Cultivate Informal Leadership
Leaders in a team are sometimes called “Leads” or “Chiefs,” like technical leads, project leads, chief programmers, and chief arc...
The Nonsense of Leadership (Princes and Priests)
Leadership is a term used by many, but sometimes understood by only a few. Again and again I feel compelled to question ideas about leade...
The Dolt’s Guide to Self-Organization (Presentation)
Here it is: my latest presentation. Five days of work, 38 drawings, 14 photos, 81 slides, and plenty of texts, to be delivered for the fi...
Make A “Social Contract” With Your Team
I have told you how to define goals, rules and boundaries for the people in your organization, and hopefully your team is on a great and ...
Quality: You Don’t Get What You Don’t Measure
I am not a saint. There have been some awful quality problems in the products that I was directly or indirectly responsible for. No, I wa...
Protecting Fish and System Administrators
I work for a company with a big open office space, in the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam. About 100 people work in an office that was the...
Good Managers Sometimes Have to Play Assholes
This is a guest post by Pawel Brodzinski. Pawel has his own blog called Software Project Management, where he writes about dealing with s...
Protect People
The first three years on high school were the worst of my life. Some guys in my class had chosen me as the center of attention in their n...
Communicate Your Goals!
Many years ago, during a board meeting, I once heard someone ask: “What was our corporate shared value of this year again?” And the C...
Checklist for Goals and Resolutions
Do you have resolutions for the new year? Are you defining new goals for your project or team? If the answer is yes, then you would do we...
Yes, Good Managers Are Manipulators
Are managers manipulators? Yes, I think so. Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine discovered that a complex system can only self-organize whe...
Managing Leaky Organizations
In a complex system each hierarchical level has novel and irreducible properties. This has far-reaching consequences for managers of comp...
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