Too Many Chiefs; Not Enough Indians

One of the most interesting patterns that I have observed again and again is that any organization tends to create layer upon layer of bureaucracy over time. Although I can’t find the reference, I remember reading somewhere that any organization increases bureaucracy with 0.7% per year. In my experience, this is a gross underestimation. Often … Read more

Why Trust Is The Foundation Of Success

Many understand the importance of trust in a society. The ability to park your car somewhere and know it will be there, undamaged when you get back. Booking and paying for a travel ticket or hotel room before arriving and knowing that it will be there. Working for an employer and knowing that there will … Read more

Activity Is Not The Same As Progress

After another week on the road, I am typing these words late Friday evening on a plane home. I spent time with three different companies (who shall remain unnamed) this week and on the way back I was reflecting on the commonalities of what I learned this week. The main lesson was: lots of activity; … Read more

Why Firefighting Ruins Your Company

There are few sessions at companies that I run or participate in where there isn’t some form of firefighting that makes it into the discussion. In virtually every company, there are situations where a critical bug is found in the field, the CEO of a customer company escalates to senior management, a critical project is … Read more

Will Computers Program Themselves?

With artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning on the top of Gartner’s hype cycle, it is easy to assume that computers will program themselves going forward and that we’ve reached the end of software engineering as a discipline. Although one might naively think that we can just feed a lot of data into a … Read more

Business Agility: What Got Us Here …

During the last months, I have run into several situations where folks outside of R&D considered this concept of agile a nice little toy for the propeller-heads in software, rather than something that is in service of the company. In many cases, these people are stuck in a waterfall mindset and feel that it’s perfectly … Read more

Why One Customer Is No Longer Enough

This week, I came across a concept from Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, where he distinguishes human beings from other creatures in that we can create an idea in the theater of our imagination. We test the idea against other ideas that we have or others have or even against the world. And … Read more