Multipliers - How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman is a book filled with MBA self-help lingo. I read it on the recommendation from a colleague and in between the narrative case studies got some real value out of it. The book’s premise is that a leader can act as either a Multiplier or Diminisher. Multipliers amplify those around them, encourage, and enable those with growth mindsets. Diminishers micromanage, don’t trust colleagues to execute, and write pithy …

Opportunities arise at random - in life, nature, and work. Luck Surface Area is an idea of increasing your exposure to these opportunities. We default to staying in our comfort zones and operating within those safe and familiar boundaries. This makes life predictable, but it also puts us in competition with everyone also operating in those boundaries. We also miss out on the opportunities that arise outside the boundaries.

The idea of Luck Surface Area is not to be more productive, nor to work …

Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting work in progress, desk checks, spikes, stories, and tasks. Coming from a startup we delivered high quality software without all of that labelled process. The mentor lent me his copy of Extreme Programming by Kent Beck, and that book gave me a framework to develop …

The Beaconsfield Returned Services League Park has a WW1-era howitzer, a skate park, and a retired Australian Army leopard tank. The howitzer is aimed at cars driving along the main road, while the tank ranges an empty lot. Fifty years after manufacturing the howitzer the Germans also made the tank. It’s possible they also made the skate park but in my research I couldn’t find any evidence. Within firing range of the tank is the the Jubilee Bakery where you can get a pretty good meat …