Behind the Book: Street-Smart Management Wisdom
September 2, 2026
Nobody warned me that becoming a manager would feel like being handed the keys to a spaceship and told to fly it while already in orbit. I first became one in 1981.
Tag: Leadership
Lessons from 33 years in corporate life and the books that build real authority. Managing people, communicating up, and why the smartest leaders put their expertise into a book instead of a slide deck.
CareerNobody Applied
September 1, 2026
If you cannot fill a technical role, the problem may not be your pay or your posting. I went looking for database administrators in the United States and nobody applied, which surprised me at the time.
IT OperationsEvery Call Came to Me Because No Rule Existed
September 1, 2026
If you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
IT OperationsThey Hated the Rotation Until They Could Put the Phone Down
September 1, 2026
The valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
IT OperationsMy Team Never Got the Skill Back
September 1, 2026
The first time you outsource a capability is usually the last decision you get to make about it. I built a private cloud, my team had no hours to learn the technology, so I hired a firm to run it.
LeadershipOur Best Product Came From Work Nobody Approved
September 1, 2026
The most valuable product the firm I worked for ever sold started as two people fixing something on the side because a machine was slow and it bothered them. Nobody asked for it, nobody funded it, and nobody could have…
HiringThe Most Competent Person I Ever Hired
September 1, 2026
The best hire I made in thirty-three years produced no story. The resume was accurate, the interview matched it, the background matched the interview, and the work matched all three.
Decision MakingYou Will Never Get Everyone to Agree
September 1, 2026
Every transformation vendor sells alignment, and alignment is not for sale. I ran a company off paper and onto computers with hundreds of people across every department wanting different things, and no version of that project existed where everyone was…
AII Hired Someone Who Had Never Written a Line of the Language
September 1, 2026
A resume and an interview tell you what someone says they can do. Neither one tells you what they can do. I found that out as a new manager with a vice president title and no interview training, on a…
GhostwritingThe Golden Rule Breaks Books the Same Way It Breaks Teams
August 23, 2026
Joe Rockey argues that treating people the way you want to be treated destroys leadership, because you hand them the motivation that works on you. The same instinct explains why a ghostwritten book can be clean, competent and unmistakably somebody…
LeadershipWhen Every Option Is Bad
August 21, 2026
Most decisions are easy and get all the attention. The ones that define a career look like no-win scenarios, and the answer is to change the rules of the game instead of picking the least bad option.
For Executives & ProfessionalsHedge Words: 14 Phrases That Quietly Kill a Leader’s Credibility
July 14, 2026
Fourteen hedge phrases quietly discount everything a leader says, from "I'll try" to "it is what it is." Why each one backfires, the plain replacement that carries the same content standing up straight, and the shift that matters more than…