And not because bald guys who talk to their dogs are spooky. We have a LOT of Dilbert cartoons at work and I have several signed (early) books from my Palo Alto days. I get called PHB a lot, but in an affectionate way (I hope).

No, I fear the Dilbert moment - when I make a Pointy-Haired-Boss decision and nobody corrects me. Right now our culture is pretty, well, egalitarian is a mild word. Forward focused opinioneering? There is a buzz word in there somewhere.

We recently had a very long discussion about the wisdom of outsourcing servers versus dong the work inhouse. I thought the numbers would pretty much let us go either way and there might be some advantages to bringing the network back.

I should clarify that we don’t serve video, can get multiple taps into different ISP networks pretty easily, etc. And we have the capital to build out the server room, if we decided we wanted to.

Our folks made it perfectly clear to me that:

1> That is a stupid thing to do;

2> It will cost a LOT more in-house than you think it will;

3> You’re distracting us from our critical path items with this piffle (direct quote);

4> What happens when the hardware pinhead (these are developers) leaves? and

5> This will impact our bonus - are you nuts?

I’m not sure about the cost estimates being wildly wrong, but this was an experienced group of a half dozen people, so they clearly had more accumulated experience than I did, so I’m going to go with their opinion.

I was very interested in their focus on their deliverables - that impressed me.

I also liked their strategic thinking about profit sharing - more employees means a lower paycheck in the short term. We’re going to have to ponder that a bit - we do not want a culture of status quo. Maybe we need to sequester costs of expansion out two quarters or something. I suspect we have the technical ability to do that but I’ll have to ask our accountant if we need to change our costing.

What, you don’t cost your projects? We cost EVERYTHING. It’s not an obsession (I could quit anytime) but it helps us invest and understand where our profit comes from.

My final conclusion was: I was pleased that even though we’ve had a lot of expansion and a fair number of disparate projects, my team, new and old, is still willing to call me a ding-dong and get their way.