I subscribe to HBR’s Management Tip of the Day. A recent tip was “Train Employees on Skills That Evolve with AI.” That’s a lovely sentiment. And totally wrong-headed and insufficient for any workforce, never mind people who might need to learn how to use AI. Yes, I agree that people need training to use AI
Imagine this scenario: You’re a project or program manager. You suspect things are not going swimmingly well. But no one has told you any bad news. Not yet. What do you do? As a facilitative leader, such as a project, program, or agile project manager (Scrum Master), it’s your job to seek out that bad
This is Johanna Rothman’s October 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom. Are you tired of large decks of project status data? I hate them. Too often, the data is not relevant, or worse, the data actually lies. That leads people to watermelon status, where the project is green until very
Last week, Ryan Latta offered a fascinating metric on LinkedIn: the number of times a leader taps a developer on the shoulder for “something real quick.” That kind of interruption makes it impossible for the team to achieve a regular cycle time. Worse, it creates aging. So more leaders want to know “why is everything
If you have to make a decision, how fast can you make it? There is certainly a range of decision times. Some decisions require almost immediate decisions. Others can take a while. But no decision can take what seems like forever. In effect, waiting to make a decision is no decision. No decision is still
This is Johanna Rothman’s September 2026 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. One of my trusted advisor clients, Gary, told me he was worried about how their organization used their LLMs. “I feel as if no one takes responsibility for their thoughts or their actions. They blindly trust
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. (I use a frame to embed the podcast into this post. Some RSS readers and some email clients do not show that. If you see nothing after “The Podcast,” please click through to this post. Or, look for “Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman” in
Do you feel pressure to do more and more? I do. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. But sometimes, that “more and more” creates pressure on the team and the people who interact with that team. When anyone has a capacity reduction, everyone feels even more pressure. But pressure is not particularly useful. Exhorting people
My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy! I did make a mistake this week. Since I was trying to stay within my minute timebox, I missed adding the most important line. Here it is: Aging is the leading indicator and root cause of all that overplanning. (Sigh.) (I use a frame
Some of you are already preparing for the salary and performance review discussions at the end of the year. (Or the beginning of next year.) Good for you, for preparing this early. You have a chance of doing a great job. However, there are many problems with performance reviews and salary discussions at any time.