Every organization has a moment when something goes wrong and the first question asked is, “Whose fault was this?” If the answer isn’t immediately clear, your RACI matrix has failed at its primary job. And if the answer points to someone who never had the authority to prevent the failure, your RACI is worse than […]
Managing AI Agents: The Career Skill Nobody’s Teaching Yet
Most management training teaches you to motivate, coach, and develop people. But your next “direct report” might be an AI agent, and everything you learned about managing humans will steer you wrong. AI agents are entering the workforce faster than organizations can adapt. They book meetings, draft documents, process requests, and increasingly take autonomous action. […]
Stop Calling Everything AI
A Cost-Based Guide to Choosing the Right Approach We talk about “AI” as if it were a single thing. It isn’t. A rules engine, a fraud model, and a large language model all get labeled AI, yet they differ radically in cost, risk, predictability, and governance. Treating them as interchangeable is how organizations end up […]
The Myth of the Intuitive Interface
Every software team claims to build “intuitive” interfaces. It’s become meaningless praise, like calling food “artisanal” or describing a startup as “disruptive.” The word obscures more than it reveals. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: no interface is truly intuitive. Every interaction model requires learning. The question isn’t whether users need to learn something, but whether what […]
The Hidden Tax of Bad Architecture
Every organization pays two technology budgets. The first appears on your financial statements: infrastructure, licenses, engineers. The second is invisible: the complexity tax on every project, every feature, every maintenance task. McKinsey research puts this hidden cost at 20 to 40 percent of an organization’s entire technology estate. Not a rounding error. A material portion […]
Why Broken Windows Lead to Broken Software
A single unpatched vulnerability. One function that violates your architecture. A test suite nobody trusts. These small compromises don’t stay small. The Broken Windows Theory, originally developed to explain urban decay, offers a powerful lens for understanding why some codebases remain clean while others descend into chaos. The principle is simple: visible signs of neglect […]
Why Execution Matters More Than Strategy
Strategy is cheap. Every organization has one. The graveyard of failed companies is filled with brilliant strategies that never survived contact with reality. The difference between market leaders and cautionary tales isn’t the quality of their ideas. It’s their ability to execute. Execution isn’t a tactic. It’s a discipline. It’s the systematic process of exposing […]
Architecture as Culture
Building Software That Stands Good architecture is not a diagram on a wiki page. It is not a committee’s quarterly pronouncement. It is a shared instinct. It is a collective reflex that fires whenever someone proposes a shortcut, ignores a boundary, or conflates convenience with simplicity. Organizations that treat architecture as a deliverable end up […]
The Law of Demeter: Why Objects Shouldn’t Talk to Strangers
The Law of Demeter (LoD) states that each object should only communicate with its immediate neighbors—and no one else. Also known as the Principle of Least Knowledge, this software design guideline encourages loose coupling between components. The law originated in 1987 at Northeastern University during the Demeter Project, a research initiative focused on adaptive programming. […]
Keep It Simple: The Hidden Cost of Complexity
Heavy Boats: The Hidden Cost of Complexity High tides float all boats. But when the tide goes out, the heavy boats find themselves on land. When we build a business—particularly a software business—we tend to make fast decisions and add features with little regard to cost and complexity. During growth phases, this feels rational. Revenue […]