No matter how you look at it, one person cannot be evaluated and paid in isolation of budgets.
Steven Sinofsky
Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.
Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.
The best work for creative folks on the team is when the problem is big and the solution escapes everyone.
Knowledge created a new culture of business derived from the information gathering and analysis capabilities of first the mainframe and then the PC.
People love to play expectations games, and that is always bad for collaboration internal to a team, with your manager, or externally with customers.
When you delegate work to the member of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives.
The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.
Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.
It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.
Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.
Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.
When you build a product, you make a lot of assumptions about the state of the art of technology, the best business practices, and potential customer usage/behavior.
Things will absolutely go wrong. In a healthy team, as soon as things go wrong, that information should be surfaced. Trying to hide or obscure bad news creates an environment of distrust or lack of transparency.
As much as we think of performance management as numeric and thus perfectly quantifiable, it is as much a product of context and social science as the products we design and develop.
It's not cool to have your name in print when it's not the truth.
I always feel great. I get to come to work every day and see the build from the night before, and every day we do more stuff.
With the general availability of Windows 8/RT and Surface, I have decided it is time for me to take a step back from my responsibilities at Microsoft.
I've always advocated using the break between product cycles as an opportunity to reflect and to look ahead, and that applies to me, too.
After more than 23 years working on a wide range of Microsoft products, I have decided to leave the company to seek new opportunities that build on these experiences.
I like a good cliche because it reminds you that much of management practice boils down to things you need to do but often forget or fail to do often enough.
When faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure, write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it.
While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.
My father, an entrepreneur but hardly a technologist, was looking to buy a computer to 'automate' our family business. In 1981, he characteristically dove head first into computing and bought an Osborne I.
A moment of disruption is where the conversation about disruption often begins, even though determining that moment is entirely hindsight.
From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.
At some point, a group of people working towards similar goals will exhibit a distribution of performance.
Groups tend to believe their work is harder, more strategic, or just more valuable while underestimating those contributions from other groups.
Despite demand, the BlackBerry avoided offering generalized web browsing support.
BlackBerry required tethering for some routine operations, and for many, the only way to integrate corporate mail was to keep a PC running all the time.
The cloud-powered smartphone and tablet, as productivity tools, are transforming the world around us along with the implied changes in how we work to be mobile and more social.
Continuous productivity manifests itself as an environment where the evolving tools and culture make it possible to innovate more and faster than ever, with significantly improved execution.
If the work requires smart, talented, creative people, then more than anything, you want to enable folks on the team to create.
