• Filter byAll
• Filter byAI
• Filter byCommunication
• Filter byHybrid
• Filter bySocial Strength
• Filter byThe Future
• Filter byUncategorized

• 

  The Confessions of an Eternal Creative Tinkerer.

  Much to the chagrin of my partner, I’m an obsessive creative tinkerer. Not in the sense that I creatively tinker with technology, but I constantly tinker with other types of creativity.  I am a published poet of a single poem. I have performed live on stage playing the…

• 

  Clumps of Stars: The Importance of Group Level Direction.

  The sometimes hard-to-swallow truth is that, at scale, flat organizations don’t work. As a company grows they need to be chunked into smaller, more manageable pieces. Companies split up into domains, groups, tribes, coagulations, or what is defined in the most recent blog post or book that the operations lead…

• 

  “Hybrid is Hard” – Your Back To The Office Plan is Failing.

  Most of us have received the email. The title reads “Back To The Office Policy” it starts with something like “We all believe that face-to-face collaboration is part of creating a vibrant, fun, and effective work policy.”.” The internal comms team knows this isn’t going to be 100% popular, so…

• 

  “Hybrid is Hard” – The Myth of The Collaborative Workplace.

  We’ve been sold the myth that hybrid work is the perfect mix between being productive and being focused in your curated, comfortable home office space. Then spending a day or two in the office being hyper-collaborative with your teammates. However, my recent survey shows that 60% of hybrid workers…

• 

  CSS: Cascading Support Systems

  What do Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have in common? Experts have suggested that these three men show borderline signs of being psychopaths. But they’re not the “murdery” kind of Phycopath.  The definition of psychopathic behavior doesn’t in fact, cover much about killing people.

• 

  The CTO’s Golden Derrière: The misguided perception of rockstar tech leads.

  Over the last couple of decades, the explosion of tech companies led to their leaders being idolized as people with superhuman capabilities; Gods of industry, savant business leaders with visionary missions to change the world. However, they’re simply not much better than you or me. People love to use…

• 

  Why I’ve not been writing

  So I explained in, quite some detail, why I started writing this blog. It seemed like I was a good engineering manager, but I couldn’t work out why. I felt I needed to understand what I knew, what I believed in, and what made me a good leader. Writing…

• 

  The Rock is My Rock, Why Not Thinking is OK

  Don’t let ‘side hustle pornstars’ intimidate you into feeling bad about being lazy and unproductive. It’s OK to sit on the sofa and turn your brain off for as long as you like. I was recently ‘Netflix shamed’ by a colleague. During a presentation, they mentioned that they liked to…

• 

  Build your own personal leadership manifesto.

  Want to understand what defines you as a leader, use this step by step process to define your own leadership manifesto. Last year I went through the process of developing my leadership manifesto. It’s now how I attempt to lead my teams, and I mark myself against it every month.

• 

  The Highs and Lows, Emotions at Work: How to Avoid Burnout Through Emotional Labour.

  It’s easier to burn someone out through emotional labour than physical labour. This isn’t something we can keep ignoring. I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions as works recently. Mainly because the fantastic Tech Point Charlie invited me to talk about the topic. But also because I have…

• 

  Are your values a motivational poster or a battle standard.

  Are your company values a boring motivational poster stuck on the wall, or a battle standard that you lead your team under? Company values, we’ve all seen them, every company has them. Large companies spend significant amounts of money, defining a nice need set of principles and company morals. They…

• 

  Are you building straight, white, male, middle-class products for straight, white, male, middle-class people?

  Quit worrying about what your git branch is called and hire for diversity already. The tech industry has a diversity problem. I think by now that we’re all in agreement on that. If you don’t agree then grab a notepad and draw two columns. Then throughout the day for every…