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Inspired by Matthew Skelton's comment on Wholehearted I decided to read the book . This is not a review of the book, merely a note of the most important (to me, at least) take-aways. Being "whole" Why is it called wholehearted? The answer is given in the introduction and this helped me file the book in the right "box": a thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, [...] it is unwhole. Mike Burrows then gives examples of situations in which we experience that "magical chemistry" that makes performing (in a group of people) effortless. This is (at least to me) a powerful revelation and a great way to define what I get to experience from time to time when my organization just performs. When that happens we are whole. And it's an awesome experience. The other insight that I got is that a business is always "at war": with the market. But when it also goes to war against itself because of...

I recently mentioned in my best of 2024 this quote from  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208] : The problem is that the financial upside is always clear. Opportunity costs are sometimes clear, but often not clear. today I read this The Register article about Pat Gelsinger "resignation" from Intel. It mentions some of the opportunity costs that Intel got wrong (in hindsight, and many years later): The Itanium was going to be the high-end architecture, so there was no need for 64 bit extensions to x86, no matter how hard Microsoft asked. AMD disagreed, forcing Intel to grumpily adopt its standard. Atom was going to be the portable processor of choice, so let's flog off the Arm license. I find it always extremely fascinating to read about these stories, and hopefully learn something from them. And I think, in this case, it's really as Ryan Holiday put it: the financial upside is always clear (and sometimes too optimistic) and ...

What a great insight from the recent Refactoring podcast episode  with Laura Tacho ! https://lauratacho.com/blog/engineering-roadmap-destined-to-fail This is something I had intuitively grasped and, consequently, I always tried very very hard to weave the Engineering in the Product roadmap (and even after that, it's still difficult to find the right balance in the daily work, as some of my reports tell me). I'm grateful that Laura expressed this concept so clearly, allowing me to take the insight out of the subconscious (the things we do instinctively) and into the conscious space (the things we actively and purposefully seek out).