Articles
Tag: stephen fishman
-
Social Media Etiquette for Our Hyper-Partisan Era
It’s been a rough few years online. We hit a new low in 2016 with displays of partisanship between friends, acquaintances and strangers. 2017 isn’t shaping up to be any better.
Continue reading...
-
The Expectations Game, or: How to Master the Performance Review Process
Whether you are on the giving or receiving side, not many people look forward to annual review time. The sense of foreboding is understandable given that the conversation revolves around accountability. So with teams, managers and individual contributors setting expectations and goals for the year ahead, I'm going to explain
Continue reading...
-
When It Comes to Metrics, Size Matters
Have you ever seen a salesperson boast about meeting their revenue targets without caring about whether the sale was profitable? Have your kids proudly showed you an A on their geometry test and ignored the fact that they haven't turned their homework in for a month? Has a delivery team
Continue reading...
-
You Can Have Your Robots and Keep Your Employees Too
Robots are all the rage in the media these days. Almost every story, whether news or fiction, says the same thing: robots are coming for our jobs. A few claim that robots will bring about a new age where humans are elevated into new jobs in existing and as of yet
Continue reading...
-
Crummy Intranets Call for Crazy Solutions
Is anything rarer than an intranet that employees love? While I’m fully versed in the black swan model of how it’s impossible to prove a negative, this might be the exception. All enterprise intranets and social networks have the same glaring flaw that technology cannot fix: search.
Continue reading...
-
Which Fate Will DevOps Choose?
Comic books have a certain math: for every superhero, there is a villain. But superheroes and super villains don't only exist in the comics. They roam the halls of the business community.
Continue reading...
-
Business Transformation Starts With Letting Go
People sometimes accuse me of not appearing focused on the problem at hand. And every time I give the same answer: we might just be seeing the problem differently. Picture a bottomless pitcher of milk turned on its side, spilling milk onto the floor.
Continue reading...
-
DevOps How To: Learning From Failure
A lie is being told in the meeting rooms and offices of corporate America. The lie is so basic and pervasive that it can be found in institutions throughout the world. The lie is linear causality.
Continue reading...
-
Netflix and Disney, Happily Ever After?
It's just over four years since Netflix's qwikster goof. People cancelled subscriptions, the Internet lit up with eulogies and pre-obituaries that pilloried CEO Reed Hastings and Netflix over what was perceived as a fatal arrogance.
Continue reading...
-
Mapping Our Way to Accountability
To some degree, we are all pretending. Executives pretend that they are always accountable and that they can hold others so merely by talking about it. Managers pretend the same thing. Individual contributors pretend that they are the only ones who are accountable.
Continue reading...
-
UX Anti-Patterns: Some Rules are Meant to be Broken
Anti-patterns can be hard to spot. Anti-patterns are the inevitable outcome when a rule set is applied so rigidly that it yields the opposite of the original desired outcome. User experience is no exception to anti-patterns.
Continue reading...
-
3 Keys to Your Next Promotion
This is not a "Top X Tips" article. If, after reading this article, you say to yourself "if I do these three things, I'm guaranteed a promotion," you are too naive to deserve a promotion.
Continue reading...
-
Automation is Evil: The View From the Other Side
I not only welcome our future robot overlords, I work with teams to build them.
Continue reading...
-
This is How We DevOps
Last month, instead of retreading over the tired “What is DevOps?” ground, I asked a different question: “How Do You DevOps?” While the debate over litmus tests and succinct definitions continues, one voice struck a chord. While I empathize with Josh Johnson’s angst and frustration, I would offer an
Continue reading...
