In the frantic pursuit of equity money, a merger or an IPO, at some point we forgot about doing good technology and engineering. Once an activity where excellence, objectivity and a methodical approach were the norm, engineers have acquiesced to marketing departments, financiers and ambitious sales teams taking the helm, offering products that do not exist in schedules that are impossible to meet for markets that are just mirages. What is more, C-teams have embraced the practice of flooding companies with managers with dubious credentials and inflated CVs. The result? Organizations that prioritize landing a headline in specialized media over designing and developing products people need.
Every time a company goes belly up, there are a myriad of post-mortem reports and in-depth analyses written trying to explain, in total hindsight, what went wrong and what could have been done differently. Companies do not die all of a sudden in a dramatic final pirouette, but due to the progression of small, incremental vices and bad practices that end up turning great ideas into failed corporations.
The book is a curated collection of essays repurposed into very short chapters, stemming from the author’s works at the Substack Managers Everywhere. Chapters are self-contained, which means you can freely jump between them back and forth without losing context.
