“From the executive point of view, the decisions are bigger, and information from the front lines is less available and more coarse grained. It has been filtered up through various management layers before it gets to them. At their scale of responsibility, your ask is one of a hundred others just like it.”

The type of leadership we see in these endeavors, not just at the top, but throughout the organization as a whole, makes or breaks the long-term success of the organization.

Emotions exist in your mind as a set of thousands of statistically probable instances of a feeling (basically, predictions of a feeling) that your brain is estimating that you might feel in the next moment. It then continuously prunes down that set based on real time data coming from your senses until it arrives at a dominant feeling that matches the data. It then uses that validated feeling to make its predictions next time around.

The structure of organizations tends to reflect past decisions. Departments are created by leaders who have a specific mandate. They then hire support staff who align with their model of the world. The culture of that department then emerges as a function of the personal interactions between members of that group. Finally, the group begins to codify its work into rules and procedures which ultimately calcify into bureaucracy. Even a new leader taking over that department cannot instantly change that bureaucracy overnight.

Stress will destroy both your productivity and creative problem-solving ability — just the things you and your team need to compete in this economy. But the majority of leaders remain stubbornly in denial of the problem of stress and its effects on organizations.

The skills required to do jobs change in difficulty and complexity from entry to senior level. This is in accordance with the layers of abstraction embedded in most organizations, as you move from menial repetitive tasks at the bottom of the pyramid, to more abstract and creative tasks at the highest levels.

The quality of a system is very important to the business. By quality, I mean that the software is architected and built in such a way that ongoing maintenance, modification, and extension are all relatively low cost activities compared to the initial cost of building the system. In modern software development, we have well-established practices for building such systems, such as pair programming, proper use of design patterns, modularity and encapsulation of components, and automated testing. One needs only to be knowledgable about these practices, and implement them carefully, in order to produce a good system.

A good friend had been working for a startup company for about 6 months. He had been very excited about it initially. It involved robots, artificial intelligence, and some large scale computing problems. It was right up his alley. We’d gone out celebrating when he’d got the job, and he’d gushed about how cutting edge their technology was.

“We’re unhappy with the engineers we’ve hired to build the product. That’s why we’re calling you guys. We want you to fix it.” This was a frequent request back when I led a software consulting agency. Every week or so, from 2000 to 2011, I got a call or an email from someone whose company was facing imminent financial disaster unless they could salvage their failing software project.

We all have been making apps and putting them on the App Store for almost 10 years now. But if you look at the data, only a small number of apps are actually being used. Furthermore, these apps have pretty much all been made by the big technology players, like Google and Facebook. And yet, year after year, startups continue to build mobile apps that would be lucky to get a few thousand downloads.

Marc Andreessen famously quipped that “software is eating the world”. He was referring to the increasing reliance on technology, in nearly every industry, not just software companies.

The rise of SaaS, cloud and big data, AI and machine learning, and the ubiquity of mobile devices with easy access to high-speed Internet represent both a threat and an opportunity to traditional companies, particularly those established before the Internet revolution of the last few decades. These companies now find an imperative to either “act like a software company,” or be crushed by their competitors.