Blog

January 3, 2016

Greg Thomas

Trust the Process PostScript

Tip of the hat to the altMBA, my own PostScript after having written this morning’s prompt, er post. So what happens when you cannot trust the process and by the process I mean the people? Then you decide which path you need to go down – the path to find a new process that you can start fresh with and start trusting OR the process by which you stick with it and you commit to making something happen.  Notice the “you”, you commit to making something happen, you come up with the action plan, you make the effort and you judge

January 3, 2016

Greg Thomas

Trust the Process

There are times in life where you have to trust without knowing the end result.  Trust that the people leading you have only your best interests at heart.  That is very easy when you know all the twist and turns you are going to take to get from A to B and the road is laid out in front of you so you can see all the speed bumps ahead of you. Not so easy, when you are starting at A, cannot see the road for all the fog and are not sure whether B is even out there. I

January 1, 2016

Greg Thomas

Commit to Yourself

So, right about now everyone is thinking or putting into practice this year’s New Year’s Resolutions. Are they good?  Are they bad? Are they unrealistic? Will they survive past January? I can’t say, but I would hazard a guess that all of the resolutions that we come up with in life are personally motivated. I want to draw better. I want to be a better coder. I want to run a marathon. None of them deal with corporate objectives or organizational strategies or what team your kid is going to try out for – all the factors that shape your external environment.

December 31, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Meeting Before the Meeting

Have you ever attended one of these?  Not knowing what you were getting into until the end of the meeting where you thought everything had been discussed, ready to go but then only to be informed that now everyone was all prepped, on point, had the same message for the real meeting? Did you then sit through the “real meeting” wondering why you were there, expect maybe for the proverbial show of team unity, wondering what code you could have eeked out in that total combined time block of 2 hours? Getting your entire team into a room for a

December 30, 2015

Greg Thomas

Letting People Fail

I’ve written about Failure a number of times – The True Cost of Failure and Insulating the Failure – and let’s be honest, so have many, many, many other people. Some of my most spectacular failures were not the ones where I was up late at night coding by brains away trying to figure out some new problemset or use some new language – “Okay, so that’s what happens when you take up all the memory”.  No they were the ones where mine, the team, maybe the company’s back was up against the wall and I had to figure out things on