2019 Interns

2019 Internship Program

Lots of Internship programs promise to give university-going candidates a glimpse of what it is like to work in the real world. Especially in their fields of study. While in many cases they may get to work on real project for their short time partnered with an employee, build spreadsheets, maintain systems or processes that employees have no desire to do, or in the worst cases become glorified gophers – I have a much different view of how these things should go. Every year I sponsor a special program for internships that is aimed at building leadership skills, focuses on self-direction, driving technical depth, and ultimately building actual products or capabilities that will actually be used by the firm itself. …

Poof! Where did all your posts go!

If you are a long time reader you may be wondering what happened to all of my posts from 2002 through roughly August of 2019 and where they went. The simple answer is this: The posts are still there. All archived off. Including all of the witty and not so witty comments I have collected over almost a decade of running this blog. It is an amazing amount of work to curate such a massive pile of nonsensical ramblings and observations. In my bid to simplify and strive for a new and improved “LooseBolts” I kind of wanted to start with a clean slate. To that end, I will be very happy to re-post any items that you want, but …

Spooky Action Issues Ahead for the Just-out-of-Reachables

I had an interesting conversation this week with a good friend of mine who works at one of the big Internet companies. We hadn’t talked in a good while so it turned out to be a wide ranging conversation that meandered back and forth from our mutual experiences building globally scaled technology platforms, past companies, current companies, to the possibility of getting together soon for beers when we happened to be in the same part of the world at the same time.  It ultimately landed on the topic of EMV and some of the unique challenges in the Payments space.  While the questions were initially focused on consumer experiences, it quickly devolved (as they always do with my friends) into …

Leadership Gameplan

Is Emotional Intelligence in a Leader Important in a Tech-led Turn Around?

I was recently reflecting on and inspired by an article I read by Ross Kingsland which was published over a year ago on the topic of the Emotional Intelligence myth in leadership.  His article focuses on the role of the leader and whether or not emotional intelligence (or EQ) has any measurable effectiveness in the area of leadership.   In fact he even points out that the entire application of Emotional Intelligence in leadership as a discipline is only mentioned a single time in the original research done by Daniel Goleman. One thing that you must understand is that on the weekends I become a voracious consumer of information and data.  Its that quiet time of the week when the pressing issues and …