Strong Manager or Weak Manager?

Here’s the link to my editorial on SSC last week. I was pleasantly surprised by the discussion, and was interested to see that rather than strong the word ‘brave’ popped up. That’s interesting to consider, it’s less about technical skills and more about personality, the willingness to fight the hard fights. Of course the hard […]

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I ran into a friend at a recent event and during the discussion he asked what I was doing lately because he couldn’t tell from my blog. Good comment, and reminds me how easy it is to forget to discuss what seems obvious. Last year my restlessness hit a new high. Training was starting to […]

Defining Your Culture

Imagine that you take over a team, department, maybe even a whole company, and as you look around at how things are done and how people are treated you decide that the culture isn’t what you want it to be. That doesn’t mean the current culture is bad, just that it doesn’t – from your […]

Writing Your Resume

There’s a lot of info out there about putting together a resume, and I probably can’t add a lot, but I reviewed a resume for a friend recently and of the notes I sent back, I wanted to share a couple here: Tell them what you want to do. Are you a DBA. An ETL […]

You Are Allowed to Care About Whatever You Want

I wanted to write this because its often overlooked. I care about things that may not interest you, things that may interest you, things that you may totally despise. And vice versa. As individuals that’s fine, we live our lives and move on. In a group setting it’s harder. Imagine you have a colleague who […]

Micromanaging

Micromanaging is one of those words that evokes an instant negative image. Certainly there are times when it happens, but it’s surprisingly hard to define well. Maybe a very rough high level definition is “excessive oversight”. Most of the time on the management side it happens due to inexperience, a lack of faith in employees […]

Celebrating Mistakes-Part 2

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s easy to say we want to take risks, much harder to set the boundaries so that you demand diligence. Taking risks shouldn’t be on the level of buying lotto tickets or a roll of the dice. It’s got to be a shared risk, one that you may […]

Celebrating Mistakes-Part 1

Most of us learn more from mistakes than successes. We talk about taking risks, but what is the average response when you fail – not good, is it? We’re not trying to fail, to make mistakes, to disappoint the boss. Does intent matter? Sometimes. There are mistakes and then, there are, mistakes. You can’t have […]

Fitting In-The Editorial

This editorial I wrote ran on SQLServerCentral a couple weeks back and generated a lot of comments, and more than a little pushback. I was looking at it again today, thinking what would I do different to do a better job of getting the point across without getting pulled into visions of joining the Borg […]

Big Numbers

What had me reflecting on numbers was an article in the Financial Times (Conduit of Contention if you can find it) that talked about the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, which settles all the equity trades on American exchanges. According to the article the DTC settled 1.48 quadrillion dollars in transactions last year, the equivalent […]

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