Posts Tagged ‘leadership’
Grace Hopper
It’s wonderful that this lecture by Grace Hopper at the NSA in 1982 has made its way out into the world. It’s SO prescient on a variety of topics like distributed computing, language standards, service ownership and the leadership vacuum. She could see it all – 42 years ago. If you work in IT today, […]
Filed under: retro, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: COBOL, distributed, Grace Hopper, history, leadership, SOA
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 […]
Filed under: culture | 1 Comment
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 […]
Filed under: culture | 2 Comments
Tags: command, culture, health, leadership, pathological
Being an Engineer and a Leader
TL;DR Leadership and management are distinct but interconnected disciplines, and for various reasons engineers can struggle with both. My military background means that I’ve been fortunate enough to go through a few passes of structured leadership training. Some of that has been very helpful, some not so much. Engineers want to fix things, but working with […]
Filed under: CTO | 2 Comments
Tags: engineering, leadership, psychological safety
Chris Swan's Weblog 