Hired Thought

Author: Ben Mosior

  • On Strategy

    “Strategy” is an interesting word in that its absence of useful meaning is directly correlated with its frequency of use, as Dave Aron describes in his book, The Essence of Strategy: People put the word strategy next to other words in order to make them sound important, but are not really clear what the word…

  • Batches and Iterations

    The following is a rather unpolished glimpse into how we think about batch sizes and iterations. First, we expect our system to have a goal. For a software-building system made of people like ourselves, the goal is to deliver value in the form of working software. We think of “batches” as the units of work…

  • Buffer Management for Meal Prepping

    This post describes an attempt to apply theory practically (praxis) to solve a silly little problem. My wife and I are getting serious about cutting our restaurant spending, so we have been cooking large batches of food to store and eat throughout the week. Cooking in large batches like this is a practice known as…

  • On Diversity

    Just a few years ago, I would not have been able to articulate why organizational diversity matters. (I know that for a fact, because I once offered a barely adequate, fumbling answer during an interview. Despite somehow getting the job, I remained largely clueless for some time.) Times change, I’ve learned some things, and now…

  • Hidden Complexities

    Originally published September 24, 2016 I consider sense-making to be a component of Landscape and Doctrine (from Sun Tzu’s Five Factors), and so I am incorporating a short overview of Cynefin into an upcoming talk on strategy. While outlining, I toyed with a few examples for the various ontological domains and learned an unexpected lesson,…