Blog

11 months ago

Greg Thomas

Always Be Challenging

Don’t worry about the closing. Worry about the challenging. If you’re always there, you’re always working, you’re always pushing, you’re never giving, you’re keeping going (like this sentence) – then you are doing the right thing. Always be Challenging.

The Big Pivot

The question when determining to undertake a pivot isn’t so much what you are going to pivot to as whether your team is going to be able to undertake the pivot. Pivots are executed by people not by products. The product is there to do what you tell it to do. The question will always be – “Can my team pivot, are they able to make this change?” Not all teams can, the follow-up then becomes “How do I get them there?”

11 months ago

Greg Thomas

Can the Team Be Challenged?

Can you challenge your team? Not by giving them more work, but by questioning why they undertook a certain strategy, why they are following a certain pattern, what did they choose library A over library B? Can you ask them a question and have a discussion, not to assert your knowledge and authority but to learn and grow through asking why? The best teams ask each other why all the time, not for ego, but for team growth.  

11 months ago

Greg Thomas

The Establishment of a Partnership

I buy your product, and you get my money. We have a partnership, and we are working together. If I don’t like your product, ranting and raving about it, but it never comes to you, that does nothing for our partnership. If I’m using your product incorrectly, that doesn’t mean you have a bad product, that means we have a disconnect, and if not talked about, does nothing for our partnership. There is always a partnership in everything we do, but if we never talk about how to make it better or figure it out, we’ll never have the opportunity

11 months ago

Greg Thomas

The Real-Time News Cycle

I remember being glued to this tracker for days and weeks 5 years ago.  It was like watching a slow moving train in action sweeping from country to country. Although informative, it did nothing for my well-being.  I write this at a time when real-time news cycles have the potential to derail our days completely with little disregard for how it affects us.  We seem to have gone back to that era where a firehose was being shot at us, and we were trying to find the needle of good within it. Sometimes the only option is lower the pressure