You are totally right. 100%. For over a decade, I basically sold myself as a hero-for-hire (or as one of my clients called me, a mercenary). My general schtick

You are totally right. 100%. For over a decade, I basically sold myself as a hero-for-hire (or as one of my clients called me, a mercenary). My general schtick was two-fold: help the company/team out of the immediate problem they were facing, and, if they were game, spend some time with the team to help figure out how the problem came to be and how they might acquire the skills to prevent it (ideally) or solve it on their own next time. Looking back, I am still pretty amazed at the turn-around I helped facilitate at a bunch of smaller companies. Presently, I am an employee, and this is one of the most painful uphill battles I have ever had to fight. I have tried warning colleagues about issues that seem obvious to me, but face exceptional pushback all the time, only to have things blow up exactly how I predicted a few months (or sometimes weeks) later. In my own work, people generally let me be and do good work, but as soon as it becomes a group effort the “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead” minority steam rolls ahead and makes a mess of it. The worst part is, I know exactly what the problem is, because I’ve been on the other side of it: organizations pay way more attention to external consultants than internal resources. 90% of the advice I have companies for how to change was suggestions gathered from their own employees, slightly curated and abridged into something easily digestible. And so, while I’m exhausted from trying to change things from inside, when shit hits the fan, I step up and do the old mercenary thing to solve problems at the last minute and great expense. I keep trying because I do have a ton of exceptionally bright colleagues who I love working with, as well as an actually world changing technology. We’ll see… after this next demo… maybe we’ll take some time to breathe and get back on track.