04/19/2026

“I guess a little healthy competition won’t hurt them,” he or she will tell you. Over the years, I have come to believe that this kind of competition is almost never explicitly designed into an organization; rather, it happens without anyone really wanting it. And the manager who excuses it (who almost seems to be taking credit for it) is a sad example of the self-deluding authoritarian who assumes that anything that happens must necessarily have been exactly what he/she intended to happen.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack