Empowering Leadership and Music Articles
Each article uses our empower framework that we also use for our leadership coaching services.
Unexpected renewal…
Within walking distance of Fannie was one of the best TexMex places - probably in the country, but for sure in the DC area. As such, you could walk down, have a good lunch, a...
executing Unexpectedly
Once you set your mind towards something, it actually fools you by finding more data to support that “perception”. The “red car” problem is Unexpected .. and real - once you...
wonderfully Unexpected
Merry Christmas!!! When I saw “wonder” would align with the day, I knew all was right with the world. For today is full of many miracles of wonders and love, some of the best...
observing Un-expectations..
Knowing that you need to make a change, and actually doing it are related, but take a different focus. Much of the trite advice you see, like “You should go TO something and not...
Partners in the Unexpected
Today’s lesson comes from trigonometry - and now I know I have lost most of you. Hang in there - it is not that complicated, and a better leadership lesson is “what goes up,...
Unexpected management…
Control is an elusive term in management. Computer systems are all built from “requirements” - what is known, “expected”, or assumed, and how to manage it. They only control...
engaging the Unexpected…
It is the season of Christmas Cards, the time when you see pictures of old friends, and families that share the stories of the year in pictures and letters. Some are very sparse...
If you don’t Prepare to renew….
When I get to the end of writing about an artist, there is always a tinge of remorse. Have I featured enough about them to make it worth your while to wander through their...
To Prepare to execute
In the ‘90s, the mode of communication was a “pager”, and by the time I had one, they at least had characters so it was very similar to the texts’ of today. In Ops, I was paged...
Can you Prepare wonder?
If you sized Fannie Mae on its impact, influence, and swagger in the Housing Market, it is a giant, like the huge Georgian Mansion that it occupied on Wisconsin Ave. But as a...
observing Preparation
I exited Ops to go back into the Development part of Fannie, supporting a group of reusable components that were the “secret sauce” to accelerate what you now know as “apps”. ...
Preparing to be a partner
A common thing people Prepare for is the next “promotion”. The next level up is an illusion that I have now heard hundreds describe as: “better”, “easier”, “more satisfying”,...
Preparation management
As I have gotten older, I have recognized that knowing what you don’t know… admitting it and asking for help… is a virtue that is not well recognized and not well understood. I...
engaging Preparation
If you are involved in the latest thing in IT development, you have probably heard the term “technical debt” - otherwise known as decisions made in the past to make things “easy”...
renewing Persistence
Three amazing gifts of moving to the DC area and working for Fannie Mae changed the course of my life. The first was realizing that THESE people had a LOT of money, so trying to...
Persistent execution…
You’re going to think all of my time as a “customer” was doing deals with vendors, and that is not far from the truth. I came of age as custom software turned out to be more...
wonderfully Persistent…
This spring I will have worked full time for 45 years. From age 17 till now, almost exactly 15 years as builder/vendor of computer systems, 15 as a customer/user of computer...
observing Persistence
As engineering continued to grow, I picked up another direct report with a great team focusing on backend services. While our handcrafted tools were great, we observed companies...
A partner with Persistence
The NeXT team was integrated, with both Ops (now) and engineering (the future) in the same small team. This meant those engineering the future were also living with the actual...
managing Persistence….
If you talk to any IT person, other than those on the Network team, you will find that pretty much everyone hates the Network team. They are never wrong, never changed anything,...