Tag: management
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Six to eight weeks, down to two days – How Tanzu Product Management Uses AI
I talked with Chris McClanahan and Purnima Padmanabhan about how the Tanzu product management team actually put AI to work. Ideation went from six to eight weeks to a couple of days, and almost none of what got them there was tooling. It was org chart work: one pod instead of hand-offs, onboarding the AI…
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If speeding up coding was never the problem…then why are we spending money on speeding it up?
When it comes to measuring developer productivity driven by AI, we’ll probably land on the same conclusion as always: counting lines of code isn’t as useful as measuring the full cycle time from idea to code to delivery to a person actually using the app – lead time, concept to cash, whatever you want to…
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Got your deck ready?
Image by geralt on Pixabay. The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation. Predicable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this post since first reading it. The mystery of this is that everyone complains about slides-driven work cultures, but the revealed preference is that people…
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Laws, anecdotes, and other shit people say
Betty Crocker, mid-1950s. I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like…
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Management is always eager to “reduce costs.”
The real story lies “in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in the release. “This marks a structural pivot from labor…
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Enterprise AI needs new apps, enterprise AI doesn’t need new platforms
For your enterprise AI projects, what you want now is resilience. I’m using that term from a paper called “AI as a Normal Technology.” There, resilience means ” taking actions now to improve our ability to deal with unexpected developments in the future.” There’s a lot of great thinking in that paper, but I want…
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Scoping questions for business books
What type of organization is this book for? IBM or Facebook or OpenAI? Netflix or Warner Brothers? Mercedes or Tesla? Alaska or Belgium? Delta or SpaceX? HSBC or Square? Does this apply to management, employees, VCs, Wall Street investors, or customers? Feel free to pick multiple, but explain. Is this a playbook for how a…
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Survive the next meeting
This is a mode I catch myself in where all I’m focused on is getting through the next meeting. “Getting through” means running out the clock so that it’s over, getting out of it without any new work, and especially without “getting in trouble” for something. Obviously, this is bad most of the time as…
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Always have a pitch ready
”Organizational interest comes in waves. When it’s reliability time, VPs are desperate to be doing something. They want to come up with plausible-sounding reliability projects that they can fund, because they need to go to their bosses and point at what they’re doing for reliability, but they don’t have the skillset to do it on…
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Amazon’s culture went the wrong way
Big layoffs at Amazon corporate: “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” [the Amazon CEO] said. “Really, it’s culture.” The culture wasn’t right: his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the…
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You get the enterprise AI you deserve, or, while management search for AI workloads, workers gobble up the AI ROI
A round-up of recent “how is enterprise AI use and outcomes going?” links: Value seems to accrue to employee, the not enterprise. The ROI is, therefore, not legible. Related: Brian on “smart people” profiting from and using UI. The US military wants AI on every desk: “‘We want to have an AI capability on every…
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Supporting the executive
This is also what it’s like to work in corporate strategy and supporting the executive suite. It feels like a lot of time wasted when someone could have been coming up with fixes instead of silo-hopping. That said: the point of a system is what it does. So, coordinating with the giant organization is often…
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Seeing like a software company – When management meddling slows down the business because they need/want to measure and make decide. Also, good sub-plot on “the meeting for the meeting,” prep meetings and using the “back-channel” to get things done.
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Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job – I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them. Therefore you need more managers to oversee them.…
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Minimum Viable Humans. – “it’s only possible with algorithmic management taking over functions previously handled by human managers: performance monitoring, task allocation, basic feedback and guidance, coordination and information flow. On the positive side, this should translate into a sunset for the endless run of pointless meetings. Good riddance.”
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The coyote trap. – “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division…
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The Titan Who Couldn’t Let Go – Founder mode case study: “There’s a pattern here, and it’s bigger than Hughes. Obsession works–in short bursts, in narrow contexts, with clear feedback loops. But scale it up, let it harden into infrastructure, and it starts to rot the system from the inside. Hughes structurally disallowed any process…
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Prompts for management communication –
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Using AI for HR – management and workers
Enterprises pouring money into GenAI and CEOs treating AI agents like cheap labor – yet only 25% see ROI right now. Vibes: “Europe’s long holiday from history is over.” Also: IBM does RTO, predictions about DOGE layoffs, the term “platform” remains a favorite excuse for overcomplicated tech, and “autonomous killer robots.” AI comes for HR…
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No Rules Are Implicit Rules – The European view on enlightened American management policy: “Greg, I hate to bring it to you, but working for ten fucking hours a day is not the normal hour. I don’t care if you live in America or not. The section continues with other “grand” examples of managers taking…
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