Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Valuation of Time

Let’s begin with a basic concept with which we should all be able to agree: time has inherent value. Nobody seriously questions this fact, what we argue is what that value is.

I was thinking about this while I was doing some yard cleanup this week and the lawn folks came by to mow. As the two of them swept in and back out in about 10 or 15 minutes, I found myself pondering the cost of that fraction of an hour in a very intellectual fashion…

“Are you fucking shitting me, that’s $100/hour to mow my lawn!” I thought, intellectually.

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Vaccine Schedule: 1960 vs 2016

Fun fact: if your friends and family are sharing this idiotic vaccine schedule comparison on social media, they’re fucking morons.

I know, I know, you’re already shaking your head and clucking your tongue at how mean it is to call these simpletons morons, but bear with me here, because I’m not the only one that must think that the sort of folk likely to share this are not blessed with an over-abundance of brains—the people who MADE the document knew it too. Here’s how I know:

Continue reading Vaccine Schedule: 1960 vs 2016

Malaise

I have so much going on at the moment; several cool development projects to work on that I’m really excited about, numerous books on the queue, the weather is nice and the bikes and kayaks are calling, there are some recently released video games that I enjoy quite a bit, I have writing ideas that sound like fun, my foot pain seems to be improving…I’m surrounded by great shit and life is, by any real measure, great!

Continue reading Malaise

Fast Food Delivery

I’ve written and spoken on the subject of managing customers fairly extensively because I feel that it is often done incorrectly—no, not just incorrectly, but extraordinarily incorrectly, cartoonishly so. In my experience, most customer management is done from a place of complete fear. How do we avoid losing the customer, how do we avoid offending the customer, how do we avoid failing the customer.

So defensive. So reactive. So rooted in negative emotion.

Continue reading Fast Food Delivery

Layoffs: Those Left Behind

Last week we went through a round of layoffs (or reductions in force, or whatever trivializing euphemism is currently en vogue). Over the course of two decades in the industry, I have been through numerous layoff cycles—as an employee being laid off as well as being among those that retained their employment, and later as a manager having had to lay folks off and escaping having had to do so. One thing that I have never done is escaped unscathed.

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Decision Triage: Cost to Revert

In a previous post, I discussed using decisiveness to reduce or eliminate decision debt; but how do you do that? I mean, if you haven’t made the decision yet, doesn’t that—by definition—indicate that you aren’t yet ready to make the decision?

From my perspective, there is only one useful way to categorize decisions: by their cost to revert. It’s less a taxonomy than a scale, but the basic organizational schema for decisions should be in ascending order from most costly to change to least costly. From there, logic dictates that you should only exhaust as much exploratory effort to make a decision as its cost to alter.

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Manager vs Leader Talk at Penguicon 2016

Dawn Kuczwara (@DigitalDawn) and I talked a bit about the difference between managers and leaders at Penguicon this weekend. Penguicon always pulls a different sort of talk out of us, and this is no exception. The informality of the panel-style discussion lent itself to several things…

Continue reading Manager vs Leader Talk at Penguicon 2016

Decisiveness and Decision Debt

Consider your brain to be like a Git repository, constantly changing and updating and checking in new information. Everybody who has maintained a Git repo for any length of time is all too familiar with the amount of technical debt that is accrued through open branches. The more branches you have open and the longer you have branches open, the greater the likelihood that merge conflicts, hidden bugs, and other evils lurk in your future code. Continue reading Decisiveness and Decision Debt

Coaching vs Mentorship

As I discuss leadership, I often use the terms “coaching” and “mentoring” in a manner that would lead a casual reader to assume I mean them to be synonymous—that they are interchangeable. They are not.

For most of us, our first real exposure to a coach is in high school sports. My high school wrestling coach knew two important things: he knew what made up a successful wrestler and he knew that I had no idea what made a successful wrestler. With those two things, he set out to teach me the things that I needed to learn to be successful—often over my objections, frequently against my better judgement. He had a clear vision of what the goal for me looked like, and he helped me achieve.

Well, sort of, I never ended up being much of a wrestler. Continue reading Coaching vs Mentorship

Post Migration: Episode 1

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I’m slowly going through the process of merging an older, out of use blog into this one. As such, I’ll be migrating selected blog posts into this space. Most will probably not make the transition for a variety of reasons—there is some truly terrible writing over there, as well as some “probably funny at the time but not so much now” stuff—but as I bring stuff over here I’ll post pointers back to them in case you’re so inclined. My hope is that by doing it this way I can keep the reposting to a minimum and keep posts in accurate date order. Continue reading Post Migration: Episode 1

Poor Sleep and Decisions

I have been sleeping ridiculously poorly. I am in a unique period of prolonged indecision; which it turns out is a thing that my brain does not like at all. I tend to be a pretty decisive person—I act on the knowledge that I have and course-correct based on new input as needed.

Currently, I’m working from a huge swath of unknowns and most of this decision is going to be based on gut feel. On emotion. Like a caveman. Continue reading Poor Sleep and Decisions

Managing Safe Spaces

There is this concept that has followed me around from team to team as long I’ve managed, coached, or otherwise led people. The description of the concept changes team-by-team—”shit umbrella”, “distraction barrier”, or (currently) “human meat shield” to name a few—but the core idea remains constant; a key attribute of my leadership style is that of preventing the enormity of the weight of the organization from ever falling on the heads of those I lead. Continue reading Managing Safe Spaces

Moving to Agile: Training

I haven’t really had the mental energy to write much about our transition to agile for the last month or two because I have been spending so much of that time period putting together and executing trainings. Even with as much enthusiasm as I have for this, it has been a draining several weeks.

The human urge to generate complexity when something seems too simple makes teaching simple things a weird chore. When I walk someone through the thought process behind answering a specific Scrum question, it’s often perceived as too simple—I get wary looks from the audience as if I’m trying to trick them. There is no trick, it’s really that simple. Continue reading Moving to Agile: Training