MJ Wivell took Rich Dad Poor Dad on his honeymoon. It proved an inconvenient choice for anyone hoping a holiday would keep business at a respectable distance. A passage about the difficulty of starting a company caught his attention. He read the warning as a challenge. Back home, he called Jeremy Nimtz, a childhood friend. In 2004, they founded BTI360.
The impulse had an unhappy professional precedent. Wivell remembers working on a $50 million software project in his twenties and watching a contractor fail its customer. His objections concerned leadership, hiring and direction. The experience supplied something more durable than a complaint: a reason to build a business of his own. If the people doing the work were well chosen and supported, perhaps the customer would get a better result.
More than two decades later, that proposition still runs through his work. Wivell leads a government software company, writes about engineering leadership and takes an unusual interest in how colleagues explain things to one another. A conversation that goes badly is, in his world, an engineering problem worth fixing.
Gettysburg, with a route into computing
Wivell grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His brother Clinton shares both that background and a professional interest in helping large organizations deliver software. Their account of the family journey gives their father much of the credit. He was the first college graduate in his family, moved from farming into information technology, and encouraged his sons to pursue computer science.
That is a rather practical inheritance: an example of changing professions, followed by encouragement to learn a demanding one. Both brothers began as software engineers building applications for federal customers. Their later work in coaching grew out of leading projects themselves. Advice arrived after experience with the work it was supposed to improve.
They also share a less solemn competition over golf. On their joint LeanOrange blog, the brothers acknowledge that they sometimes disagree about whose game is better. The dispute is a useful reminder that collaboration need not require an end to sibling rivalry. It merely helps to keep the scorecard away from the software architecture.
Small increments, larger questions
The brothers’ approach to software delivery developed through use. They describe starting with Agile methods, delivering work in increments, then experimenting with Lean software practices in early 2009. They added elements of Kanban to Scrum teams as their understanding changed. Their account places the emphasis on adapting practices to the organization’s problems.
The distinction matters in government work, where an improvement has to survive the constraints surrounding it. The brothers’ coaching focused on that setting. LeanOrange became a place to publish their experiences of scaling software agility across an enterprise, with material about methods, training and the difficulties of organizational change.
For Wivell, the arc from writing software to developing engineers is continuous. A program can be technically promising and still struggle because the surrounding organization cannot make decisions or coordinate work. His career has increasingly occupied that uncomfortable meeting point, where the code may be perfectly polite and the humans still need attention.
Nine books, and a condition attached
In 2019, Wivell published a reading list for engineers who wanted to become better leaders. The nine books were arranged in three groups: leading yourself, leading others and leading teams. The order gives away his priorities. Before an engineer acquires responsibility for colleagues, there is some work to do on the person in the mirror.
His selections included Extreme Ownership, The Servant and The Fred Factor in the first group. For relationships, he chose Love Works, Drive and Crucial Conversations. Team leadership brought in two Patrick Lencioni books and Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen. This is an engineering syllabus with substantial room for character, motivation and the ability to explain an idea.
The final instruction was to experiment with what the books teach. Reading was supposed to change behavior. A shelf of improving literature can otherwise become an expensive arrangement of good intentions. Wivell’s list asks the reader to try something, observe the result, and make the learning useful to someone else.
“Am I a leader worth following?”
MJ Wivell’s question for engineers, 2019
The engineer who learned to start with the summary
A 2020 essay supplies a particularly revealing example of what Wivell means by collaboration. He described a team with a technical project manager who wanted a brief account of the situation and an engineer who preferred lengthy, precise explanations. Their conversations left the manager frustrated. Accuracy was present; usefulness was having a harder time getting into the room.
After attending BTI360’s Collaboration 101 class, the engineer changed the order of his reports. He began with a summary and talking points, then supplied the detail. The manager received something usable, while the engineer retained the explanation he considered necessary. The solution was small enough to describe in a paragraph and practical enough to recognize at almost any workplace.
The class ran for four weeks and used DISC to give teammates a shared vocabulary for different working preferences. Wivell favored its simplicity. His account describes learning about yourself, understanding colleagues and adapting how you communicate. The point was to make differences easier to work with. No one needed to become a different person before the next meeting.
The example also puts some limits around the language of teamwork. Agreement about a project is only part of the job. Colleagues still need information in a form they can act on. In Wivell’s account, the class helped an engineer notice that distinction and change a habit. The improvement depended on paying attention to the recipient, a manageable assignment even in a complicated organization.
Inside Collaboration 101 · described in 2020
- Understand yourselfNotice how you work and communicate.
- Understand othersRecognize different working preferences.
- Adapt togetherMake the exchange useful to your colleague.
Growth measured in people
BTI360’s approach to professional development covers software craftsmanship, technical curiosity and leadership. It connects the quality of the work with the growth of the people doing it. Training therefore includes both the technical habits that make software maintainable and the human skills that help an idea become something a team can deliver.
Wivell’s own company biography, published in 2015, describes him meeting engineers individually to understand what motivates them. The same sketch puts time with his high school sweetheart and their two children alongside his attempts to fit in golf. It is a modest domestic counterweight to the language of enterprise transformation. Even someone occupied with improving organizations must occasionally arrange a tee time.
There is a concrete test of the development philosophy in the careers Wivell describes. By July 2026, he said, some company leaders had begun as college interns. He also said BTI360 had never laid anyone off in more than twenty years. Those are his stated measures of continuity: people staying, learning, and eventually helping the next group begin.
“Most companies use people to build the business. We use the business to build people.”
MJ Wivell · 2019A useful neighbor
Wivell’s interest in developing people extends into education and community work. Evergreen Christian School lists him on its board of directors and describes his interest in equipping future leaders in business and ministry. He has also served on the board of Justice & Mercy International. These commitments give his leadership interests a life outside the company.
In 2013, BTI360 shared his conference talk, Lean Giving Beyond Software, about applying talents to help others. A decade later, he publicly welcomed the company’s recognition for service in Herndon, crediting its team and the work with Cornerstones. BTI360 received the town’s Distinguished Corporate Service Award after moving there in 2021. Becoming a neighbor had acquired a practical meaning.
There is a pleasing consistency between teaching an engineer to communicate more usefully and asking a business to contribute beyond its contracts. In each case, ability becomes more valuable when someone else can benefit from it. Wivell returns to that question in settings considerably wider than a development meeting.
AI still has to do the work
The company’s technology has moved on. In July 2024, BTI360 announced that its customized generative AI solutions were available through the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community. Its offering combined professional services with adaptable components for tasks including questions and answers, reporting and data services. The intended customer was a government organization with operational requirements.
That setting helps explain Wivell’s insistence on the engineering around AI. In his July 2026 comments, he emphasized security, scale and the constraints of national security work. His ambition is to get useful systems into operation and reduce the manual processing that occupies people who could spend more time exercising judgment.
BTI360 also established its first advisory board in September 2025, bringing together David Shedd, Jennifer Ewbank, Gary Struzik and Amr ElSawy. Their backgrounds span intelligence leadership, digital modernization, finance and research organizations. Wivell welcomed their help in expanding the company’s impact while preserving its engineering focus. Growth had brought more experienced people to the table.
The underlying question remains familiar. Can the organization equip people to do useful work for the person relying on them? Wivell first approached it as a dissatisfied engineer, then as a founder, coach and reader with a list to share. His tools have changed from one stage to another. The habit of beginning with people has been harder to dislodge.