As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see the hard costs of ignoring it. Culture isn’t just how we feel about work; it is the distributed operating system for how decisions are made when leadership isn’t in the room. There is company culture, […]
A few companies back, my manager and I inherited a group of teams after layoffs. Confidence was already low. People didn’t believe in the systems we maintained. Stakeholders lost trust in what we did. Results were inconsistent, and even routine work needed more verification than it should have. We tried to steady things, but it was hard to know what […]
I’m about to take yet another flight, this time flying to India. I’m excited, but then I can’t seem to pass the thought of why the heck security checks are so random. I had to come early to the airport because I simply couldn’t trust what would happen next. Over the years, I’ve been to so many airports and across […]
Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for failures. For influence. Some people became too visible, too connected. They were deemed likely to become dangerous later, so they had to go. The mechanism was called ostracism. In essence, it […]
In 1935, Boeing had a new bomber prototype, the Model 299, which later became the B-17. It was impressive, and it was also easy to mess up because it had more switches and steps than pilots were used to. During a demonstration flight, the aircraft lifted off, climbed, then stalled and crashed. The investigators did not conclude that the pilots […]