leadership
I find a that the metaphor of a cornerback (CB) and the safety is valuable in a lot of professional discussions, as it makes the concepts of layers of defense or resilience a little more interesting to talk about. In football, the cornerback directly defends the wide receiver (WR), trying
leadership
There's a concept you find in a lot of domains about how valuable it is to find problems earlier in the process. * In software engineering, engineers are taught that the cost of a bug goes up exponentially the longer is exists -- it's cheap during a
leadership
When I was a junior engineer, years ago at Lockheed, I had a great senior architect who I looked up to. One time, we were heading into a meeting with several very senior directors, and he leaned over to me as we walked in, and he told me to pay
lessons-learned
I think everyone would agree that a great friend (or sibling or spouse) is someone who drops everything when a friend of theirs needs help. I have a great friend who has shown that several times in my life -- my wife and I were in a motorcycle accident several
leadership
One of the things that was so important early in my relationship and marriage with my wife, was the concept of identifying gaps between what was normal to her and what was normal to me. Everyone has their own expectations of normal, based on where they grew up, how their
leadership
When creating a presentation or developing the agenda for a meeting, it's tempting to jump into writing the content, and then refine and organize it later. Fight that urge -- instead you should start by mentally 'stepping back' and thinking about the big picture (as a
leadership
Years ago, I was in a series of meetings with a partner company, and one of their leaders kept taking up big blocks of time in the meeting to talk about some of the significant problems that we were wrestling with. While sometimes it's useful to step back
agile
There's a lot of value in automating things in your life -- making things automatic or easy to keep happening. Ramit Sethi has a great concept of automating your finances, where you design your budget and have the fundamentals of your personal finances automatically happen (e.g. You
CIO
With so many in-person conferences and events cancelled, I'm excited to be presenting at iDEAFest 2020, a virtual (all online) 2 day conference on April 21 and 22. The two-day event will be all online, and only costs $99 to attend. Speakers will include: * Ty Schieber, Chair of
agile
It sometimes feels like you need lots of words/pages/slides to look/sound credible, but great communicators go through the hard work of refining their idea/message/recommendation down to a crisp, easy-to-digest message. "I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote
leadership
In computer science, the concept of a computer's processor switching from one system to another is referred to as context switching, where the computer switches from updating your gmail browser page over to your Microsoft Word application, etc. Computers are very good at this, but people are horrible
agile
So many leaders or teams quickly move too quickly (or skip entirely) the early parts of a new project/initiative, failing to invest real time in wrestling with questions like: * Should we do this project? (This question is skipped way too often -- think about investing in exercises like a