Articles for category: Growth

January 13, 2025

Greg Thomas

You’re Gonna Lose… Sometimes

Guaranteed, you will lose. Sometimes it will be a close loss (almost finished to the demo and then a pesky little pixel disrupted the whole thing). Sometimes it will be an epic shutdown on the launch pad that will pull down everything. Other times it might be trying to push things a bit too far and you destroy it all. It’s all a loss – it doesn’t matter whether it’s close or far away – it’s a loss. You won’t always lose, but you will lose. Now, is it worth it to complain about how much you lost by or

January 12, 2025

Greg Thomas

Your Place of Work

Your Place of work is anywhere you want it to be. Go to an office. Go to your desk. Go to a coffee shop. But make it useful, make it productive, make it valuable. If you’re not getting anything, it’s no longer your place of work. It’s just a place, but it needs to be a place where you get things done.

January 11, 2025

Greg Thomas

The Detractors

Detractors will never go away. I was surprised to see I wrote about this previously, many years ago. They aren’t there to help, they don’t volunteer, they don’t step in. They whittle at your efforts, they try to hold you back, and their job is to pull them down. With Detractors, it will always be the same – you can’t stop them, you can’t hold them back, you can’t engineer some way for them not to be there. You can only work through them and let them watch from the sidelines. And hope they join in.

January 10, 2025

Greg Thomas

But when does the Pilot End?

This is the big question, when does the pilot end? Is it going on forever (i.e., the Beta program that lasts 2 years)? Does it end after 3 months? When does it become the “now normal” and not the hanger-on of ideas? What defines its success? What metrics matter? If you’re asking these questions while you are in the pilot, while you are doing the work, while it is happening, you are asking them at the wrong time.  These are the questions that need to be answered BEFORE the pilot starts, BEFORE anything happens so that when you get to

January 9, 2025

Greg Thomas

The Point of Standups

The point of standups is to hear what others are doing. It’s a cue for what they are doing, for others to listen and jump in on. If you’re not listening, you’re not participating, you’re not there. It’s the listeners that make standups succeed, not the talkers. Listen.