My first surgery at 43: cervical discectomy

This year, 2021 was always going to be the year of many changes for me. I took a leap of faith in disrupting myself by switching to a new world of work altogether. I relocated to a new city with my family, starting over again having no family or close connections in Cape Town. My kids all going through teenage phase, having uprooted leaving behind their last 10 years of growth for new beginnings. My wife too, left her community and lifestyle behind to support my work ambitions and personal adventures. I thought I was prepared for the disruption (despite the challenges of covid-19, I'd resigned and found new work in 2020 and relocated provinces in the same year during second wave)... but I didn't quite expect disruption to my own personal health front. 

This health challenge called me to inspect yet again my priorities and focus. I knew 2021 will call for increased work hours as part of my ramping up to new company culture, new domain, timezone differences, that my focus would be more work than family or even my own individual interests for that matter. 

So I'd started experiencing some discomfort in my right arm from July/ August. Experienced severe pain, pins and needles that made it quite impossible to focus at work, sit at desk or even function outside of work normally - without medicating for the pain. Took to painkillers at first, thinking it a temporary situation. Three weeks passes (I'm stubborn like that) before decided to consult a GP, suspected a bad pinches nerve or slipped-disc, so had me in a neck brace for 2 months and some interesting pain killers. Problem with nerve meds and pain killers is that it kinda slows everything down, best to take at night and getting the timing right also makes for an interesting experiment. 

After two months of neck brace, the severe pain was replaced by mild pins & needles and dull pains. Yeah, I'm on my way to recovery or so I thought. Then the pain came back, with a vengeance. Not having a decent night's sleep for months, waking up with a sore arm each morning, not being able to go thoughout my day without some kind of pain relief, some days pain was 8/10, others 4/10...started to add up and take its toll on my overall mental and physical well-being. 

Went for MRI. Diagnosis: you need surgery but it's up to you. If you can manage the pain and adapt to a lifestyle disruption then you can decide not to have surgery. 

I needed some time. Decided to take another course of higher dose of nerve and pain killers. I never had an operation in my life, I wasn't going to start now! It's the spine, I grew up with some strong biases "Don't ever go near the neck/spine...once you put knife it's all downhill from there"...my default programming, innate fears unjustified but made up my belief system nonetheless.

I sought other opinions, some friends had similar experiences ended up recovering with physiotherapy and chiropractic manipulations. I tried physio, it for worse. I went to a chiropractor, who had the best bedside manner I've ever experienced. He looked at my MRI, sat me down and explained the seriousness of the issue. In his professional assessment, there's very little he could do. In his personal opinion, he advised surgery. 

Watershed moment. 

Screw it let's do it! Time to be like water, go with the flow. Trust in Qadr. Shed old fears. Embrace change. Have courage. Be brave. Prioritize myself for once!! So I decided to go all-in and have the surgery: cervical discectomy

insha'Allah. God willing. I took the necessary precautions nonetheless (made sure my life's paperwork was up-to-date, what to do in emergency rehearsed with my wife, etc.) General anaesthetic, I'll be out for 4 hours. Anything could happen...thankfully nothing happened. Shukr Alhumdulillah!

But what do I do about my work commitments? Can I just drop everything in 2 days and leave, even though so much urgent projects are underway?

We've been planning an off-site strat session and team building in another country. It would be the first time we'd meet our bosses and peers face-to-face. The journey is 33+ hours travel in coach/economy that I wasn't looking forward to, very uncomfortable...so I asked to upgrade my seats based on medical reasons, economy premium - sweet! As much as I'd committed to the travel and workshops, deep down I was still concerned about being in physical pain dampening my contributions to the workshops. 

A week before the planned trip, Omicron covid-19 variant broke news. I was in two minds about the trip, didn't want to risk getting stuck in the US, missing my planned surgery. As luck would have it, flights were automatically cancelled due to countries closing their borders to South Africa. I saw this as a sign not to squander the opportunity to have my surgery done much earlier.

I prioritized my health and personal wellbeing ahead of work. 

I actually felt bad doing this last-minute, but it honestly felt like the right thing to do. Even though I did not square things off face-to-face with my manager, I did have a 1:1 with my skip-level boss who was more than empathetic and supportive. I felt my direct reports had things under control and could be trusted. 

The recovery period is between 4-6 weeks, the longer I leave it, the later in 2022 I'll start to recover...so I left work all behind in the capable hands of my direct reports, mailed my boss and went all in on focusing on my health and recovery. 

It's been a week since my surgery but am on the road to recovery, albeit a little slowly. The pain in my right arm that crippled me earlier this year is no longer there. I have a scar on my neck and an alien foreign device as a new part of my body. It will be a while until I start hiking or cycling again, and I have to let the healing process take its time. 

As I write this, I do feel a little sense of regret having missed out on team building, strategic planning and operational planning events, even missed out on a big AWS outage post Re:invent but hey...when it comes to life, one has to prioritize life first ahead of work. 

Health and well-being comes first. Work is lower priority, work will always be there...

I've learnt that physical pain must be treated before it becomes an issue impacting lifestyle and work. A grumpy colleague in pain, who's head might be floating on meds is harmful to the team and business. Just as much, if not more, a grumpy father in pain is not good to be around the family either!

Here's my MRI:

Here's the device now creating room for the nerves and hence relieved the pain:

And I've got my first surgical scar on the right side of my neck (what a sensitive area!) at the age of 43! 

I can't believe I actually went ahead and done this!!

2021 - what a year of personal disruption it's been so far!!

Simplifying complex projects using visuals

In my previous work experience as a program director, I led very large programs consisting of hundreds of people distributed across geographies. I had multiple stakeholders to manage, mostly C-Suite folks that depended on me to simplify the details and present the essence of program to them, so that they could make effective decisions in a timely manner. Whilst I managed the detailed project plans and task breakdowns with my team of project, program & engineering managers, I adopted varying styles of communications to suit my audience level.

To this day, even though I've left program and project leadership behind for some years now, I myself served as a SteerCo member, sponsoring projects and programs to deliver KPIs. I still prefer the art of simple visuals as a means of communication. A picture, presented in a way that directs a conversation can be so much more efficient and powerful than reading lines and lines of verbose text, IMHO.

Sort of a #throwbackthursday post, I came across these old visuals I used on a project Steerco going back six years ago. This particular program was pretty tight, very little buffer contingency, executed in under six months, a major upgrade and launch of feature end-to-end, with hundreds of people contributing. The steerco group consisted of a dozen executives. The detailed project plan cut across 20 workstreams, the launch release updated 55 countries in Africa.

Paths to Launch

Launch Go/No-Go Checklist & Plan

Some program and project managers can over complicate messaging and communications. I've learnt over time that whilst detail rigour is still necessary for tracking project deliveries, there is actually an art to managing projects - there is also a style to stakeholder engagement - the methods of communication plays a major role. Whilst some might argue that pictures remove much of the thinking and thought process behind, I believe in the power of visuals...after all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

About me - One slide intro with my new leadership team in Amazon

 A #thismightnotwork post

Earlier this year, as part of breaking the ice with the new senior management team, our leader asked each one of us to share a bit of background about ourselves on one slide. Sharing my story here. It was an interesting learning experience as it opens up the team for inclusion & diversity - getting to know more than just the work-side of your colleague. A great way to get to know one another!

FYI: Check out Amazon's Leadership Principles here - we live and breathe these every day, with every interaction. It's not just lip service or posters on a wall. 

P.S. We're always hiring - do get in touch with me if interested!

On Cloud Transformation, CTO reflections on scaling tech & people - Part 1 - Intro

In a series of posts this year, I plan to write on how I led a transformation of a technology platform and engineering team - and delivered results in scaling to 10X+ growth on KPIs such as user-and-device growth, user engagement, enhanced personalisation & content discovery, reduced platform instability by increasing availability from 97 to 99%; created a 20X+ reduction in core operating costs (saving R100m+) and simultaneously built a scalable leadership team to take over. All in 3.5 years.  

This draws on my professional work experience from March 2017 - October 2020, when I spent my time as CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of an OVP (Online Video Platform) for Africa's largest VE (Video Entertainment) provider. In this short period my team delivered end-to-end transformation (not just software development) that set up the IT/Engineering to scale for future growth. I also left a scalable leadership pipeline in place which allowed me to comfortably transition to my next role outside of video systems by leaving a technology roadmap delivery plan & sustainable processes in place for at least another 2 years. Since my departure, I remain in contact with the team who continue not only to thank me for the roadmap but also for the opportunities I helped create to grow their own careers as leaders, who are themselves on track to become CTOs & CIOs as well.

Context

The business grew increasingly concerned about their online video platform's ability to scale to increased forecasted demand anticipated as more customers switched from traditional broadcast satellite-TV viewing to on-demand, on-the-go-viewing through streaming video over the internet. With incumbents like Netflix & Amazon Prime Video and others entering the African territory, we also needed a reliable internet-ready TV product that customers have come to take for granted. Until then, the video platform which was built largely in-house by a local engineering team, had an active user base that consisted mainly of early adopters, an internal start-up project, fledgling at best. 

This platform and product was still in its infancy, not-yet-ready for exponential internet growth, which could happen at any time. As such, this team operated on a shoestring budget of a constrained start-up for a number of years. The engineering team was also spread quite thin, working on multiple, incoherent projects, product and services not specifically focused on internet video. Rather, we were the "online people" that did everything from hosting websites, various content management systems, wrote media apps and ran operations for digital marketing sites across African continent. In short, I owned a digital IT shop that was a multi-armed, multi-headed hydra that needed taming.  Such constraints whilst bred out of necessity, unfortunately ignored the bigger picture, long-term strategic investments needed in the platform to scale for future growth were largely ignored because of budget constraints. The platform barely supported its early adopters in so far as providing consistent availability was never guaranteed or reliable. Customer satisfaction scores were very low, below 4 (<40%). Net Promoter Scores (NPS) almost non-existent. Outages due to platform stability was the norm, with on-call load on support engineers increasing as number of users began to increase. 

The business, unawares of the true state of the platform, had nonetheless planned increased marketing and awareness campaigns for its internet streaming product. Large events like the FIFA Soccer World Cup (2018), Olympics (2018) Cricket World Cup (2019), Rugby World Cup (2019) sparked much concern about the platform's ability to scale for increased load. Other events like UEFA, Premiere League, Game of Thrones and other popular video content expected to bring increased traffic to the platform. Apart from primary content drivers, the fear of not making a noise on the streaming side was high - we needed to take this fledgling product & platform and make it mainstream. Marketing increased. Along came a decent technology budget assigned to me to help turnaround & deliver a recovery. I could not pass up this opportunity to test my skills in technology, engineering, strategy, delivery and leadership...what a journey it was!

The ask: build and scale an video streaming (live broadcast and video-on-demand like Amazon Prime Video or Hulu) platform to work across 50+ countries on the African continent, with localisation. Build, stabilize, replace, buy, partner - do what is necessary, but we don't have time-to-wait a year for new R&D or migration, as we're going to make a noise in marketing, so the platform better be available. At the same time, build complementary services for "internet connected set top boxes" in addition to pure online play.

Book Review: Leadership BS

Confront brutal truths and reality of #leadership or ignore at your peril!

This book took me on a rollercoaster ride though highs and lows, twists and turns, free falling into the deep abyss to be yanked out suddenly again - what a ride! Throughout this book I experienced feelings of deep resonance as well as extreme dissonance as well! 

I've not felt this uncomfortable reading a book in a very long time!  At one point I put this book aside for weeks, resolving to give it a one star rating! I couldn't believe what I was reading. I refused to accept the evidence. The narratives conflicted with my own experience and deeply held beliefs of what leadership is.  Nevertheless I continued on, pushing through at a pace that didn't wreck my mood, working hard to disconfirm my beliefs which were in part, to be honest, largely influenced by the feel-good leadership industry I've become an avid fan of.  Moreover, I am myself a practicing leader, having held leadership positions for 10+ years, with a third spent as C-level and another 50% spent working very closely with C-suite customers. 

So I took issue with the Pfeffer's messages - at times became quite irritated with the evidence presented. My personal value system (vetted by my own workplace experiences and biases) didn't align which made me think the book reflected more a corporate America bias and definitely not a reflection on the global industry! Bias! I couldn't ignore the hard truths though, I've seen all types of nasty leadership behaviours as displayed in the book, we can't downplay the real-world corporate game exists, and therefore, must be played like any other game. It's the system for better or worse.

Nevertheless, this book is a must read if all you've encountered so far is the feel-good, warm-and-fuzzy side of leadership industry, this book provides a necessary healthy dose of reality, earning a 5-star rating in the end 🤷🏽‍

I'm also quite glad I stuck it out and read through all the way. This book re-affirms my own belief to be different, to be the kind of leader I wish I had. I refuse to accept the game as it is. I have walked away from engagements I didn't feel right about, I walked away from leaders that came across as egotistic, pompous jerks. Personally, I'm on my own path to leadership...however it's important to face the brutal facts, but still remain hopeful for change.

I'm reminded of the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of the current reality, whatever they might be.

Curious to learn what other readers have to say about this book? 

Please share your thoughts in the comments.