Recently, I had an email exchange with a good friend at work. He posed a question and a couple of us chipped in with what we thought might be helpful information. He mostly ignored our response and repeated the content of his original email as though we either didn’t read…
“Look, she’s been proven to be a liar in so many different ways. This is just another lie,” – Donald Trump It’s hard to believe anyone found this statement credible from a man who clearly didn’t care for whether or not his statements were true – he made them for…
A wise leader once told me, it’s not the problems that managers know about that cause them to get fired, it’s the ones they never see coming. As such, he made sure that his people told them of all the problems they were running into or heard about. This message…
In a probably apocryphal story, a scientist places a group of 5 gorillas in a cage. At the beginning of the day, he puts a banana on top of a pedestal. Whenever a gorilla attempts to climb toward the banana, he sprays all the gorillas with water, which they hate. This continues…
The other day in a planning meeting, a friend of mine suggested an idea for what we were engineering. I didn’t understand why that was necessary and it seemed like it might make things too complicated. I mostly wanted to understand why he thought it was necessary. He’s a smart,…
When I was a teenager, I started being able to challenge my father in games. Often after making some particularly aggressive play against my dad, he would retort: “I don’t get mad; I just get even.” This was something he said from time to time, sometimes when I was just…
Several years ago, when my friend’s wife turned 30, he invited many of their friends to play a game at their house. Each person came dressed as a particular character and then played out their role. The premise was that we were all stuck on an island, there were a…
“Things which can’t go on forever, don’t” – Stein’s Law Overdrive feels awesome. We push it and reap huge benefits quickly by pushing the system beyond its normal limits. Unfortunately, the system can’t operate that way forever. If we use overdrive for too long, the system will break, often irreparably.…
Sometime ago, I was in a meeting where one of the engineers asked the sales manager whether there was an update from a prospective customer. This question of curiosity was met with ferocious opposition as the sales manager launched into a tirade about how we’re not just going to go after any…
Back in High School, my friends and I teased one another as a way of showing affection. Come to think of it, we still do this. In this vein of showing affection, I took to calling my best friend a loser. I didn’t intend it like it sounds. He has…