Category: Career, Management, & Leadership

There are two analogies for leaders that have made a visceral impact on my life and career, the architect leader and the gardening leader. These analogies became central to my personal and professional growth ever since I formally entered management five years ago. Arguably, I have been a leader for much longer than that in […]

Any given business day you will find an age-old conflict brewing in a neutral-toned conference room or on a tiled video conference call. This conflict is the push and pulls of the idealists and the immediatists. The idealists advocate for the best possible solution with a timeline or cost that is unattainable in the short-term. […]

Just like you, I have struggled with many problems of a wide variety in my life. Given my profession, many of these problems were challenges with technology. I worked my way up to leading an operations team by solving harder and more problems than others. I worked my way up to leading an architecture team […]

It has been discovered that potassium is capable of being in two states of matter, at once. Potassium, and potentially other metals, can be a solid and a liquid simultaneously when extreme pressure and extreme temperature is applied. Some of the atoms of potassium are well formed and strong. They remain solid under these conditions […]

I have never been one to understand the division between work and life personas. When I was in the U.S. Navy, I had to live with the same people that I worked with each day. Often, individuals would display their complete lack of integrity and disregard for others during the work day. Then I would […]

It is the technical professional’s responsibility to ensure that the business can give informed consent or they retain the burden of deciding for themselves.

If you have been following my blog, you know that I recently went through a burnout phase. Now I have begun a learning and analysis phase. I am definitely on the upswing of things. So why do I wander my house filling unfulfilled? Who wants to work late? I… do…? An odd thought occurred to […]

Architecture choices for cultural factors I was having a discussion with one of my team members. He questioned some of our early decisions which predated his involvement on the project. I began to give him a bit of history of the choice and realized, while I was explaining, that some of the benefits were never […]

Mindset framing Recovering from an infection of the responsibility virus requires us to change our mindset and to do it on faith. The over-responsible party tends to see the under-responsible party as lazy, incompetent, happy to ride coat tails, or simply useless. The do not trust the under-responsible party and feel justified in their need […]

Doubling down on my decision to lead My new understanding of the responsibility virus has helped me view a lot of my past experiences and, more importantly, my past perspectives in a new light. This has helped solidify my goals of pursuing IT Leadership. I consider myself an excellent engineer. There is no single topic […]