March 27, 2020 A week ago today I went into the hospital for what turned out to be appendicitis. While I was waiting for my CT scan that morning, my appendix burst. I got out Tuesday this week with a boatload of heavy antibiotics to clean out all the sepsis from my blood, etc. If…
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Note: I started this post in late February 2020, before the pandemic lockdown, to remind and describe how companies have “pivoted” (hate that term) in the past due to societal mandates. Now I finally went back, post-surgery, to finish it… See the “Mad Men”-esque image above. Where’s your organization’s secretarial pool? Not long ago (my…
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February 4, 2020 It’s noon on the day after the Iowa caucuses, and we have yet to know who “won” thanks to a snafu with a smartphone app. Officials in Iowa have announced they’ll have an announcement by 5 pm. Politics notwithstanding, I’m sure we’ll learn in the days to come more about the app,…
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Yesterday (when I started writing this) was New Year Adam — coined we believe by our friend Brooxie Crews Keary. Because Adam came before Eve, don’cha know. Brooxie used to have “Christmas Adam” parties on the 23rd, and since then the naming tradition has stuck. Brooxie disavows this term, but the preponderance of evidence points…
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I can’t begin to tell you when I became a Craftsman. I can tell you that it’s been a long road. I think it started when we bought our first house, built in 1922. In no time, you find yourself presented with things that need fixing, and in no time you learn that most current-day…
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Like any good business school student of the 80s/90s, I read all the classic works to explain how to get ahead. I’m sure many of you remember the Gordon Gekko line from the movie Wall Street that in some ways encapsulated the ethos of the era: “Greed is Good.” Many of the book choices of…
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Part of the fun of keeping a blog is putting little bits of oneself out there, and today I’m sharing one of my Dad’s favorite Gypsy jokes — without this, it may be lost to the mists of time. I wonder if they still tell these in Hungary. All countries and nationalities have a history…
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I read a piece this week that illustrates the importance of building diversity into our teams. In the waning days of NASA’s Apollo program, the money was running out. Not to go deep into the why or politics, Apollo 18 was canceled, and NASA had to make decisions on what projects to include in our…
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“Not Invented Here.” This is a popular corporate syndrome that was often mentioned as part of Microsoft’s organizational culture back in the late 90s/early 2000s. Being that it was org culture, it kept popping up in different ways. For example, in the early days of the Internet, Microsoft chose to keep the ‘Net at arm’s…
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Last week I was talking to someone about the sad realities of not having access to good backups. The example I talked about was the famous “NotPetya” attack on the worldwide shipping firm, Maersk. It’s fascinating reading (WIRED wrote a great story about it here)…the upshot was Maersk’s entire worldwide network was destroyed, necessitating a…
