How To Get The Performance Evaluation You Want — Playing an open-world game can be very rewarding. At their best these games are beautiful, immersive, rewarding explorations of an expansive world. At their worst they can feel like big empty maps absent of direction and layered with frustration. Imagine for a second that you’re a silent hero navigating the…

What Not To Do When You Lead A Team — I consider a movie good if it helps me escape from reality for a couple hours. Some are better than others to that end. The 1990’s saw the release of a bevy of such films. Immerse yourself in the laundry list of films and you’ll eventually uncover the 1995 gem…

Guidelines For Project Status Reporting When You Don’t Have A Crystal Ball — Once upon a time in 2003 in your favorite pirate film (no not that one) Lucky Jack was responsible for taking the H.M.S. Surprise and hunting down the Acheron to stick it to Napoleon in a time when Napoleon was winning. On this impossible mission Jack and his crew encountered…

How To Deliver Difficult Feedback — Before One Sunday after missing my Cowboys beat up on their rival Eagles, I was up late burning the last of my midnight oil. With each passing moment my resolve weakened and my error rate increased. Mistakes happen, and it sucks to make mistakes. …

How to Make Social Media Less Toxic — I: Part I: How We Got Here No matter who owns Twitter, whether Instagram’s timeline is algorithmic or sequenced, and regardless of whether TikTok is the future, you have control over what you see and who you engage with. The fun of social media is in its ability to serve up nuggets that we want to see…

And What They Have in Common with Indiana Jones — Let’s assume we’re Program Managers, and therefore responsible for the successful execution of a book of work. Our direct reports are Project Managers and those Project Managers own their respective projects. What then do we do with our time? We’re responsible for “oversight,” one of those words that is perfectly…

Half-baked observations because fully-baked commentary is boring and unhelpful (see: the curse of knowledge) — 🔎 Your Actions are Magnified People read into things. It’s easy to lose control. 🍌 Adapt Processes for Scale Most every process I had before doesn’t scale based on my new time constraints. 25 people needing my time is different than 4 people needing my time, e.g. 🧩 Don’t Try…

A catalog of learnings as a consultant, project manager, and coach — I write about my career as a consultant and project manager. If you’re out there just starting your career, or you’re looking for a fresh perspective, consider my work one more perspective. I’ve been doing this for a while and in that time I’ve learned a lot. What follows is…

7 People Management Archetypes — People management would be easier if people were inanimate objects. Unfortunately, people do have more personality than chess pieces♟️ (and certainly more self interest 💁‍♀️). We interact with people every day and as much as PhD’s would like to boil down human interactions to a program, free will is a…