Archive for the ‘culture’ Category
Sacrifice
TL;DR Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. Background I wrote yesterday about pathological culture, but this post has been brewing for a lot longer.. It’s also the answer […]
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Tags: command, culture, leadership, military, pathological, sacrifice, war
Pathological culture
I’ve been really enjoying Gene Kim’s recent interviews with Ron Westrum (Part 1 & Part 2). There were two things that really struck me in part 1: Pathological cultures make people ill – we know this from the Whitehall study; but that’s fine for the bosses, because it’s not them who are getting ill, it’s […]
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Tags: command, culture, health, leadership, pathological
TL;DR We need to make space between online activities if we want to remember and appreciate them. Background – are virtual meetings just running together? One of my Leading Edge Forum (LEF) colleagues sent me this Washington Post article ‘All these Zoom birthdays and weddings are fine, but will we actually savor the memories?‘, which […]
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Tags: events, learning, liminal, space, virtual, whisky
Working From Home
TL;DR I prefer working from home over the grind of a daily commute. After many years of doing it I’ve been able to refine my working environment to make it comfortable and productive. Background As the COVID-19 pandemic bites a bunch of people are working from home who might not be so used to it. […]
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Tags: design, ergonomics, home, office, WFH
In Plain Sight
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson This post is about a set of powerful management techniques that have each been around for over a decade, but that still haven’t yet diffused into everyday use, and that hence still appear novel to the uninitiated. Wardley Maps Simon […]
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Tags: DevOps, management, maps, SRE, Wardley, working backwards
My MBA
TL;DR I started out doing an MBA as it felt like a necessary step in pushing my career forward. The most important part was getting my head around strategy, and by the time that was done the journey had become more important than the destination. The motivation I’d not been working at Credit Suisse[1] for […]
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Tags: MBA, strategy
Marginal cost of making mistakes
In a note to my last post ‘Safety first‘ I promised more on this topic, so here goes… TL;DR As software learns from manufacturing by adopting the practices we’ve called DevOps we’ve got better at catching mistakes earlier and more often in our ‘production lines’ to reduce their cost; but what if the whole point […]
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Tags: architecture, cost, design, DevOps, economics, mistakes, risk
Safety first
Google’s Project Aristotle spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what made some teams perform better than others, and in the end they identified psychological safety as the primary factor[1]. It’s why one of the guiding principles to Modern Agile is ‘Make Safety a Prerequisite’. The concept of safety comes up in Adrian […]
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Tags: DevOps, racing, safety
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