Blog

March 23, 2017

Greg Thomas

Guides as Leaders

When you have a team of great leaders and you are charged with leading them, are you really leading them? Do they need someone to lead them? Isn’t the objective that they become great leaders so they don’t need to be lead? Perhaps then as the role of leadership evolves it moves from leading – where we work with our team on daily tasks providing constant reinforcement and direction to mentoring where we take a bigger step back assisting when problems arise that the leader has never seen before and then finally to Guiding where we direct the leader on

March 22, 2017

Greg Thomas

Lead with…

Passion? Decisiveness? Heart? Collaboration? Team? Brains? Numbers? Will? Drive? Culture? Profit? Methodology? Lead with any, all, more, less or none of these, pick the ones you want, throw away the rest, but identify how you want to lead, stick to it and make it happen.

March 21, 2017

Greg Thomas

Long-Term Failure Planning

  Planning for the long-term isn’t always about minimizing risks and making sure you’re covered for a rainy day. It’s also about planning and insulating for failure. Planning for the experiments that might go awry. Planning for pivots to new ideas that might not work out the first time through. Planning for creating something with a small reward but took big time. It’s about giving yourself time to try something new, fail and try again.  When we don’t give ourselves time to do this, we stop getting better, stop learning from our mistakes and stop improving. Plan for Failure and Hold

March 20, 2017

Greg Thomas

The Monster Hustle

That’s the word these days – the hustle – it was shipping for a while, creating, leaping, leaning – but today the word is hustle. What is the hustle? It’s about not waiting for something to happen, it’s about going out to make it happen. Take for example Social Media, you have 10 followers now, you want to get 10,000, how are you going to do that? No matter how good your content is if no one can find it (or you for that matter) it won’t matter, so you hustle.  You got out there and you introduce yourself, you

March 17, 2017

Greg Thomas

Why all the Software Architects?

I have friends that are Software Architects, many are quite good, but to be honest, I’ve never been much for the title. It looks fancy on a resume but it connotes that one is only focussed on architecture and not on coding. I.e., focussed on the thinking and not the doing. I’ve always held the belief that writing code is the only way you get better at design and architecture, you get better from the doing of it, not the designing of it.  And with that said, if we are all thinking and doing we are all doing Software Architecture.