Posts

Don’t let the marketing fool you, one size does not fit all. Maybe it’s the algorithm, or perhaps it’s recency bias, and realistically, it’s probably a combination of the two, but I’ve increasingly seen more and more posts about what type of leader someone should be. And predominantly I’ve seen the advice to be written as absolutes, which you all know, only Siths deal in absolutes. Posts and advice of "as a manager, you should never micromanage", or "as a leader, you should not be hands-on", or even topics like "you should not be the smartest one in your team". ...

Needing a hero in your organization is a warning sign, unless you’re Disney or Marvel of course. However, at any company, it’s a red flag, because it means there are layers of failures, many of them silent and undetected for a long time. I say this while actually being that hero recently at Sidecar Health. We had a legacy ETL pipeline that had been silently failing for 6 months and no one knew. A vendor drops provider data into our SFTP, and we are supposed to ingest it, validate it, and update internal models. This data is customer-facing and valued by our executives, which makes it even harder to reckon with how long it had gone unnoticed. Now I finally know the answer to the age-old question: when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a noise. ...