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Competency Drift and Accidental Strategic Hollowing
Most outsourcing decisions are easy to justify. Reduce costs, ship faster, let the team focus on what matters. Individually, they’re often the right call. The problem is that the impact of these decisions compounds. What starts as offloading commodity work can quietly become ceding the thing that makes you different–not through one bad decision, but…
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Core Competencies vs. Core Capabilities: A Framework for Strategic Decision-Making
I’ve watched companies outsource their competitive advantage because “the vendor was cheaper.” I’ve seen engineering teams spend months building authentication systems from scratch because “we’re a technology company, we build things.” Both mistakes stem from the same root cause: failing to distinguish between core competencies (what makes you unique) and core capabilities (what you need…
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Context, Not Control
Your job as a senior leader isn’t always to make decisions — it’s knowing when to make them and when to ensure others do. People talk about ’empowerment’ all the time, but empowerment without context is just abdication. Empowerment with control is just micromanagement wearing a friendly T-shirt. What actually works is giving smart, senior…
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Questions for the Chaotic Neutral
For the last decade or so, I’ve been collecting questions. Good ones. Weird ones. Chaotic ones. Questions that make people stop and actually think instead of giving the usual autopilot responses. I started out calling them my “Tinder opening lines” because that’s where the idea came from, but they’ve become so much more useful than…
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Why I’m Releasing My People Manager Training Series
Over the course of my more than 15 years as a CTO, I’ve learned many technical lessons. But the lesson that has mattered the most, and has had the greatest impact on the teams I’ve led, is this: strong teams are built by strong managers leaders. That idea didn’t come from the world of tech…
