Take 3 parts great people. Take 1 ounce of luck. Take 2 cups of awesome product. Add 1 tablespoon of secret sauce. And poof – Instant Culture Not quite. It’d be great if we could all have that super awesome culture of “Awesome Company Du Jour” – even when it changes to a completely different company, we’d simply switch over to that new brand of company. Yeah that’d be awesome – that’d work – except it won’t.…

How many times have you been a meeting with someone to have them take your words and regurgitate them back into a message that is completely off topic from your original idea? Once a Month? Once a Week? Once a Day? When you look at those missed interactions, how often is it the same person or group of people? How about when the message is targeted at people you know vs those you don’t? What…

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about what you could call the “Rogues Gallery” of Software Development Teams. We have the Nitpicker, the Backbencher and the Doomsayer but today we are introducing the legend themselves – the Whiner. It’s super easy to know who Whiner is… Whine about the requirements Whine about the codereview Whine about the unit tests Whine about the QA Plan Whine about the deployment taking too long Whine about the servers…

I love these cycles of Open Letters going round and round – for awhile there is nothing and then we start seeing them all over the place – then they die down again. I think at one point, perhaps when published in a newspaper there was an intent to advocate on behalf of a set of people, but the myth of what it accomplishes has decreased significantly. The myth is – I write this letter,…

You know the person on your team that knocks it out of the park – all day, every day – they show up, deliver and leave you sitting at your screen thinking – “Wow, amazing, just wow”. And you always ask yourself that one question – “How do I clone this person?”  or in more realistic terms – “How do I scale past one?”  And maybe this is you, running the solo company, making a go…