Business is usually complicated, but sometimes a cartoon explains the disaster in your boardroom better than any consultant ever could.
You remember the “Underpants Gnomes” from South Park, right? They had this incredibly industrious, high-energy business plan that looked like this:
I was recently in a review with a team that was asking for additional resources. I strongly agreed that this team needed more resources but when I listened the case they made, I was not convinced. I thought I would share with you the coaching that I gave them.
Successful communications is all about what is heard, not what is said. In order for the message you want to send to be heard correctly, you need to speak into someone’s listening. That is to say, the conceptual model that people have in their head is what defines what they are able to hear. You need to understand someone’s conceptual model and craft your communication accordingly. If you make case for additional resources that does not fit an executives conceptual model, they won’t hear your argument and you won’t succeed.
Continue readingProblems, like the poor, are with us always. The trick is what to do about them. I recently told my boss about a previous job where someone had resigned and during the exit interview, they cited a particular problem as the reason for leaving. Had I known about the problem, I would have happily addressed it but I didn’t know about it until the person was leaving the company. The lesson is:
People can only solve the problems they know about.
So when you have a problem, whether it is a work, personal, career, product or service situation, you need to speak up and let people know about it. Don’t suffer in silence. In my experience, it is important to use the phrase “this is a problem”. That signals the need for action (e.g. addressing the problem).
Continue reading[2023 Update]
I’ve been meaning to update this for a while. The advice in this post is no longer current. A while ago we changed the implementation of Write-Host to being a wrapper on top of Write-Information. Prior to this, when you used Write-Host, there was no way to capture and process the data you wrote – because it just wrote to the host. Now that it uses Write-Information, it goes through a path that writes to the host AND allows you to capture and process that information.
-Jeffrey Snover
[End 2023 Update]
When you are writing or reviewing PowerShell scripts, I’d like you to remember the following rule of thumb:
In my previous post Evolution of a Script, Timing Operations, I used the technique of putting “__” in front of variable names to avoid namespace collision. Niklas Bergius left a comment saying, “Instead of using __ prefixes, wouldn’t $private: work?” Great question – let’s explore. Continue reading
I just love PowerShell! One of the things I love the most about it is that you can pick the level of programming you want, write a script and then evolve it to meet whatever need you have. Sometimes you want something quick and dirty and other times you want something you’ll share with others and then other times you want something that is going to be used in production. Continue reading
Technology heroes are always difficult subject. As an engineering manager, I remember the first time I participated in a “life boat” drill where you have to produce a stack rank of your engineers. Someone explained the process saying, “The task is to figure out if you had to throw out one person from a lifeboat, who it would be? After you figure that out, then you decide who would the next one be, etc. until you have a fully ordered list.” I chewed on that a bit and asked, “How many people are going to be left in the lifeboat?” When they asked me why, I replied “Because if there is only one person left in the lifeboat, it would be Mark but if there was more than one person left, Mark would be the first one I’d throw out.” Mark was a technical hero. Able to accomplish a great deal but at a great cost to the the organization. Continue reading
Years ago I enjoyed reading the book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. I got a lot of out of it but it had a small signal-to-noise ratio. I’ll save you a few bucks and a lot of time by sharing the 2 key lessons I got from the book: Continue reading
This week I read the story about how Iran hacked and captured one of our most sophisticated military drones. It struck me that this was an excellent example of the potentially disastrous ramifications of ignoring technical debt. It appears that the potential to spoof GPS was known and ignored for many years. Acknowledging and managing technical debt is an issue that separates the whiz kids from the graybeards in the tech industry. Let me start by saying that a military boof-a-rama of this magnitude is, by necessity, going to be followed up with multiple misinformation campaigns so I doubt we’ll really know what really happened for a few decades. Nevertheless it provides a teachable moment for us so let’s explore this topic. Continue reading
This morning my daughter asked my wife how many days there were until Christmas. That conversation didn’t go so well. 🙂 Seriously though, this year things started super early. The local store started selling Christmas stuff before Halloween and a couple of weeks ago our neighbors put up their Christmas lights. I can understand why my daughter is getting whipped up into an Christmas frenzy. That said, as my wife contemplates a big day of effort for Thanksgiving, I can understand why questions about Christmas are not welcome. Continue reading