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…

Slingshots – not the toy, but the event, the idea behind pulling something back slowly, waiting and then releasing at which point the object is propelled at an increasingly fast rate across a distance. Applied to leadership – waiting, holding back, not saying anything, perhaps biding one’s time and then… a Tsunami of advice, direction, guidance, opinions that were never there before but are now. It seems like a good approach but what is missing is…

“But you didn’t ask me about THAT.” To which my answer always is – “Did I ask you how you got here?” No. The best updates in any meeting, on any project are the ones that come voluntarily and don’t wait for the meeting to happen to volunteer them.  They are the ones that provide the most impact and make you think – “huh we probably don’t need that meeting, so let’s cancel it and…

I love the Doomsayer. This will never work. Nope, when this goes out to the customer it will blow up in their faces. You can’t do that, the API doesn’t work that way. We will have to update everything if you make that change. This is going to blow up in our faces. Everything is always a mountain instead of a mole hill, everything is always going to be so hard that it’ll bring the…