Career-Limiting Advice

Trust isn’t dying. It’s just being rerouted from tired institutions to TikTok teens and the new class of billionaires. If you have to pick one, invest in the teens.

AWS is the buffet. Azure’s your friendly dad at a BBQ. GCP’s quiet luxury. And they either want to sell you crack, fries, or a magic muffler.

How should we build companies going forward? Trust, autonomy, and actually paying people for impact instead of their meeting stamina.

Super simple guide to navigating around corporate seniors: less heroics, fewer firefights, more alliances… and know when to nod, smile, and duck.

Tired of average engineering output? Empower engineers. Not with capes. But with some Batman-grade, Alfred-supported self-awareness.

Your success in the corporate world is tied 100% to how well you hoard good managers— those rare “net exporters of talent.”

Better word: integrate! Because a buy is just a build in disguise— a focus on data that needs your builders and can’t be bought.

The title says it all.

If you’re looking for a future-forward side hustle, let me suggest “AI journalism” — quotes intentional and dipped deeply in spicy sarcasm sauce.

Stop using spaghetti as your work complexity metaphor at work. We all deserve to keep our carbs and chaos separate. Instead, try icebergs.

Using AI to understand our future with flying cars.

The most important post in the history of business.

Day three of a five-day writing exercise: What if I posted every day?

I heard once that fun is the f in life.  Without it, it’s just a lie. 

At some point (25 years from now), this younger generation– with a healthy sense of purpose and balance– will be in charge.

One of my favorite people at work said that my Out-of-Office message is better than any of my blogs. They are no longer "one of my favorites."

How to think about multi-year innovation

By today’s standards, he was unsuccessful.

Go on. Squeeze it.

'Frequency bias' makes us likely to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Differentiate on design and make life more beautiful.

The most important question of our time….

The real burden that software vendors need to share.

Wrapping up a five-day writing exercise: What if I posted every day?

Day four of a five-day writing exercise: What if I posted every day?

Day two of a five-day writing exercise: What if I posted every day?

Last week, every news source on the planet published the same headline– based on a report by Goldman Sachs that predicts: “As many as 300 million jobs could be eliminated by generative AI.”

Let me ruin it for you: Data Science Without Business Context. :)

Your leaders will work hard on everything, including making you feel like everything is going well. 

I don’t know who needs to hear this but there’s no reason for capitalism to have a hard edge.  It can and should reflect who we are and who we aspire to be.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my man cave, playing with #ChatGPT.

Coaching in the corporate world is fundamentally broken.  Same goes for mentoring and sponsorship.  The problem is one part developmental challenge (career gamesmanship getting in the way of cognitive growth) and one part structural (i.e., having to coach within the best interests of the Firm, not necessarily the employee).

Bookmark this one if you’re an engineer in a large enterprise. Come back to it after your next string of meetings.

There's been a lot of sad news lately about tech companies cutting staff.

How is it that HR leaders continue to fight an uphill battle when pressing fpr diversity?

Just doing my part to encourage biting. (That’ll make more sense if you read the piece.)

When I first read this headline about an outsourcer letting go of 300 people for moonlighting, I was convinced it was The Onion.  I clicked on it fully expecting a joke about how work-life balance was being replaced by work-work balance.

I am in *LOVE* with equicratic.org— a non-profit started by a longtime friend and mentee, who— in my opinion— has the best answer ever to “why’d you leave a promising career at JP Morgan after 20 years in HR?”

There are only two times when I turn my camera off during meetings.  The first is the obvious one— you do *not* want to see me eating.  I was clearly raised by ramen-lovin’ wolves.

Next purchase for my kids: a gene splicing kit.  I don’t care if their room is a mess but somewhere in there, they better be growing something cool.  On purpose. 

I’ve been noodling on how we all need to change the way we lead in a more hybrid world.  And I keep coming back to “not everyone is the same kind of leader so not everyone has to follow the same playbook.”

The hardest part of getting to a fully-automated Ops future and a quick look at how we tackle the problem today.

Gandhi’s best quote isn’t his “be the change” quote. His best quote is actually about what happens when you do. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”

The word promotion has come to mean doing a larger job, sitting in a larger seat.  It does not mean doing the same job (better) for more money.

Before the Edmund Pettus Bridge became a symbol of courage and hope, it was just a bridge.  Similarly, your office is just an office.

What does dignity have to do with a microservice architecture?  A thread for product managers.