Leadership & Change

When the Army started building replacement hospitals about twenty years ago, the people who had done it before had already retired. Shaun O'Leary, who worked on one of those projects, described what followed in a comment on my post this week. By his account, the new teams faced a steep learning curve, and poor coordination led to mistakes, delays and eventually lawsuits. The teams weren't kept together afterwards, so the next hospital faced much of the same learning again. On

We put a team of young developers in charge of code that was older than most of them. Seven applications, thirty years of patches, billions of dollars in operating revenue running through them, and a service provider that was winding down whether we were ready or not. We had bought the legacy software from them, and responsibility for keeping it running was moving to us. Naturally, we asked for the documentation. We got a user manual from 1996. Most of the original developers

Four of us heard the same wrong word on a Gino Vannelli record last weekend. And I was the reason. I was golfing with some friends at a beautiful course in Kananaskis Country. Dave was kind enough to drive, which meant I got to look around instead of paying attention to the road. At one point, I noticed several dark bovines standing by the side of the road, out of the sun. And for reasons that made perfect sense in my head, I immediately belted out: "Black cows look better in