Balancing Safety and Productivity

To create an engineering organization that’s focused on high-impact and that routinely provides innovation, you have to put in place a culture based on curiosity and willingness to fail. Genuine novelty does not always succeed. I can say unequivocally that most teams I worked with started in a default state of risk aversion. No one […]

Increasing Your Executive Leverage

Many leaders and executives are lately feeling a void. Sheltering in place and working from home means, for most, that there are a lot fewer interruptions. That, on top of the zero commute time, translates to more discretionary time than they are accustomed to having. Now they have to decide what to do with it. […]

Missed Opportunity Cost

I see many companies rushing to take action and react to the pandemic. Given the current global economic changes, it makes complete sense to revisit your company’s strategy and recalibrate. However, what seems to be the knee jerk reaction here is not the right strategy for everyone. Entire industries have furloughed many employees, and others […]

Thoughts on Team Productivity in Quarantine

Since the pandemic has started, I’ve been talking to many clients, readers, and friends. I probably spoke with almost a hundred different executives and managers in tech the last few weeks. I asked most of them a simple question: how has the team been doing with the quarantine WFH? Here’s what I have gathered from […]

Your Managers Are Passing Their Time Cargo-Culting Important Work

During these interesting times where multitudes of tech businesses are busy trying to reinvent how they work together (and sometimes their business models), it is becoming clearer and clearer that there is a big gap between what managers think they should do to what they truly should do. You cannot blame this on the pandemic: […]