Empowering Leadership and Music Articles
Each article uses our empower framework that we also use for our leadership coaching services.
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,...
Persistent engagement
Now that you know the Team, there are still a few stories that are worth spinning around my tour through Ops with the NeXT team. Today’s starts with the fact that our NeXT PC’s...
renewing Promises
A teammate once bet me I would never get the team back together. We had done it for 10 years, every Christmas season ... then I let it slip. I have lost that 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙚 so far. So,...
How does a Promise execute?
We were again in my office, which you are going to soon think is more a Disaster Recovery location, particularly after today’s offering. We were sitting in the dark - not...
wondering about Promise…
I once asked a team of 30 whether they had ever been on a good team. Anywhere ... work, church, a sports team. Half raised their hand. Which means to the other half, "team" was a...
The Promise of observation…
Like children, you don’t really have favorites on a Team… or shouldn’t. It is where the analogy with Pooh may break down, as he is Christopher Robin’s best friend and confidant,...
The Promise of partners…
The nicest people I have ever worked with had 1 thing in common. For years I noticed it, then I found the pattern: the easy-to-work-with ones were often Purple and Gold down deep...
Management Promise…
I thought my career was over. I had not meant to land in Ops, and nearly everyone there wanted the 𝗡𝗲𝗫𝗧 team I was handed to fail ... hold your breath, this brand of the month...