What Machiavelli gets right about running operations
Ndcharles Nweke
Data and IT Operations
People quote The Prince as a manual for scheming. Read it again and a lot of it is about something duller: keeping a system stable after you inherit it.
Machiavelli’s point is that a new ruler is judged on what happens, not on what was intended. Operations works the same way. Nobody remembers the elegant plan for the migration; they remember whether payroll ran on Friday.
The part I keep coming back to: change the rules in one go, then stop. Drip-feeding painful changes keeps everyone anxious for months. Make the hard call once, explain it, and let people settle.
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