There's an important concept that all leaders have an energetic budget with which they get things done. Every demand you face spends some of your complexity budget. My earlier post outlined that idea and credits its originators. As a leader, if you have more demands that you can satisfy, an overwhelming number of conflicting priorities, dissatisfied stakeholders or are spending
Every change you want to drive within a business costs you time and energy. You have a limited capacity of both. If you commit yourself to more change than your own capacity to fulfil it, you are most likely to execute the change poorly or have it fail. This sounds obvious, and therefore avoidable, but many times I have noticed
Over the last few years, I came to properly understand this warning from John Kotter about business change: Never underestimate the magnitude of the forces that reinforce complacency and that help maintain the status quo. That's from his book Leading Change, which my friend and colleague Wayne recommended to me when our change project was about to be funded. Wayne
Courtesy of NuoDB I was drawn to read Gartner’s updated magic quadrant report. It’s sidenote includes an observation I have to agree with: Through 2018, a wave of consolidation will affect the operational DBMS market’s smaller vendors, through mergers, acquisitions and business failures. NuoDB, who I mentioned in my previous post, did well as a visionary, whilst
At Rackspace I have a number of business customers who are committed to a Microsoft architectural stack. Some of these are older businesses, not startups born with cloud tech choices nor with access to cloud-era talent. Their stacks include SQL Server exclusively, and it has been part of their world forever. Recently as I’ve been talking with their IT
One of my core principles is to continuously increase the clarity with which I see the world. This is a top-level principle, and so I have a bunch of values and behaviours which flow from that. I have seen this value misused. A bitter person misused it to excuse counter-productive behaviour, and an idealist misappropriated it to disguise their unwillingness
I’m a fan of the Strengths model. On both of the times I have done the self-assessment, two of my top five strengths are: Achiever Focus This is very true of me. The ‘so what’ of the combination might not be immediately obvious unless you have those same two compulsions, or have a significant other with them, and have
