Browse by Band, Artist, or Leadership Theme
Each week we feature a different band or artist, sometimes a few. Read articles covering the bands or topics below.
Bands & Artists
Your brain wants what it knows… and craves to learn things it doesn’t. Music is the perfect vehicle for both of those. We select a combination of proven artists with cuts from deeper on the albums or playlists that you may not know. We also challenge us all to try new genres of music that we are not familiar with, to see what we can learn that is both familiar and different. If we get the balance right, it will give you a pleasant dose of dopamine, and just enough tension to encourage your brain to start your day with learning in mind.
Leadership Topics
Topics for each week are selected from challenges that have been experienced by leaders at all levels of various organizations. They come from actual life experiences, and are often highlighted with personal stories that are “anonymous” for everyone but the author 😉 They are built around best practices and approaches that have been proven to work, mostly because the opposite is what was tried. Each article can stand alone, and also fits into a framework of 7 articles that stick together on a topic and group to illustrate it from those different perspectives.
For a deeper dive into the empower framework, visit this page.
Additional Topics:
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executing Retrospectively..
After 2020...I wonder what “20/20 Hindsight” means now… or 20/20 vision. With that "amazing" year firmly in the rearview mirror, Retrospectives are popping up all over the web. Your most important “this,” how you learned “that,” which strategy was …...
Retrospective wonder…
Where is your wonder?Something that we collectively lose track of as we get older is our ability to tune into our own inherent creativity. I am reminded of that with my grandkids, who are constantly up for something: singing off-key, painting outside the lines, or...
observing Retrospectively…
Believing what you observe... Retrospectives are, at their heart, all about observation. It is taking time to look at what happened... compared to what you thought would happen, and then adjusting accordingly. There are formal mechanisms in the Agile community that...
Who partners with your Retrospective?
Energy partners...As an extrovert, much of my energy comes from interacting with others. My wife is an introvert… so the rhythm of my being gone for a few days worked well mentally and financially for us both 😉 The long drives to DC allow me to charge up with loud...
managing your Retro-perspective
manage to Celebrate?Leadership books are always a hot topic with Coaches, and in a recent inquiry, many were bantering about this or that book that has some new insight or wisdom. For all the writing and focus on what makes great leaders, we seem to be missing so...
Retrospective to engage…
Particularly In 2020 - and every year-end...This week will end with probably the most anticipated change in numbers - ever. Rolling from 2020 to 2021, there will be a collective sigh that this year is over. The fascinating thing was remembering back to last year, we...
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 Margarita (I can now confirm), and walk back renewed in an hour. Hand-made soft tortillas,...
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 start looking for them, your brain is more than happy to throw out the others and focus on...
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 of which are Unexpected. I am not easy to surprise, being a control freak...
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 run FROM something”... like my Bosses feedback… not so helpful. In fact, my experiences at...
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, must come down”. I just like the symmetry that a nice sine wave has - gently cresting, and...
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 what you prepare them for, and even the illusion of AI that you hear so much about is still...
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 with only a few clues as to what happened during the year, while others have complete...
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 catalog? I am constantly amazed about what I learn, and I hope that I can get some of that...
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 literally 50 or 60 times a day… some were informational, some were important, but you were...
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 company, it was actually very small - around 5,000 employees. As such, it didn’t command...
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”. The idea is to have some proven “building blocks” of function so that you are Preparing...
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”, or my favorite, “more powerful”. It is always implied and often stated that clearly it is...
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 really didn’t want to be an Ops person, didn’t have any choice, so when I had enough...
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” that have snowballed into something needing attention, now. In Ops, that is shown in...
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 fight and catch them was very unlikely. The second I have written about before - now...
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 complicated and expensive to write and support than “standard” packages… and also led to the...
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 systems, and now 15 years studying people and how they interact with each other. The most...
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 now offering solutions that were similar, and offered the advantages of “support” and...
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 issues day in and day out. As our prestige grew, I stepped up into engineering for all...
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, and in our case, a small mistake could wipe out whole swaths of perfectly fine systems. ...
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 were required to have 32 Gig of memory - when 4 was normal and thus, “our” PC’s were full...
renewing Promises
The culture of most Ops groups are the same everywhere… and yet unique compared to other parts of IT. It is almost entirely understood by one simple metric: have you been on call yet? New guys (and they were mostly and are guys) would show up with an impressive...
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 because of the hour, but because there was no power in the building. As you might guess, those...
wondering about Promise…
I know I have written before about the great office I had for this season - whiteboards on both big walls - and a big conference room table - a very nice dining table, actually. Anyway, none of that mattered as it was very early in the morning, and the whole team was...
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, and also the center of the story. And like Piglet, the name and character can sound a...
The Promise of partners…
When I started teaching at JMU, I started to notice people that I worked with from there… and there was a very consistent theme. They were all really nice people. In fact, if you are in the Mid Atlantic area, and work with someone that is easy to get along with, ask...
Management Promise…
I really hadn’t intended to land in Ops, and frankly thought my “career” was over. Pretty much everyone wanted the NeXT team to fail… hold their breath, and this will pass like other “brands of the month” that most organizations see happen. What they didn’t know is I...
engaging the Promise…
Our group was “Advanced Technologies”, doing cutting edge work with the Promise of Object Technology, Artificial Intelligence, etc. And we were in the IT group responsible for systems that ran the "business", and were barely off of Mainframes in the early 90’s. Our...
renewing your Thanks…
We spent about as much time at Church as we did at home during this season. Some of it was proximity - we were the go-to for all kinds of things since we could walk there in 30 seconds. Beth was involved in a Wednesday night dinner for the church family - the...
executing Thanks…
After playing for a few years, particularly around Church, people got to know a bit about what we were doing. A member of our church approached us: his son was taking “violin” and was interested in possibly playing with us. He was “only 12”, and as the person that...
The wonder of Thanks…
Fannie Mae was located off of Wisconsin Ave in a HUGE palace of a building - fitting for the “home of housing”, but imposing and a little stifling. As such I had a regular habit of getting out for lunch, often walking north to a great Thai restaurant that had great...
Thanks-observing
Happy Thanksgiving! ….and, of COURSE I have a story - actually more than one. Come on - it is 250 days in a row - today, and that doesn’t count the 175 I wrote before. You may or may not be Thankful, but I am for the opportunity to try to make sense out of the...
Who are you Thanks partners?
When I arrived at Fannie in 1992, there were about 400 developers/contractors… and we used about 400 development tools. Now, innovation and creativity are important, but at the end of the day, we were a bank, so the ROI of that many different tools was hard to...
Can Thanks manage?
Before I left IBM, my new Boss needed me to come to a very important kickoff meeting before I was supposed to start. The good news is that the meeting had some people from IBM there, so I sorta blended into that team, although I got some paranoid looks from the other...
Can Change renew?
Our offices in Crystal City were magnificent, with my boss having a great view of the city. It was a small team, so we would gather around his desk and he would engage each of us.... only after he finished reading The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The...
What Thanks engage you?
Leaving something is never easy, particularly when I hadn't actually looked for a job in over 13 years. I also had to navigate telling my parents the IBM that provided our family its livelihood was now completely different than they had experienced. There were also...
Change execution…
The whole concept of LeadingWithMusic is to talk about using the power of Music to Change the way we think and act as Leaders and people, taking you on a journey linking the 2 together with examples from both. Lately, I have been receiving a lot of feedback that my...
The Change of wonder…
Today's story starts in a Maryland suburb with a kid graduating from high school and started at a local college. There he started working on building his first guitar from scratch, and realized this is what he wanted to do with his life, and dropped out of college....
What does Change observe?
So at this point, we were trying to get a staid Federal manufacturing facility to become "lean" and cost-efficient to produce commercial products. At the same time, we were trying to steer through the Unix wars both inside and outside of IBM which were becoming pretty...
Change partners…
If you ever are asked to work a business show, my advice would be say NO. You stand in a booth and answer questions from people who are never actually interested, and/or handing out chatzki which is what they really want. With my reputation, I was nominated to work...
Do you manage Change, or….
Being "different" was a core competency of not just me, but my boss for this season, and probably why we bonded so well initially. He could have easily selected an office in FSD Headquarters in Bethesda, but having been around HQ in other divisions, he knew that would...
SO… engage with Change?
As you might have guessed from last week, despite saying we would never move to DC, by the Summer we had made the decision to make a Change and permanently leave Texas for the DC area. Even though the project was not in the greatest shape, the opportunities looked...
The renewal of Hope..
Transitioning the project from Research to FSD included my boss changing into our division, and physically moving from New York to DC where our headquarters was. His choice of offices was a small marketing office that was in Crystal City mostly used for reps that...
executing Hope…
Having already worked multiple business shows for IBM on the Space Program, I was the natural person to hit the road for demos once we had enough hardware and software to do something convincing. It is always a little stressful - ensuring you have the right...
The wonder of Hope…
IBM had always been involved with the American government marketplace and formed the Federal Systems Division in 1957 to give a special team for that focus. Initially working on Defense-related projects, it would quickly also be the home of the work on the Space...
observing Hope…
Now surfing across the top of IBM, I had access to VP's and Senior Vice President's who literally managed over 100,000 people. It was a long ride up through the many layers of the company to get there, competing on ideas and approaches against each other to "win" the...
What do you Hope for in partners?
While I was helping get the Intel card up and moving through IBM, our specific challenge was to build something that had multiple processors. The idea was to demonstrate that with more than one processor, you speed things up faster than waiting for the silicon to get...
managing Hope…
It was always dicey traveling out of the Ithaca area in the winter, which is basically not July 😉 We were heading to a meeting down at IBM Research in late January to discuss the handoff of the design to manufacturing, and 4 of us were standing in the Binghampton...
Hopeful engagement…
Our little card was starting to get some notice across IBM, and for our little team, I was assigned to go out and meet with customers. As such I had been having conversations with a sales rep out in Chicago that was working with a very large publishing firm. She had...
How to renew your Fun?
The center of the IBM universe was a very small town in "upstate" New York, which I had learned meant "... everything NOT in New York City". Nestled between Valhalla, and Pleasantville (who could script that), Armonk was we now what we call the "Mid Century Modern"...
Fun execution…
With many not flying, it is fun to reminisce a bit about a different era of flying, when it was a little less uptight and a lot more Fun. If you are under 40 you probably never flew on a 747 or a DC 10, and definitely not one that had a stand-up bar - in the cabin. ...
The wonder of Fun…
I have traveled to the Silicon Valley area that is now so revered since early in the '80s at the start of my career. When I first went out, there were still lots of cherry trees that were native there, and the "Valley" included stands that sold baskets of them by the...
Fun observations…
This little card from Intel was roiling large portions of IBM, which I had Fun observing. This nearly 100-year-old company had been able to dance through multiple changes adroitly. Now with so many competitors in so many different fields, the byzantine leadership...
partners for Fun…
I know I was gone for 250 of the 300 days available in 18 months for this season… New York’s taxes are SO horrendous AND they only tax you when you are “in the state” that you actually keep track. When I had the chance to actually take the family to Chicago (where...
Fun management…
These stories are going to exceed your realism meter... as in "there is no way THAT is true". Yes, they are actually true and I will not exaggerate - they don't need it. It was a bizarre season where I 1) had the energy to keep up this craziness, 2) it seemed...
engaging with Fun…
We were into our second week of touring Europe with the kids. I realized that with Amie 12, the “family” would be in a different place within 6 years. We had set about driving through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and were this day somewhere in Germany. Driving...
The Opportunity to renew…
I have written about being fired before, and I have used that story with a number of others who now I can honestly say, "I know how you feel". It is not fun, and yet... like the Stock Market, it puts in the "bottom" that you either grow from, or get angry. In this...
executing Opportunities…
I was fortunate that there was another tech company literally across the street that needed a VP of Engineering. I interviewed with the leadership team and found it was similarly a merger of 3 companies that were mostly in the Imaging space - storing and processing...
wonder what Opportunity is?
After a couple of years, the work at Merant was into a "good" rhythm. I was enjoying meeting with customers and trying to figure out how to develop Product Roadmaps that would resolve issues they were having both with our current offerings, and also the market...
observing Opportunity…
The company I joined was headquartered in Maryland, but I led teams from an acquisition located in Beaverton Oregon, which in turn had bought a company in the UK. Being in DC was actually helpful as I could bridge the time differences, but also meant I had long trips...
The Opportunity to partner…
At a Women In Technology meeting a few years ago, a young woman said "How did you construct such a perfect career plan for all of these experiences?" Well... if you read these regularly, you know that planning is not really a core competency. Recall I got the Fannie...
management Opportunity…
It was another meeting, another group of people, and by knowing the list, I didn't even need to know the topic. I could tell you who would say what, what would not be decided, what would not be done... and I knew more than ever it was time to move on. Through a series...
Opportunity to engage…
Some of my first memories are musical - playing records at 78 because the would go faster 😉 And of course, the College Kids dancing and having fun while music was playing set the standard that those go together. I took piano and quickly got good enough to...
renew your Guts…
The structure of these postings causes me to bounce around a lot. To be frank I don't need an excuse to bounce around - that is a core competency so maybe I should replace renew with random 😉 And I am old enough to know that doesn't work for others... and actually...
execute your Guts out..
Two of my kids worked in my organization - not directly in my chain, but in an adjacent piece that did Operations for the code that my team wrote. Ops and Engineering classically have "different" types of mindsets, and I had actually been in both, and recognized that...
Guts to wonder…
I come from a long line of tinkerers. Both my grandfathers had no money through the Depression and World War II, so they had to reuse/repair everything. That was passed along to my Dad who looked with disdain on "new" anything. People make fun of McGyver, but I grew...
Do you have the Guts to observe?
It was another Lock-In for our Church Youth Group. A time tested recipe for lack of sleep, lots of hormones, and hopefully some memories that will last. This particular one I arrived on fumes to start with - a long hard week of work, and then the drive down to...
What Guts do your partners have?
When you would walk into a Debate Round, you would put your name on the ChalkBoard - your number, and then your names, so the Judge would know who you were. You would get scored both as a team and as an individual. As such you had a "brand" as a team. Jack and Jones...
… the Guts to manage…
We were losing the game. It was the final of the All-Star Tournament, and as such it was a blend of players from multiple teams. It was the age (U-16) when individual stars could be overcome by great teamwork, which is how we had gotten into the Finals. And yet, we...
engaging with guts…
I had already planned to get back to harder rock this week - I fake the love of the others music but hard rock is my first love. Following Feet was going to Guts - as in: "You are going to need them to get your own and other Feet to move". AC/DC was what I had...
Feats of renewal…
Where are your Feet going?My new profession is a lot like teaching Sunday School. You enter someone's life and, for a season, are with them for a part of their journey. Hopefully, things will go well, and at least with 6th-grade boys, they will graduate and will no...
Feet executing Feats
How do your Feet execute?I am pretty sure this is the longest I have had my Feet in the same place... probably since I was born. I am taking yet another class, this one on "The Neuro Science of Change" spending a lot of time on the "embodied self"... and for me, it...
Feats of wonder…
wonder what Feat you will be impacted by?I was wearing a baseball cap with NASA on it, which matched the T-shirt of the young man checking us out at Costco. We naturally struck up a conversation, not that I ever need an excuse 😉 I started talking about my work on...
observing your Feet’s Feats…
Are your Feet going where you want to go?Many people are starting to reconnect to their initial goals for their lives. Being forced to actually hold still for Covid, I can certainly relate - this much time to NOT be chasing after something has brought a different...
The Feat your partners perform…
What Feat will you do for a partner...High School Debate was something you could not do by yourself. You had a partner, and you won or lost together, and there is something about being closely linked with someone else that has always worked better for me. Growing up...
How are your Feet managed?
Do you manage on the wrong Feet?Breakdowns are typically the places where great stories start... not end. It is the realization that something is not working, or you are not fitting in, or the thing you have designed doesn't work. While it seems like a failure, it...
What Feat engages your Feet?
Feet engage for different reasons...Happy "Federal-Sponsored-Holiday-for-Italian-Americans-now-controversial-because-of-who-they-chose-to- honor." Columbus Day was on-and-off through history - starting in 1792, refreshed in 1892 when 11 Italian Americans were lynched...
… the renewal of Patient…
It was the classic corporate meeting, conducted in a classic large conference room on the West Coast. All of the officers of the company were gathered to hear from our new CEO. Until recently, he had only been a member of the board, but with acquisition after...
…executed by Patience…
Engineering is a field that requires systematic thinking, applied linearly, and methodologically to problems. The best compliment you can pay them is using the phrase "reduced to practice". That means that you can actually show someone else exactly how to reproduce...
…the wonder of Patient…
My sons were musing with me about the continuing dominance of the USB interface on computers. The "Serial Bus" was originally looked down on - it was slow, it was "only serial", and would "clearly be replaced with faster". The new version of USB will actually likely...
observing Patience…
Our boss had hired a consultant to come in "help our Team be more productive". It was like the LAST thing I really wanted to do. First, we were not a team - more a collection of people put together because we all had something to do with Data... but beyond that, it...
Partners for Patience…
We were in a bad place. We had sold software that we had barely started writing, and the customer was figuring it out through a series of conversations that had made it up the chain to the business leader. My engineering team was obviously intimately involved, and...
Patient management…
Those two words have NEVER been used with me... until I had to. It was the only thing that would work, at scale, with a global team. Being random and abstract is lots of fun, and I still have times for it... but to really manage well, you have to be predictable. In my...
Patiently engaging…
You may not realize it, but not only have I been working on an artist each week, but these themes have also been building. So after Virtue, comes Patience... well, after someone who like me didn't have it, suggested it 😉 I have slowly been telling more and more...
… and the renewal of Virtue…
An interesting thing to observe through this season has been the increasing focus on Justice - that there are things that are Right and Wrong. That actually can be a good outcome for the future - that there is some Virtue that can be discerned. For a season I read a...
executing Virtue…
We had gotten the critical part of the meeting, where we had laid out most of the issues and alternatives and were deep into the discussion of pros and cons. None of us had been paying attention to the clock as we were countering a paring as great fencers on the...
Virtue wonders….
One of the Virtues instilled in me since I can remember is the power of Relationships. Watching the college kids when I was little, I noticed how much the enjoyed talking and being with each other, and actually let me feel a part of that community. Observing the...
How are Virtues observed?
As I leaped out of IBM just before they laid off 40,000 people, I was fortunate to land a job at Fannie Mae. Their Vice-Chairman saw a Business Week article (remember that magazine...) about Software Reuse, and directed the CIO to pursue it. It makes sense - write...
Virtue partners…
A great mentor of mine said that you don't miss the work, you miss the people when you move on. That is particularly true of partners who are really that - who work tirelessly to support you, help you by both listening to you, and also being people of Virtue. So...
Do you manage with Virtue?
As a part of my interview process for my last "real" corporate gig, I was to the round where I was interviewing with leaders who would be my peers. One of them had been in a startup that the company had purchased, and he was clearly different than the others, and we...
What Virtue engages?
It will not surprise you that I was a big fan of the early Woody Allen movies. His wry ability to observe the world around him, and turn everything on its head I have tried to adopt most of my life. One of his earliest observations was about advice from God to a man...
The renewal of Delegation…
If you feel bad about how effective you are with Delegation, look at God. As we like to say these days "... you had one job.....". He set up... wait for it.. the ENTIRE universe. Like I remind people often, everything you see around you comes from about 28 lego...
Delegation execution…
"Every time I give them something to do, I have to redo it. Spelling errors, grammar, all of it!" Gently I suggested ... "... you have trained them to do that". "OH no! I am not a micromanager - I really support my people, and want to see them grown and...
The wonder of Delegation…
Watching my grandkids, you watch as they slowly begin to control the world around them. Their first tool is crying, which puzzled young parents eventually figure out the difference between a tired cry, a frustrated cry, a hungry cry, or a bored cry. As they get...