Random Thoughts on Leadership & Technology

On capacitors, queues, and the strange conviction that people are the one component in the universe rated for continuous operation at maximum There is a small, boring, deeply unglamorous act of engineering humility that happens millions of times a day ins…

The Southpaw Problem Why your organization is beautifully prepared for an opponent who may not show up Ninety percent of the world punches the other way Watch a competent orthodox boxer meet a southpaw for the first time and you will witness something clo…

Making Weight On the corporate art of hitting the number by becoming worse at everything the number was supposed to measure There is a photograph taken of every fighter at every weigh-in, and the internet always says the same thing about it.

Ring Generalship, or How to Win a Fight You Never Appear to Be Having Somewhere in the third round, a fighter who has landed fewer punches wins the round.

The staffing error that gets filed as a motivation problem The mechanism, in ninety seconds Pitching is adding yeast to wort.

A short meditation on mops, microbes, and the promotion cycle The part of the craft nobody photographs Brewing photographs beautifully.

Every organization has at least one requirement that has been discussed more times than it has been implemented.

Managing Two Capability Pools - Human and AI The quiet arrival of a second workforce Every organization now runs on two capability pools.

How the least dignified product in Swiss history rescued the most dignified industry in the world In the late 1970s, Swiss watchmaking was engaged in the most refined form of suicide available to a mature business - dying while being entirely certain it w…

The comfortable story goes something like this.

Escapement, Yeast, and Trim or Three Ways to Stop Steering There is a particular kind of executive who is never not needed.

Roman Roads and Platform Teams On funding things whose value arrives late, uninvited, and in someone else's budget In 312 BC, a Roman censor named Appius Claudius spent public money on a road to Capua.

Batch, Not Continuous The vat does not care about your quarter There is a moment in every brewery tour when someone in the group, usually wearing a lanyard from a conference they are avoiding, asks the guide whether the fermentation could be sped up.

Burton vs Pilsen - Why Your Imported Playbook Tastes Like Pond Water There is a version of business history in which two towns in the nineteenth century held a competition to see who could brew the better beer, and Burton upon Trent won, and then Pilsen w…

On why your team keeps perfect time for three weeks and then invents a new calendar There is a word for the thing every executive claims to want and almost none of them are willing to engineer.

The pitch you already heard Somewhere around 2019, platform engineering arrived with a slide deck and a promise.

Or, how to stop paying good money to be told that the future is still in the future Somewhere right now, a leadership team is entering month nine of a decision that deserved a fortnight.

On Changing People's Minds or Why Being Right Is Not a Strategy There is a story managers tell each other for comfort, usually late in a chat thread, usually after a decision has gone the wrong way.

Nobody invented weight classes to protect the feelings of small men.