About the Book
The Dao of Delivery
I wrote this book for technical leaders who are responsible for delivery but can't figure out why their teams miss deadlines, stakeholder relationships sour, and process improvements fail to stick.
I could have called it "Eric's Litany of Failures," because that's what it really is. Thirty years of painful lessons learned without a mentor, distilled into the lenses I wish someone had taught me earlier.
Why This Book Exists
For the past decade, I've been called in to fix engineering organizations that were struggling. Each turnaround taught me something new about what breaks delivery and what I had been doing wrong in my own leadership journey. The productivity improvements and successful transformations emerged only after years of making every mistake in the book. The lenses here don't spring from natural talent or brilliant insight. They come from the political, emotional, and cultural dynamics that repeatedly humbled me until I finally learned to pay attention to what actually matters.
Most engineering leadership books promise a magic bullet. They describe a process or framework that fueled some company's success, then hold it up as a cure-all. Those were snapshots of a moment at that company, with that leadership, and that culture, at that time. Some of those ideas may serve you well, and if they do, use them. But you shouldn't expect them to, because leadership is fundamentally dynamic.
This book is called The Dao of Delivery, not The Laws of Delivery, because leadership inside organizations is never fixed. It's a living system, always shifting. The Dao represents a way, a living path that adapts to what's in front of you. There are no universal laws. At best, there are lenses, ways of seeing, that help you decide what matters most right now and how to act with balance and proportion.
What You'll Find
The book provides lenses for understanding political capital, team dynamics, and organizational momentum. These are tools for discernment rather than recipes to follow. If you treat them like recipes, you won't get as much out of them as you should.
Throughout the book, you'll also find callouts addressed to CEOs and other senior executives. These sections help non-technical leaders understand what's really happening when engineering delivery struggles, when to intervene, and how to support their technical leaders in addressing root causes rather than symptoms.
The Desk Reference
This site is where I work out the ideas that feed the book. Frameworks get tested here. New lenses emerge. If you find value in what you read on this site, the book goes deeper.