Remember the Tracy Kidder book, “The Soul of the New Machine“? Required reading in business school from almost the day it shipped, the author embedded with teams at Data General in Massachusetts, in their quest to build a new and better mini-computer (remember those?) in those in-between days between big iron mainframes and the eventual…
August 23, 2020 Make no mistake; the COVID-19 pandemic is expensive. In a macroeconomic sense: world economies sputter along in low speed, needing fewer of this and that means fewer people employed, making fewer dollars, and national and world GDP not nearly as robust as before. No doubt the world we go back to will…
For years as an IT diagnostician, my most sought-after skill was being able to know someone’s mind (and thus their technology needs) well enough to anticipate needs, or at the least being able to translate needs into something I can deliver. Later as an IT Director and V-P, when onboarding beginner Tier 1 tech support…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…