Adam Gonnerman

AI is nipping at the heels of outsourced BPO jobs in countries like India and the Philippines. I know people in the Philippines who can attest to the difficulty of finding such work already, before the full effects of AI are felt. The following video does an excellent deep-dive into the reality of BPO work in what may be the dawn of the AI era. 

 There is a pattern I have seen repeat across organizations of different sizes and industries. Teams adopt an Agile framework, populate their calendars with the right ceremonies, use the right vocabulary in standups, and then wonder why delivery feels just as slow and friction-filled as before. This is Agile Theatre: the performance of methodology without the substance of it. SAFe is perhaps the most visible example, a framework so dense with alignment meetings and coordination layers that the overhead of running it can quietly consume the productivity gains it was supposed to create. I have been thinking about this problem lately, and two frameworks have helped me sharpen my thinking: Agile² and DORA. The piece "Agile²" makes an argument worth sitting with. Agile, in its original form, was a correction to a specific failure mode: process worship. The Agile Manifesto pushed back against the idea that following a detailed plan was the same as delivering value. The uncomfortab...

Once I was pulled into an emergency meeting about a project that had stalled six months earlier. The client was asking pointed questions about decisions made during the initial planning phase, and the original project manager had moved to another company. As I sat there watching my colleague scramble through scattered email threads and half-remembered conversations, I was reminded of a practice that has saved me countless times: keeping a daily work blog. I know it sounds excessive, but hear me out. For most of my career, I've maintained what I call my daily project log using Confluence's blog widget. I set it up right in the center of my personal workspace, surrounded by my other project notes and references. Every day, without fail, I spend five minutes documenting anything relatively significant that happened with my projects. This isn't about writing novels or crafting perfect prose. It's about capturing the small but crucial details that slip away: why we chose ven...

Back when I was working at a startup, we brought on two engineering interns for the summer. Steve was personable and well-liked around the office. He had good technical skills and could handle the tasks we assigned him. When things got slow, you'd find him chatting with the team about weekend plans or the latest tech news. Sometimes he'd even catch a quick nap at his desk during those inevitable startup lulls. Isabelle took a completely different approach. She was equally capable with her assigned work, but when the inevitable downtime hit, she had her laptop open learning Ruby on Rails. This was the web application framework our entire product was built on, but it wasn't something we expected interns to master. While Steve socialized or rested, Isabelle was diving deep into documentation, working through tutorials, and even building small practice applications on her own time. I watched this play out over the course of their ten-week internship. Both interns completed thei...

Six weeks before our product launch, the VP of Marketing walked into my office with what she called "a small request." She wanted to add a complete user onboarding flow to our mobile app. Small request. Right. I'd seen this movie before. In my early days as a project manager, I would have smiled, nodded, and quietly absorbed the extra work into our timeline. The team would have worked nights and weekends, quality would have suffered, and I would have spent the launch week putting out fires instead of celebrating a successful delivery. But I'd learned the hard way that scope changes, no matter how they're dressed up, follow the laws of physics. You can't create time and resources out of thin air. The first thing I did was assess the real impact. This wasn't just adding a few screens. The onboarding flow required new API endpoints, database changes, additional testing scenarios, and integration with our analytics platform. My rough estimate put it at three w...

Three weeks before our mobile app launch, I watched our carefully planned timeline crumble in real time during what should have been a routine status meeting. The API team mentioned, almost casually, that they'd hit a snag with the authentication service. "Nothing major," they said. "Maybe a few extra days." That few extra days turned into two weeks, and suddenly our QA cycle compressed from three weeks to one. The marketing team had already locked in their campaign dates. Customer support hadn't finished their training materials. What started as a minor backend hiccup cascaded through every workstream like dominoes falling. I learned something crucial that day about dependency management: it's not just about tracking relationships between tasks. It's about understanding that every delay ripples outward, often in ways you don't anticipate. After that near-disaster, I completely changed how I approach dependencies in project planning. Now I map th...

I still cringe thinking about that executive briefing years ago. Our team was six months into rebuilding the customer portal, and I had prepared what I thought was a thorough status update. I walked into the conference room armed with architecture diagrams, database schemas, and a detailed explanation of our microservices approach. Twenty minutes in, our CTO held up his hand. "Adam, I need to stop you there. Are we on track to launch in Q3 or not?" The room went silent. I had spent the entire presentation talking about technical elegance while completely missing what he actually needed to know: timeline, budget, and business impact. That uncomfortable moment taught me everything about communicating tech status upward. I had fallen into the engineer's trap of leading with mechanics instead of impact. The CTO didn't care about our service mesh implementation. He cared about whether customers would have the new features before the holiday shopping season. Since then, I...

Three months into my first project management role at a software company, I watched a colleague destroy his credibility in thirty seconds. The engineering team was discussing a legacy system bug, and someone cracked a joke about Visual Basic. My fellow PM laughed loudly and nodded knowingly, clearly trying to signal that he was technically savvy enough to get it. The problem was obvious to everyone in the room: he had no idea what they were talking about. The engineers exchanged glances, and I could practically see his authority evaporate. That moment crystallized something I'd been sensing for weeks. Walking into a team of skeptical engineers as a new project manager feels like entering a room where everyone speaks a different language and you're holding a phrase book upside down. These developers had been burned before by PMs who talked a big game but delivered bureaucracy instead of value. Some had been working without any project management oversight and genuinely questione...

Tim Wu has built a career on making complex technology policy accessible to general readers, and The Age of Extraction may be his most urgent work yet. In it, Wu examines how the digital platforms that promised to democratize information and spread prosperity have instead become some of the most powerful wealth-extraction machines in economic history. It is a sobering diagnosis, but Wu delivers it with clarity and a genuine sense of purpose that makes the book feel less like a warning and more like a call to action. Wu grounds his argument in the concept of the "neutral platform," a structural idea with deep historical roots. He traces how platforms ranging from railroads to IBM and AT&T could either catalyze broad economic participation or concentrate power in the hands of a few, depending on how they were governed. This historical framing is one of the book's great strengths. By the time Wu arrives at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, readers already unders...

Ask someone outside the profession what a project manager does and you'll hear some version of the same answer: they run meetings, update Jira boards, track tasks, and produce status reports. Maybe they build a Gantt chart or two. It's not wrong, exactly. Those things happen. But describing project management that way is like describing an iceberg by what you can see from the deck of a ship. The visible tip is real. The work below the surface is where the job actually lives. Beneath every clean status update is someone who spent the previous 48 hours balancing three competing priorities against a resource pool that couldn't support all of them. Beneath every smooth stakeholder meeting is a PM who quietly diffused a conflict before it ever reached the conference room. The Gantt chart your executives see on Friday reflects decisions, trade-offs, and conversations that never make it into any report. That's not an accident. That's the job. What the profession actuall...

 Late 2012 was a season of massive change. My wife and I had decided to move our family back to her native Brazil, with her and the kids going ahead while I stayed behind for another year to fund their transition and pay down our US debts. In the middle of this life upheaval, I made what seemed like either the worst or best decision possible: I decided to pursue my PMP certification. Conde Nast, my employer at the time, generously paid for my PMP training. I spent several intensive days in a classroom with a coworker and about twenty other aspiring project managers, absorbing the fundamentals. The instructor was solid, the materials comprehensive, and I left feeling oriented to the challenge ahead. What I didn't fully grasp was that the training was just the beginning. For the next two and a half months, I studied with an intensity I'd never matched before or since. My routine became monastic in its discipline. I'd come home from work, decompress over dinner, then dive into...

Before I moved to Brazil in December 2013, locals warned me that foreign workers struggled in Brazilian companies because they "don't understand the culture." I never quite grasped what that meant, but after working at a local tech company for nearly a year, I can share what the reality actually looked like. I had lived in Brazil before and spoke fluent Portuguese, so the language barrier wasn't an issue. After months of job searching while teaching English to pay the bills, one of my students referred me to his company. The interview process itself was my first taste of cultural differences. The HR conversation lasted over 45 minutes and covered territory that would be off-limits in the United States. They asked about my church attendance, my family situation, and other personal topics that would send American HR departments running for their lawyers. But it felt natural enough in the context, more like getting to know a whole person rather than just a professional p...

When I got promoted to associate project manager early in my career, I thought I knew what I was doing. I'd watched other project managers for years and had managed a few small projects myself. But nobody ever sat me down and walked me through the basics. On my first major project, I stared at a blank Excel template for what felt like hours, trying to figure out how to create an actual project plan. I knew the tools existed, I knew templates were available, but I had no idea where to start. That's when I learned the hard way that creating a project plan isn't about mastering software or filling in templates. It's about having the right conversations with the right people in the right order. I started with what seemed obvious at the time but wasn't: I sat down with the project sponsor and key stakeholders for a kickoff conversation. I asked three simple questions that would become my foundation for every project since. What are we trying to achieve? When does it need...

I've spent much of my career working inside the media industry, and even with that background, this video filled in gaps I didn't know I had. It traces Hollywood's full arc from the founding of the major studios in the early 1900s through the seismic legal and cultural disruptions that reshaped the industry at every turn, all the way to the streaming wars redefining entertainment today. It covers the consolidation plays, the regulatory battles, the unlikely moguls, and the acquisitions that quietly concentrated enormous cultural power into very few hands. And here is Evan Shapiro's most recent map of the media universe , to help give you some perspective on the actual size of these companies.

There are books that explain an industry and books that indict one. Darren Cross's No One Planned This: How Platforms Rewired Entertainment attempts both, and largely succeeds at the first. Tracing the arc of digital entertainment from Netflix's streaming pivot in 2004 through the rise and internal contradictions of the creator economy, Cross builds a compelling historical account of how the business of entertainment got rewired, often without anyone fully intending the outcome. The book's central argument is that the platforms which promised to democratize entertainment ultimately optimized for something narrower: time spent. Discovery, Cross contends, is broken. Algorithmic sameness rewards the familiar over the original. The creator middle class that the internet seemed to promise turned out to be largely a myth, and independence from traditional media structures came with its own costs. This is not a new critique, but Cross assembles it with enough historical texture a...

In the summer of 1995 I was part of a work crew operating under the Job Training and Partnership Act , traveling between two counties doing maintenance, painting, and lawn work. It was my second year with the program and I was looking forward to it. What I was not looking forward to was what the summer actually became. The team leader, whose name I will change to Mark for the purposes of this piece, was not much of a leader. Within the first two weeks it was clear that he had little interest in working. Off-color jokes were a regular feature of the day. So was sitting around while hours ticked by. I brought my concerns to the regional supervisor, a woman I will call Scarlet. Her response was simple and direct: if I did not like it, I could quit. I did not quit. I stayed because I did not have time to find something else on short notice, and I needed the work. What followed was a long summer of profanity, inappropriate humor, and minimal productivity. And then, predictably, things got...

"Innovation is saying no to a thousand things."  -  Steve Jobs There is a meeting to align on a proposal. Turnout is good, including some fairly senior people. Opinions differ. Time runs out. A follow-up is scheduled, a revised deck will be produced, a pre-read will be distributed before the next alignment meeting. Nothing is blocked. No one has said no. Yet nothing moves. This is what organizational stall actually looks like. Not conflict. Not resistance. Diligence. Leaders often equate consensus with alignment, but they are not the same thing. Consensus means everyone agrees. Alignment means everyone understands the direction and their role in it, even if they would have chosen differently. One is a state of unanimous opinion. The other is a condition for coordinated action. When consensus becomes the goal, progress slows while risk quietly compounds. Consensus optimizes for harmony. It is a room full of nodding heads, objections softened or withdrawn, everyone heard and id...

Not every career advancement is the result of a deliberate plan. Sometimes the right environment finds you at the right moment, and what you do with that opportunity determines everything that follows. After working at Zepinvest, a small New York City startup, I had developed a working foundation in content curation, content management, basic HTML, and the practical realities of keeping a web presence running. It was hands-on, scrappy work, and it prepared me well for what came next. My following role was as a web producer at Condé Nast, a considerably larger stage with considerably higher expectations. I did not know it at the time, but that position would become one of the most formative experiences of my professional life. In my early days as a web producer I sat in conference rooms where conversations about projects, products, and timelines felt like a foreign language. People moved through discussions with a fluency I did not yet have, and I spent more than a few meetings simply...

Not every career follows a straight line. Mine has not come close to one, and I have spent enough time now looking back at the path to say with confidence that nothing along the way was wasted, even the parts that looked like detours at the time. When my family moved to New Jersey in 2005, I was walking away from full-time ministry without a clear idea of what came next. I explored options that ranged from the practical to the improbable. Tree trimming was on the list at one point. What I landed on first was a job teaching English as a Second Language in Newark. The pay was low and there were no benefits, but it was work, and it was work that required me to communicate clearly across significant cultural and linguistic distance every single day. I did not think of it as professional development at the time. Looking back, it was exactly that. Having taken an introductory paralegal course while living in New Mexico, I got the idea of pursuing work at a law firm. Without credentials or ...

There are moments in a program manager's career when following the established process is exactly the right call, and moments when following it blindly leads to serious problems. Knowing the difference is not something any methodology teaches you. It comes from experience, and sometimes from a project that goes sideways before it gets right. I was once tasked with leading an ADA compliance initiative for a company's primary application, covering web, mobile, and Smart TV platforms. Accessibility work is not optional. It is a legal and ethical obligation, and the stakes of getting it wrong extend well beyond a missed deadline. When I assumed the project it had already passed through the hands of two product managers, both of whom had moved on to other opportunities. I was inheriting something that had already lost momentum and institutional memory. I did what any program manager would do in that situation: gathered what information I could, held a structured kickoff meeting, al...

When I was young, meeting someone new was uncomplicated. You saw another kid, asked if they wanted to play, and a friendship began. Growing up in a pre-internet world, the people you knew were largely the people you saw regularly. You had each other's phone numbers, and that was enough. Connection happened through proximity. There was a time, further back in history, when formal letters of introduction served as the mechanism for entering new social and professional circles, but that practice faded long ago. Today, the introduction happens online, often before any in-person meeting ever takes place. About twenty-one years ago I made a trip to New Hampshire. I was a full-time minister at the time and was exploring the possibility of becoming a bivocational minister in that state, with the goal of finding steady work while using my remaining time to plant a Brazilian congregation. When I arrived, I already had a contact: a Brazilian man I had connected with online. He and his Americ...

A little over a month ago we heard about someone at Meta losing a good portion of her email to an AI that went off course. She managed to stop it before it finished, and it apologized, but the damage was done. I was surprised that she posted about it publicly. In any case, it demonstrates the danger presented by giving AI complete control over one's desktop and work.  This situation was presaged humorously by the series Silicon Valley. See below and enjoy!  

More than a decade ago, sitting across from a Brazilian consultant who was reviewing my resume for a potential project management opportunity, I received a verdict I was not expecting. He looked up from the page and said, matter-of-factly: "You're a theologian." He was not wrong about my degree. I hold a Bachelor of Ministry, earned through an accelerated program at Harding University that covered nearly four years of biblical, counseling, and ministry education in two. But in the standard Brazilian professional framework, you are what your degree says you are. My PMP certification, my years of project management experience, my track record of delivering complex initiatives meant very little in that moment. I had graduated into theology. Therefore I was a theologian. I thought about that conversation years later when I enrolled in a Master of Arts program in management with a concentration in project management, made possible through Viacom's employee education bene...

Nobody puts missionary experience on a project management resume. I did not either, at least not explicitly. But after fifteen years delivering complex technology programs, I am convinced that two years of mission service in Brazil shaped my professional instincts more than any methodology certification ever has. Let me explain why. After a mission internship in Brazil in 1997, I committed to returning as a full-time missionary. That meant getting the right education first. I enrolled in Harding University's School of Biblical Studies, an accelerated program that compressed nearly four years of education into two. The pace was relentless. I studied beginning through advanced biblical Greek in 24 weeks. Along the way I went deep not just into Scripture but into counseling, fundraising, cross-cultural communication, and the practical realities of sustaining a mission. I was trained to enter unfamiliar territory and figure it out. That turns out to be an extraordinarily useful profess...

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” — Stafford Beer A team drowning in slow approvals decides the problem is speed, so they add AI. Leadership announces a new assistant to unlock productivity. A chatbot is rolled out to close knowledge gaps and reduce internal friction. Demos look promising. Early outputs feel impressive. But weeks later, nothing fundamental has changed. Decisions are still unclear. Ownership is still fuzzy. Data is still inconsistent. If anything, the noise level has increased. You can't use AI to repair broken systems. What it does in reality is accelerate their weaknesses. You see, AI multiplies what already exists. Unclear decision rights leads directly to faster confusion. If no one knows who owns decisions, AI generates more options. Further, more stakeholders weigh in, and decision latency increases. Think about it like this: AI increases surface area of disagreement. Poor data result in confidently wrong outputs. If your data are incomplete, incons...

"The leader must own everything in his world. There is no one else to blame." — Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership Having just been assigned to a cloud migration team, I was trying to get the lay of the land and understand where project work stood. What I gathered wasn't good. They hadn't had a project manager for about a year, and work had started to drift badly. That first week was when their manager called me into his office. He laid into me about how far behind everything was. His frustration directed at me felt like an accusation, as if I'd personally caused the delays. I could hardly get a word in edgewise as he vented. It became very clear to me that although I had no hand in creating the mess, it was mine now anyway.  This is part of inherited debt. When you step into a team, you don't just inherit a role. You inherit the technical shortcuts nobody documented, the cultural habits that formed before you arrived, and the strained relationships with stakeh...

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” - Michael Porter It's a familiar event to anyone who has worked with a tech team. You have work well along on a project when a stakeholder comes along asking for "just one more feature." If you are the project manager or product manager, people will look to you for guidance. You know that capacity is full, tradeoffs are real, the roadmap will bend, and something inevitably will break. Yet, the pressure is subtle (or non-so-subtle, depending on the stakeholder). There's an expectation, perhaps, that you'll say that the team can make it work, suggest that all are aligned, and acknowledge that this is an important feature. So, you say "yes." Six weeks or less later, you find that delivery slips, quality drops, morale dips, and trust is now eroded. Leadership is not only about what you drive forward. It’s about what you refuse to absorb. We need to be clear that saying "no" is not obstruction....