Thursday, October 31, 2024

Bosses at troubled companies say they want growth through innovation. They prefer growth through girth.

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The headlines are heavy with iconic companies that have hit the skids recently, from Starbucks, to Boeing, to Intel. All have relatively n...
Monday, September 30, 2024

It isn’t “return to office.” It’s “malicious destruction of trust.”

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Return-to-office mandates continue to trickle in, and every now and again a prominent employer makes a headline-grabbing decision that all e...
Saturday, August 31, 2024

For years, tech firms were fighting a war for talent. Now they are waging war on talent.

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In the years immediately following the dot-com meltdown, there was more tech labor than there were tech jobs. That didn’t last long. By 20...
Wednesday, July 31, 2024

US automakers are struggling with electrification. They won’t have that luxury bringing autonomy to market.

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Four years ago today, I blogged about the difficulty automakers faced in transitioning to electric vehicles , specifically that there were c...
Sunday, June 30, 2024

The yield curve is inverted. Tech's problem is asset price inflation.

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The business of custom software development is, at its core, an asset business. Software development is the business of converting cash to ...
Friday, May 31, 2024

I can explain it to you, but I can't comprehend it for you

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I’ve given my share of presentations over the years. I am under no illusions that I am anything more than a marginal presenter. My present...
Tuesday, April 30, 2024

The era of ultra low interest rates is over. Tech has painful adjustments to make.

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Interest rates have been climbing for two years now. The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday with the headline the days of ultra l...
Sunday, March 31, 2024

Don’t queue for the ski jump if you don’t know how to ski

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I’ve mentioned before that one of my hobbies is lapidary work. I hunt for stone, cut it, shape it, sand it, polish it, and turn it into art...
Thursday, February 29, 2024

Patterns of Poor Governance

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As I mentioned last month, many years ago I was toying around with a governance maturity model. Hold your groans, please. Turns out there ...
Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Governance Without Benefit

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I’ve been writing about IT governance for many years now. At the time I started writing about governance, the subject did not attract much...
Monday, July 31, 2023

Resistance

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Organizational change, whether digital transformation or simple process improvement, spawns resistance; this is a natural human reaction. M...
Friday, June 30, 2023

How Agile Management Self Destructs

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I’ve been writing about Agile Management for over 15 years. Along the way, I’ve written (as have many others) how to get Agile practices in...
Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Give us autonomy - but first you've gotta tell us what to do

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The ultimate state for any team is self-determination: they lead their own discovery of work, self-prioritize that work, self-organize thei...
Sunday, April 30, 2023

Measured Response

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Eighteen months ago, I wrote that there is a good case to be made that the tech cycle is more economically significant than the credit cycle...
Friday, March 31, 2023

Competency Lost

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The captive corporate IT department was a relatively early adopter of Agile management practices, largely out of desperation. Years of expe...
Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Shadow Work

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Last month, Rana Foroohar argued in the FT that worker productivity is declining in no small part because of shadow work . Shadow work is u...