When you can’t do awesome things, because of crushing bureaucracy
I’ve sometimes bumped into people who bemoan their broken company cultures with varying degrees of self-awareness. Around 2007, a then-customer heard we were heading to Vegas to speak at BlackHat and said: You guys are so lucky.. my company won’t let us go to anything like that At the time I bristled. We worked for months on that research, dedicating many nights and burnt family time before we could stand up and talk. For sure our company celebrated those wins, but it irked me that someone who spent his free time tearing up backroads in a 4x4 felt we were gifted access to BlackHat. In the intervening decade+, we’ve encountered genuinely broken work cultures. I’ve looked at some of the brokenness and wondered how on earth those environments would ever lead to awesomeness in the face of all of the obvious impediments? And then, fortunately, I started reading “ Skunk Works ” by Ben Rich. (I'm not quite finished but so far it's been excellent.) (Awesome on Audible too) The book is...