I realized this past week that I have been guilty of not trying to build a company, but rather building something that might sell someday. It’s not that selling your company is a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind if it happened. However, the focus is not the same. I was finishing up Steve Jobs biography […]
Tag Archives: work
Answering the Question Prematurely
I was at a client site the other day and they were talking about some exciting new initiatives that were getting ready to kick off. While there was a good bit of excitement around it, there was also frustration with some of the thinking around how to attack these new opportunities. It seems that there […]
Removing My Email Fix
I am an email junkie. I check my email probably 50 times a day at least, either on my phone or while working at my desk. To paraphrase an old Chicago lyric “Email, you’re a hard habit to break.” However, this week I have set about changing my habits. I did the math on the […]
Why An Occasional Outage Is A Good Thing
I had a major internet service interruption at my office yesterday. I called the service provider and found out that the whole block was offline and that it was going to be a while before service was restored. I had five minutes of panic, thinking about where I needed to go to get back on […]
A Different Kind of Performance Review
I was reading an article by Premal Shah of Kiva this past week. The focus of the article was on how to do reviews for the people that work for you. I thought he had some really good ideas on how to get away from the traditional annual review. At Kiva, the staff are required […]
Being Ruthless About What You Shouldn’t Do
I have been reading and studying the book End Malaria this week. It’s a compilation of 62 authors who came together to help, as you might imagine, end malaria in Africa. For every book that you purchase, $20 is donated to buying mosquito nets. The first part of the book is about focus, a topic that […]
Serving Two Masters – Will It Work?
I have been running Rocket Hangar for about a year now. When I started the company, I had two primary goals: 1. Do interesting and valuable work. 2. Don’t go broke For #2, I lined up a series of consulting gigs that I still work on to this day, more or less. Smaller gigs have […]
What is the optimal company headcount?
I got a topic from Kade Ross (@kadeross) last night related to an article about the effect of increasing headcount on employee productivity. You can read the article here. The gist of the article is this: for every 10% you increase company headcount, productivity drops by 6.3% for each employee. Kade calls this the borg, […]
Unfocused
I was reading a post by Michael Hyatt this week called ‘Why I Stopped Reading Your Blog’. A few of the points he made I agreed with, a few I didn’t. One of the points made me think for a while about this site, specifically his point about being unfocused. Michael is a great writer and a tremendous […]
Re-invention
One of the great gifts of being a professional in technology is the gift of re-invention. What was true of me yesterday does not have to be true of me tomorrow. As I was looking for opportunities to do something new, I made a purposeful decision to not focus on what I had been doing, […]