AI is not a niche tool or a future bet—it’s rapidly changing the world, and companies need to be diving into practical, strategic ways to integrate the technology across their business. And yet, it feels like a surprising number of people and companies still don’t see it. Beyond AI, Innovation shouldn't be limited to products, services...

For decades, companies have operated based on structures, models, and ideas developed during the Industrial Revolution—a time when efficiency was measured by physical presence, rigid work hours, and standardized processes. The conventional model of productivity—often summed up as “butts in seats”—has its roots in an era when physical p...

https://medium.com/illumination/why-big-tech-and-their-9-5-jobs-are-not-tempting-anyone-anymore-474ee9502873 Some quick thoughts... Like the author of the article, I am not here to say you shouldn’t work a 9-5 job. In fact, for many people, it provides stability, benefits, and a clear structure that works well with their lifestyle. The...

You've probably seen the news out of Meta, focusing on moving low performers out of their organization this year. If not, in a recent memo, Mark Zuckerberg told employees he "decided to raise the bar on performance management" and act quickly to "move out low performers." https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2025/01/16/meta-and-micro...

In a true employee-focused organization, one of the most important outcomes for the organization and its leaders is continually finding the right spot for each team member. People are not one-size-fits-all; they are individuals with unique strengths, experiences, preferences, and aspirations. The key to creating a productive and engage...

A unified leadership team is key to any organization’s long-term success. When leaders are on the same page, it creates stability and keeps things moving in the right direction. When you can keep a leadership team together for the long haul, it makes a huge difference. They build trust with each other, understand how to work through ch...

Companies seem to be caught in a pattern of waste—wasting the time, energy, and attention of their most talented employees. This is especially true in IT. Activity = Productivity (and it shouldn't...) For many IT executives, our days are packed with back-to-back meetings. During these meetings, we’re often glued to our laptops, trying ...

“In a five-minute break, walking to the bathroom and back, we were able to completely change the company strategy around support for Linux and open source.” When I left the Microsoft .NET ecosystem in January 2018, my development experience was almost entirely Windows-based. I wrote C#/.NET Framework code on a Windows PC using Visual S...

"When Satya Nadella took over as CEO, the company was lumbering and uncool. He cleaned up a toxic culture, crafted the deal of the decade, and put Microsoft back on top." Fascinating article, long read! Satya's transformation of Microsoft is nothing short of a master class in leadership. From decisive decision-making to fostering strat...

Amazon’s five-day in-office mandate feels like forced attrition—because it is. For knowledge workers, flexibility has become the new gold standard of employee benefits. It offers a more modern way to work, especially in how people structure their day. For me, it’s about having the freedom to adapt to life’s demands while still getting ...

As an industry we waste so much time trying to predict how long things will take instead of putting our time and energy into building and iterating. The amount of bloat and complexity in IT is crippling. It's so bad now that there are frameworks to estimate how accurate your estimates are. Estimating your estimates. Crazy. What we thin...

In 2018, I got back into PHP development and one of my first projects was navigating the maze of UTF-8 encoding intricacies, particularly the unique challenge of dealing with widespread Latin-1 encoded data mixed within predominantly UTF-8 encoded MySQL tables. The Problem: Latin-1 encoded data displayed as UTF-8 (i.e., garbled looking...

A quick thought to end the week..... 1. Be an Ideal Team Player (Humble, Hungry, Smart) 2. Be really good at what you do 3. Get lots of high quality work done