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Marc-Daniel Ortega

Marc-Daniel Ortega

Marc-Daniel Ortega is a seasoned engineering leader with a passion for transforming teams and platforms into thriving, collaborative ecosystems.
01
Sep
Monday Myth: Order Creates Efficiency

Monday Myth: Order Creates Efficiency

Monday Myth: Order creates efficiency. Silos make the organisation look orderly by placing similar people together. The work experiences that order as queues, handovers and distance.
8 min read
30
Aug
Friday Fun: Another Successful Orbit Around the Sun

Friday Fun: Another Successful Orbit Around the Sun

Longevity appears in the annual report as evidence of health, even when it merely demonstrates that customers remain trapped, creditors remain patient and nobody can identify the person authorised to turn the machinery off.
9 min read
27
Aug
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

Safety-critical industries learnt that punishing the person closest to an accident often produces a satisfying culprit but an inadequate explanation.
9 min read
25
Aug
Monday Myth: A Faster Machine Produces More

Monday Myth: A Faster Machine Produces More

We made the machine three times faster. The factory still ships forty units an hour. Systems thinking starts where local productivity stops looking like system performance. And AI may be about to make that distinction impossible to ignore.
8 min read
23
Aug
Friday Fun: The Laws of Corporate Physics

Friday Fun: The Laws of Corporate Physics

Physics has spent several centuries developing increasingly sophisticated explanations for the behaviour of the universe. Yet one important physical environment remains surprisingly under-researched. The corporation.
5 min read
20
Aug
Wednesday Reality: Strength Comes From Imperfection

Wednesday Reality: Strength Comes From Imperfection

For much of human history, making better metal appeared to mean removing what did not belong there. Ore came from
7 min read
18
Aug
Monday Myth: More Visibility Gives You More Control

Monday Myth: More Visibility Gives You More Control

The objective becomes a programme. The programme becomes initiatives. Initiatives acquire milestones. Milestones become features. Features enter quarterly roadmaps. The roadmap reaches three quarters into a future nobody has yet observed
9 min read
15
Aug
Friday Fun: The Great Corporate Cargo Cult

Friday Fun: The Great Corporate Cargo Cult

The expression cargo cult entered Western vocabulary through observations of religious and social movements in Melanesia, particularly around and after the Second World War.
9 min read
13
Aug
Wednesday Reality: Engineering Begins Where Reality Refuses to Cooperate

Wednesday Reality: Engineering Begins Where Reality Refuses to Cooperate

Engineering begins with an acceptance that reality imposes conditions the designer does not control.
11 min read
11
Aug
Monday Myth: Small Teams Move Faster

Monday Myth: Small Teams Move Faster

In 1989, Volvo opened a car factory at Uddevalla on Sweden's west coast that looked strangely unlike the factories which had come to define twentieth-century manufacturing.
12 min read