Recently I've been writing about the use of metrics in the workplace, especially the pitfalls of using them poorly or simplistically. The pitfall I'm writing about in this chapter is how when a measure becomes the objective it ceases to be a good measure.

This is often called Goodhart's Law (Wikipedia link), based on the writings of a British ( Read more... )

Yesterday I started writing about metrics. Specifically, using metrics on people in the workplace. It's become a fact of modern life that we're constantly measured in what we do at work. So much of what we do is already managed through computer software, and modern computer software makes it trivial to collect- and report- metrics. But the ( Read more... )

I'm thinking again about metrics in the workplace. I'm specifically referring to metrics on human work. For example, "How many tasks did each person on the team complete last week?" "What's the average time for a person to do X?" "What percentage of their time is this person/this team spending on category Y ( Read more... )

Yesterday I wrote about how my upcoming two+ week vacation will be the longest vacation from work I've taken. I suppose I should put an asterisk next to that claim. I actually took 3 weeks off from work once before. The asterisk is because it technically wasn't vacation time. It was a sabbatical ( Read more... )

One thing that's often frustrated me about working trade shows is how casually my colleagues take their duties. In my first sales job many years ago the company had a simple set of booth rules, simple and obvious things like "Be there" and "Pay attention to prospects, not your phone." My colleagues and I took these rules seriously. We understood ( Read more... )

An exchange in the comments on a recent post mentioning weather got me thinking more about how long periods of cold, gloomy weather weigh on a person's spirits. That in turn got me thinking about when such gloom has influenced a major decision. In effect, When has the weather changed your mind about something? ...And I don't mean just, "Gosh, I'm ( Read more... )

Silicon Valley Bank has collapsed. "So what?" you might think, "Isn't that just some community bank for liberal techies who care more about whether the lollipops in the lobby are cruelty free and LGBTQIA+ positive than what the interest rate is?First, SVB is not a community bank but a commercial bank. That means instead of offering personal ( Read more... )

As I'm flying to Detroit today I'm also traveling down Memory Lane. That's because when I started traveling regularly for work back in the mid 00s my first trip was to Detroit. (Yeah, I know, lucky me. 😂) What's changed about travel, particularly air travel, between then and now? Here are Five Things:

1) Driving to the airport. In the mid 00s I ( Read more... )

Last week was a blur of activity. After we got home from a nice, 9 day vacation Sunday evening I was back to work by 7:30am Monday morning. I was starting a proof of concept (POC) project with a customer.

POCs are a common part of the enterprise sales process. We can do all the presentations and demos of our product, but before buying the customer ( Read more... )

My company has been changing its security policies. We're implementing Okta integration for more and more of our internal applications. Okta is a SAML tool; see the remarkably lucid SAML explained in Plain English if you're curious to learn more ( Read more... )