All,

A question for everyone on the management DL, do you think like a business guy/gal or an engineer?

The single most insightful comment that shaped my approach to management over the years was made by an old Kx contractor back in 2002, Don Orth, now passed. Don was one of the Bell Labs / Morgan Stanley super intellect vintage.

I was venting about someone or other, he simply said: if a exec comes into the office on a Monday and has seven things on her to do list, an engineer will spend the whole week on the one of the seven they find the most interesting; a top business manager will focus on closing out the most important item that morning.

Over the years I’ve remarked to quite a few of you that the route to making a personal $100m and having a lot of fun in the process is to nail being an effective “Business Engineer”.

In terms of mindset, the business engineer will start each Monday by closing out the most important item on the list, then a couple of easy wins, before spending the rest of the week on the fun and interesting stuff.

Sounds easy, and to a certain extent it is. It’s all about mindset and personal implicit process.

When looking at engineers (most great business engineers start as engineers) the single biggest indicator of potential tends to be how quickly people fly through the easy stuff on their to do lists. Getting immersed in the big interesting topic is fundamental to being a top engineer in the first place; having the discipline and wherewithal to clear a few key or easy wins each day is the differentiator.

Caveat, step one is to have a to do list in the first place… and note I didn’t say “only” indicator.

Life is a little bit more complicated than Don’s observation, the top business engineers tend to be more perceptive, have more of a listening bias, talk to customers a lot, be marketing savvy, and perhaps most important think in terms of longer time horizons. The long time horizon leaning is probably the most defining attribute of the automator, and tech economies are always morphing so those sensitive to the ebbs and flows have a big advantage (crossover with the now famed open mindset). Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are the classic examples, though folks we’ve worked with like Ron Verstappen (Wombat founder) are very strong on this front.

On this theme, we’re going to schedule a “Business Engineering” focussed virtual management checkpoint on October 21st and 22nd. We’ll send out more details through the week.

Over the years a common complaint in (or about) Options is that our engineering has been miles ahead of our sales and marketing.. and we generally undersell ourselves.

I’d argue this isn’t strictly fair, but we have some great examples at the moment. For one, we’ve heading for 45 M365 migrations underway and more queued up but don’t even have a client facing FAQ never mind a snazzy sales deck. Like who tries to migrate a hundred clients (& 4,000+ users) without a FAQ..? ahem.

The sky could be the limit if we can balance our dynamic engineering excellence with some equally slick sales and product marketing material..?

More to follow..

Cheers,
Danny