Adam Gonnerman

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin In startup and tech culture, we celebrate the last-minute save. But heroics are often symptoms of earlier neglect. Hero Culture thrives on moments like this: it's Friday at 4:47pm, a ticket has been sitting in review for two weeks, the stakeholder is impatient, and the engineer has a flight to catch, so someone pushes the deployment button because it's a small change and it's always fine. By 9pm there's a Slack thread, by 10pm it's a call, the engineer is somewhere over Ohio in airplane mode, and the one person who knows that part of the codebase is stepping outside a birthday dinner every fifteen minutes to check their phone. The fix takes forty minutes, the post-mortem takes two weeks, and the person who stayed up to save the night gets praised on Monday morning while the person who warned against Friday deployments three sprints ago is quietly forgotten. That's the thing about Hero Cult...

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” -  Warren Buffett One consistent truth I have observed in business is that leaders tend to reward what is visible, while some of the most essential work within organizations remains unseen. Consider a product launch. Slack channels fill with celebration, leadership offers public praise, and performance metrics are widely shared. Now contrast that with months of refactoring, quiet mentoring, and diligent risk mitigation that largely go unnoticed. Visibility distorts perception. This is visibility bias in action. It appears as: Shipping rewarded more than stabilizing. Roadmaps praised more than operational rigor. Deck-building valued over difficult conversations. Activity mistaken for impact. This connects directly to a post I previously wrote on shipping versus advancing , where I argued that organizations often conflate visible activity with meaningful progress. Shipping, with releases, tickets, a...