately. You have to be explicit, vocal, and clear. We all know it, we all use the term often enough, but do you actually do it? Setting the right expectations is one of your main levers to ensure people are going in the right direction, […]

Putting Your People in the Spotlight

The current state of the tech industry means that hiring is extremely tough on everyone. Every single client of mine reports hiring as one of their biggest efforts. I believe a game-changer in the long term is to create a brand of technical excellence. Such a brand requires your technical people to be in the […]

The Executive Mindset

Working with executives that used to be very good at their hands-on jobs, I often see they are very skilled in similar things. One such skill, which is priceless when working closer to the implementation, is that they become world-class experts at poking holes in ideas and approaches. Good technical people are excellent at debugging, […]

Different Archetypes of Organizations

While no two companies are the same, when you get a glimpse of the internal workings of enough companies, you eventually start noticing some patterns. One such aspect is the main locomotive of novelty in the company. I tend to consider this as a polychotomy consisting mainly of Product vs. R&D vs. Regulation vs. Biz-dev. […]

The Management Bit

When I used to work at IBM, we used to jokingly state whether a person had their “management bit flipped.” That’s because, in a big behemoth such as IBM, you could have people regularly managing teams, yet not regarded as “real” managers due to some bureaucratic reason. At some point, hopefully, all the needed TPS […]