Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Adjustments! When power adjusts the scientific results

Two Roman rulers, Julius and Augustus permanently got themselves into the western Calendar. I don’t know how many months we would have if other Roman rulers were as powerful of these two!? To accommodate them, there were some calendrical adjustments made. Sept means 7 and Dec means 10 but their months are shifted. August month is so important that an extra day needed to be taken from February, which originally had 29 days (30 in a leap year), and was reduced to 28 days.

I see same pattern happening now in many areas where people with power easily override the outcome of a scientific result. The "I don’t like that number" syndrome.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Use Red to change your attitude towards a habit

To stop smoking, put a red band around cigarettes to give the smoker a guilt zone. By stopping at the red band, the smoker gains control over her or his smoking habit.


Suggested by Edward De Bono.



Monday, November 12, 2007

The Red, Yellow and Green pattern

Using colors can add intelligence and meaning to your work. I found using red, yellow and green pattern in many different situations giving you the control needed to achieve quality. Control is a wonderful feeling when you have been out of control. While busy red indicates that you don’t have time to talk, yellow means strictly business and green shows that you are open for any kind of conversation.

In today world of agile software development, Red is failure, yellow is for code smell and green asserts that you are in control.

Cars use the color pattern indicating oil, gas and other things that are running out. Where else do you see this pattern can be used?

“If you do not design your own life then someone else will do it for you.”

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Key on Caring

Our offshore coordinator asked this via Email:

What courses of technology would you recommend for your staff to take?

He had a list of classes (mostly specific to Microsoft Platform) in the body of email.

My answer. They shouldn't take any of those courses. They shouldn’t key on languages and platforms. They should key on learning to communicate, to think, and to work well with other people as well as to care for their craft. Once they have those, learning the languages and technologies become simple matters.

Reading principle-based books like Pragmatic programmer and Peopleware is by far a better start then blindly following those courses.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Subtracting = Simple = Better = Beautiful

Fresh from several years of computer programming, 137-year-old Sirius settles in the LA to finish his research on the behavior of computer programmers. But during his research he found most of the code written so far follows the Brownian motion that happens in physics. He was fascinated by a gentleman (Danash) who learns all the computer languages alphabetically…Ada, Basic, C, C++ etc. His research shows that people are always adding stuff and he thinks: “Kids should learn subtraction at school prior to learning addition”. He remembers in his dream while having fever, that a fat hand starts writing really bad code in solo. There is only one hand coding and the other one is missing. The hand then opens his mouth and starts drinking coffee and throw up almost instantaneously on the code. This goes on for the entire development cycle.

Over time, his disgust towards bad-code forces him into near-insanity, and finally Danash introduces him to a group of people who actually care about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. He anxiously study and searches for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Their code was like a garden with a few things carefully selected and placed, simple, beautiful. Sirius realized that they also eat in smaller plates, pass the keyboard frequently to each other, laugh frequently, test like there is no tomorrow, and build their software 20 times a day. That was a turning point for Sirius’s research. There were no bad dreams and there were always 4 set of hands involved in any coding episode.

I should take my medicine, before this writing gets totally out of hand.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Sarbanes-Oxley

"When the cost of a new control is small compared with the legal exposure it covers, CIOs will implement the control. But this has always been true. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't change anything. I predict that Sarbanes-Oxley will still be the law of the land 20 years from now. I further predict that it will have no effect whatsoever (other than causing a bit of panic in the first year or two) and will eventually be universally ignored. It will be like the blue laws still in existence in most states that prohibit a Wal-Mart from being open on Sundays, even though Wal-Mart is open on Sundays in all 50 states."

- Tom Demarco

Friday, September 28, 2007

Blitz

Blitz is a fast game of playing chess game. You must use 40 moves in 5 minutes, as you think and when you go over time you lose. The objective of this tight restrains is to keep the game brief and focused.

It reminds me of stand up meetings (they are Blitz meetings) which give all the members a chance to express their thoughts in a few seconds.

In chess there is a timer to keep track of moves and time. In stand up someone needs to play the role of the timer. How do you make one lose if she goes into details?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Committees

Some quotes on committees:

"A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours."
"The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present."
"You'll find in no park or city a monument to a committee."
"Committee - a group of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary."
"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled."

Sounds familiar?

Saturday, September 15, 2007

I wish had seen this 5 minutes clip before buying my new car

Rob Gruhl the car buyer expert gives some great, practical advice on how to buy cars.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Trust

Most corporate default company assumption is "Employees are NOT to be trusted!"

You can not use a DVD writer, portable devices, access blogs or certain sites. On top of that your computer will log off automatically whenever you walk away to drink a cup of tea (drinking coffee had the same side effect). Actually, company loses money on the policy by wasting its employee’s time and drives the creative one away.

"Do employees who aren’t trusted behave as nicely to the customers as those who are trusted? If we don't trust them why are we hiring them?"

The Healthy cycle

"Listen to your employees, listen to your customers. Do what they tell you."

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Video Specification

YouTube is a great way of learning almost anything. Why not create a similar tool for your company to deliver visual requirements to remote teams besides sending a textual specification.
Those who are remote then have a chance to watch a three minute video and get an idea as to what the topic is. However, if people who are making a 300 page of boring specification are the same who will make these videos then forget it.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Take a personality type test to find out who you are

NP was very excited about his personality type test. Meanwhile I was talking on the phone with AM and he just came back from a personality checking type of a seminar. He was very thrilled too. It is my personality to look into this further, if two smart guys are very excited then I should be too. That itself explains my type. You can check yours and your spouse here. I am not too sure as to how scientific these tests are but some of the points are very valid and fun to play with.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

See the waste

Do you think if you replace a great developer with 10 mediocre ones you save money?

Do you think 10-20 mediocre developers can produce the same thing that a great one creates no matter how long they work?

Would you rather to work with 2 great people or deal with 20 unknown ones that you never see daily?

Final question:

Would you rather fly in an airplane having a pair of extremely skilled pilots or die by a crew of 10 clueless one?

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Contagious

Seth Godin talks about a study that shows obesity is contagious. “If your best friend gets fat, your chances of gaining weight more than double.”

It is very important to have a tool for enticing you to choose what you learn when you’re hanging out with friends. I often tell my kids “Show me your friends, I tell you who you are”. A fat free blog could act as a tool to stay in touch with your selected friends. There is also RSS tool like google reader to let the flow going.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Value Stream Mapping

You are able to see that your process is taking longer than ever and your gut feel says you need new resources to remedy this situation. If application is running slow you think you need new servers or changing the application itself etc.


The question is what tools do we have to map our gut feel to reality? How do you know all the way from start to finish where the waste (waiting) vs. work reside in the process?

Value Stream Mapping - it simply plots the course of the added value vs. non value added (waste) to distinguish where the areas of attacks are. Mary Poppendieck’s presentation on productivity clearly has a great example of this process. You can also watch her presentation here.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

When in doubt reverse it

Language is a tool to express situations. However our language for expressing the software life cycle is very poor and deficient. We couldn’t find a suitable word between 'Development' and 'Test' and we have been stuck with Analysis->Design->Dev->Test cycle. Reversal is a great tool – doing just that you get TDD or TDDA. Now we are equipped with words like “TestDriven” and “Refactoring” coined by Martin Fowler, but there is much more to be done.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Channel 137 - a TV funnel that worth watching

I have created the Channel137 site to contain intelligent videos. This is a channel for people who miss intelligent contents in regular TV channels, topics like agile methodology, Lean, extreme programming, and interviews with great minds on any subject. You just turn off your TV and watch the shows from your computer or by connecting them to your big screen.

You can also rate the channel and vote on its content.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

What should project managers do when it comes to planning?

What should project managers do when it comes to planning? There are tones they can do to avoid wasting people’s time and bore them to death by putting fungible names on a list while playing with fake numbers.

I think there's a better way (this tool has steps), one that gets everybody just about everything they need, project managers, bosses, programmers etc. Here goes:

Step one: download Jeff Patton’s (from Thoughtworks) wonderful article on “It is all in how you slice”. You should print the article on a colored paper (forget the lousy cost savings policy – it costs more not to have it in color). Read it carefully.

Next step: Print more copies for people who might be interested or benefit from this tool.

Next step: follow the steps in the article for one of your projects. See if your team or customers will benefit from this process/tool.

Next step: visualize your exploration. Something 1 foot by 2 foot or so. Printed on cardboard. You can transfer the findings onto a spreadsheet or just take a picture and communicate.

Last step: Make this a habit and invite your best customers to help in your planning. Look into yours and other people energy level and compare it to the way planning was done before.

Send me a testimonial comment if this helps.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Four walls to trigger positive behavior toward having a balanced life



Remember there are four walls in your room. They are for Education, health, Art and friendship. I have drawn a simple picture of walls for my kids and every night they put dots on walls each time there is a success for a specific activity.

Today I looked at my own walls and it looks like this picture. I am not doing well when it comes to Art. To score on that, my daughter decided to teach me how to draw picture of Nemo the fish. I am very excited about getting points on the Art and friendship both. It is amazing how a simple tool can have a long lasting effect on your behavior.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

It Is Up Side Down

Why people who don’t know anything about projects and work impose policies, deadlines and reward on those who perform the work? The mind set is that people are prisoners (of promotion, reward, title, etc) and they should follow orders. The wrongest thing is when they judge an employee and reward an individual or stop their work. I always give a score of 0 to managers who reward an individual publicly instead of acknowledging teams. I often wonder how they treat their own kids. There is a big difference when you say “you are a great kid” vs. “I liked the way you helped your sister today”. The first one is Jugging on the personal level while the second feedback is very useful and sticky.

Here is a great Video illustrates how these kind of small-minded people act as if they somehow deserve to judge far more talented people than themselves.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Boring

Sometimes while driving I see a person holding an advertisement sign. The person behind the sign does nothing all day but waving a sign. If you pay attention around you at work, you see some people having the similar sings up all the time.
Why not make these people helpful? Perhaps we should ask them questions. How is the traffic? Where can I find a nice restaurant? Where is the closest bank? Can we skip boring people with administrivia at staff meetings? Perhaps an engaging experience can help to reduce stress and make this world a better place.

Friday, June 08, 2007

Simple way of gathering metrics

Despite of huge investment in tracking tool still process oriented mangers struggle with gathering meaningful metrics. According to Tom Demarco a useful metric should have the following qualities:
1. It must be a consistent indicator of the cost factors to be projected
2. It must be available early enough to satisfy reasonable political constraints imposed on the estimating process

A very simple and low cost way of gathering useful metrics is suggested by Esther Derby which you draw a picture of all the modules and each time there is a production problem put a color coded dot on the module – red for a crash, yellow for an issue with a workaround and blue for a data problem. You will see quickly the most error-prone modules, and gradually you can tackle those problems one by one.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Turtle

Adding requirements for security, data shield and audit purposes come with a cost of slowness. Look at the nature – animals with shells (security) are far slower than others.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Simplicity

“How come my car is so much larger than my camera, but my camera’s manual is thicker than my car’s manual”.
- John Maeda MIT Professor

Saturday, May 19, 2007

SPECIAL THINKING DAYS

Friday afternoon you feel different since Saturday is a special day. Many groups have special days and they look forward to have them. The concept here is the same, to create special days that increase productivity and enrich your life.

1. SMALL PROJECTS DAYS

Many of us have tasks and projects that they mean to start but don’t for various reasons. Often something unattractive mandate or meetings get in the way. However, on this day we break through by committing ourselves to spend a short specified amount of time 2 hours per pair on doing interesting stuff. On that day we say “No” to meetings – email or any other things to get things done.

2. LEARNING DAYS

Whatever your potential is - you become better through learning, study and practice. It would be a great day to design new tools like inventing a new game for learning the business. On this day you can learn a new skill, new programming language, crafting a new screen you always wanted for administrating your shared files, etc.

3. GETTING THINGS DONE DAYS

On these days your mood is clearing clutters. No email review when you start your machine and allocate time for reading emails same way C programmers do for allocating arrays [1024]. Read email at 10, 2 and 4. Reinforce the habit of making a small to do list of 4 things on a sticky or index card. Set short deadline for each activity and do one thing at a time (multitasking is evil).

4. POSITVE ACTION DAYS

On these days you invest time and energy to help others. Positive actions create a permanent effect of team work and long lasting friendship.

5. CLEAN UP DAYS

Increasingly we seem to spend our lives rushing around with stressful meetings, phony deadlines and many other things passes easily through our firewall. One consequence is failure to extract the full value that every moment offers and emotional bankruptcy. On these days you make “no” the default answer for new tasks, meetings, and other demands. Those things should wait and earn their way into the attention field. On these days you don’t review your email when your day or machine starts. Morning is yours, afternoons you can spend time with your teammate to refactor that piece of a code that make you feel unclean. You delete emails, trash documents and turn off your phones.

6. TRY SOMETHING NEW DAYS

It is very easy to become entrenched in the same habits and get used to your daily habits. There is always stuff in the horizon with the potential to enrich our lives – we just have to be willing to seek them out. On Try Something New Days start trying different kind of food (spray coffee powder on your pasta – it is great), talk with different kind of people, go visiting somewhere you’ve never been. Write a utility you always wanted in new language. (I am not qualified on many of these items, as I am too lazy to go to new places or do some of the aforementioned items; however I believe in trying new things. I have tried the grounded coffee on pasta and can’t eat pasta without it ever since).

7. WORK FROM HOME DAYS

On working from home days we get into the creativity zone and purposely engage our brain into thinking of “possibilities”. Your mode will change and you can perform better at work when you have these days (pauses).

Friday, May 11, 2007

Learning from monkeys

NP told me that monkeys peel bananas at the ‘wrong’ end. I have tried it and it seems peeling is easier and actually banana taste better.
Are there more possibilities at your daily routine that can benefit from this principle? XPers tests before writing code, Dell sells computers before making them…

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Fail over

There is a joke (by De Bono) about the airline pilot who apologized to the passengers for having to shut down one engine. He explained that it meant they would arrive two hours late into New York. A second engine failed and he explained that they would be four hours late. Then a third engine failed. At this point the co-pilot leaned across to him and said:” I hope to goodness the last engine doesn't fail or we shall be up here all night!"

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Welcome to feedback culture

Smart customers know that projects are done by a step by step process, not an event.
Instead of this:
Request ---> Complain
It works like this:
Request---> sample ---> ask for feedback ---> learning ---> more sample ---> accept ---> relationship

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Who says we need our logo on every slide?

Garr Reynolds says: “The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to. We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by re-stating our name, why do we bombard people with our company logo in every slide?”

He also shows a clip of Lewis Black appearing on CNN and getting fed up with the extraneous graphics on the display. Fun to watch:



Thursday, April 26, 2007

When to stop

Toyota assembly line stops when something is wrong. There is a willingness to quit when things are off track - then they are on the path of mastery.

If you fire your worst boss, clients, stop working with the people who have no value, stop working on wasteful activities, then you free up an enormous energy. Direct that energy toward conquering great things and odds of success go way up.

Your pick?

You are presented with 2 options of picking a bottle of wine in a restaurant. One is going for 20$ and the other one goes for 30$. Which one do you pick? What if there is a third choice for 40$?

Last week I provided estimate to our users in a range, 4-8 weeks, 4 being the probability of have something to deliver. User’s understating was that we are going to finish in 6 weeks!

Monday, April 23, 2007

Better = Simpler

Many organizations view complexity as a sign of getting better. They make things overly complicated by imposing new processes which create metrics (usually they are not based on results) they like to have. The end result however, is very depressing: fear, pressure, uncertainty, and complexity. What suffers? Human CPU is not very good at handling pressure when things are complicated. Since complexity is the default (law of physics), you need highly creative people to make things simple. Creative people survive only in an environment which creativity is allowed. While many advanced teams are implementing proven methods to increase teamwork and creativity, still many managers are at sleep or denial, ignoring possibilities of doing things new ways.

At one time China was ahead of the West in science and technology then they started to believe that information was enough and progress came to a halt because they never developed “possibility”.

Simplicity is the best indicator of “getting better”.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The more "done" something appears, the lesser and narrower feedback get

One of my colleagues at work has asked me to give feedback on his vision document (position paper). Oh well, the document is so strongly voiced that I am not sure that it is a vision document, a road map or a solution to a perceived problem. The document is definitely looks sharp with pretty pictures of sunny vision and green road maps. It also has an appendix section containing code snippets of a tagged language (xml/xslt). I am sure that our friend has put tones of work into this and his document is well thought out and incisive.
So, why am I losing energy as I read through the document? So much of what I read strikes me as correct but somehow belittling of the problems real domain face. The vision: Reuse, shared components and shared database. The document then goes through some lengths to show a solution along with a possible implementation.
The problem with such a generic vision statement is more or less the equivalent of a manager advice/order to "get better." That is no help at all if not insulting. I am also not a big fan of vision first, team later approach. Most successful companies define a domain to explore, build a team and then have the team to come up with the vision.
I am losing more energy as I see the perfectly fonted and formatted draft, every sentence seems more done than you’d like it open. The solution proposed deal with small amount of real problem, pretty much like an iceberg where 90% of it is underwater. The best design is emergent and done through exploration rather than a perfectly prescribed solution.
Am I just grumpy, or others may get annoyed as well? I shared the document with NP and DR, they both reacted the same way as I did - just a little stronger.
Don't make the Vision or a design document look done. Here is the most damaging part of this exercise besides setting the wrong expectation as Kathy Sierra suggest:
The more "done" something appears, the lesser and narrower feedback get.
If you show me something polished and pretty, you’ll get feedback on font sizes. The possibility of getting feedback is far more achievable if you do it on a piece of paper, napkin or white board. Java people use Napkin Look and Feel, for the same reason.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

When measurement becomes dangerous

Tom Demarco - based on the Rob Austin's book, Measuring and Managing: Performance in Organizations is that measurement is a potentially dangerous business. When you measure any indicator of performance, you incur a risk of worsening that performance. This is what Rob calls dysfunction.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Make the study interesting by using test driven approach

I was helping my daughter with the goal of making the social study subject interesting. Initially she was torturing herself by reading a page passively trying to get through the chapter. I was thinking that timing of this material isn’t right for an eleven year old person. We all get interested in these subjects later in life when we are busy working and there is no time for literature, social study and other great things.
To achieve our goal (learning the topic by injecting interest) – my daughter and I decided to use the test driven approach. Without reading any of the chapters we tried to answer the questions first. It was kind of like a guessing game which you do your best to come up with the answers. Now that acceptance criteria were defined early in the game and our brains were sensitized to those questions, we started reading the chapter. Every time we hit the line containing an answer – we look at each other, if we’ve gotten it correctly we smile, nod and hi five, otherwise we learn and that learning sticks.
This is a fear reducing method that can help your child [team] overcome something that is perceived as boring or scary.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Helping people determine if they work for an asshole.

This is the test of ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam ) scores based on Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule . Clearly, I am not a fan of profanity and forgive me for using this word here; however "asshole" is the only word that delivers the proper message in some situations.

How do you improve the productivity of meetings for software developers?

Bring a mobile projector to meetings. Many people may raise their eyebrows by saying it is expensive but if you use a projector in your working session you’ll see the difference. These days I say that every team should have one projector handy.
Why is this important? If you have a working meeting and need to share and see different things, it is far better to show everyone the same thing on a big screen. If you print screens on paper people will drift off and meeting can’t follow its course. The feedback loop increases once everyone is on the same page and usually your meetings are very focused and productive.
This is not as expensive as most people think. One of my friends said the price for a mobile projector is in the range of 1000 to - $2000. People are expensive; it doesn't take much to recover that kind of cost.
Sharing ideas over a big projector screen is a wise investment and cost reduction act.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Measurment Rules

"Isn't it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?"

1: A useful measurement should help you to understand and make decisions.
2: The cost of gathering metric shouldn’t exceed the benefit it provides.
3: The aim of metric shouldn’t threaten the safety of employees.
4: People who measure shouldn’t design it to nudge the numbers to make themselves look better.
5: Management shouldn’t have a preconceived outcome in mind and are open to whatever the data tells.
6: It is about learning
7: Use “Just enough” measurement to understand the system
8: Don’t measure individuals
9: Create Safety – Before collecting data, talk with the entire team. It’s critical that your team understands that they will not be blamed, ranked, or rated based on the data.
10: Assure your team that you won’t be using the data to evaluate them. You are depending on the team to collect the data, and you want accurate data.
11: Having distorted data is worse than having no data. If your team starts reporting the data in a way designed to make their performance look better, you will be relying on distorted data.
12: See the whole - Increase employee safety by only seeing aggregate data, not the results associated with any one employee. Otherwise you lose trust.
13: Gather Data based on your department goals, anything else is irrelevant.
14: Find the motivation - Ask why five times to get to the root cause of why we need these data in the first place.
15: You don’t have to have fancy automated data collection or an elaborate measurement program to do this.
16: Make sure the collected metric is used in a way to increase customer satisfaction.
17: Check the progress
18: Stop - if there is no reason to keep collecting the data.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

137

Sometime back our team had a lot of fun using number 137 to estimates unknown requirements. We could have used another number like pi but pi was a known number and less likely to believe by the project office.
137 is a mysterious number mentioned by physicists as the value of the fine-structure constant (the actual value is one over one-hundred and thirty seven), which is defined as the charge of the electron (q) squared over the product of Planck's constant (h) times the speed of light (c). This number actually represents the probability that an electron will absorb a photon. Pauli the famous physicist did a lot of research about this number and he died at room 137.
137 is the odds that an electron will absorb a single photon. Protons and electrons are bound by interactions with photons. So when you get 137 protons, you get 137 photons, and you get a 100% chance of absorption.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Two biggest mistakes

1. Not giving your team authority and enough space
2. Not managing peer relationships effectively

Monday, February 19, 2007

Stand ups

It seems that people have a fear of justifying their work during standups rather than focusing on what can be done.
Last week I created a big visible chart (story wall) of actions, how and when columns and stuck it to the wall for everybody to look at. This helped people to become focused and they started signing up for tasks as oppose to a push system which managers assign tasks to programmers.
We also tried to prevent people from going into detail. Initially we were showing the red card as a signal but recently adopted yawing for indicating too much into detail sign. Yawing is very contagious - start yawning couple of times when a meeting gets boring, you’ll be amazed as to how many people will get infected and start to yawn.

The twenty happiest countries

According to the study by Adrian White the twenty happiest countries are (the world map of happiness):

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Malaysia
18. New Zealand
19. Norway
20. The Seychelles

Other interesting data: USA (23), France (62), China (82) Japan (90), India (125). This seems like a good list of places to travel to. I am thinking about spending my next vacation in Costa Rica (ranked 13th).

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Guide to success




From Richard St. John, author of Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich: Spike's Guide to Success.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Do you recommend this presentation to your friend?

Please let me know by adding * in the comments.



Measuring what? Criteria for good measurement.

1. Measure the cycle time
2. Measure the Business value, ROI and not the number of items or hours worked. Who cares if fruit that you made isn’t juicy.
3. Customer satisfaction – most will put their faith into customer survey – they allocate 1024 questions and forget to free the customer off. The ultimate question is much superior approach, you ask just one question. It goes like this: Would you offer this (product) to a friend? The scale would be from 1 to 10, 1 is recommending it to an enemy.

What happened to you?

To see how you have been evolved, do this simple comparison. Watch a movie that you have seen 5, 10, 20 years ago. Can you compare your feelings about this film to the feelings you had when you first watched it over many years ago? To put things into perspective, look at the code you have written many years ago. Back then, when you were young and trying to do new things with an open mind. What has changed?

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Communication pattern

Couple of years ago I adopted the thinking process of assuming that everybody in the meeting is smarter than me. Since then I realized that this pattern gives you ammunition to communicate and understand others better.

The killer in any communication is the Curse of Knowledge. When we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become ignorant to others people’s view and lousy communicators. Doctors can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a simple question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. He is trapped in a road which when he talks to you, he talks from his view that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the Doctor in our own domain of expertise.

This is illustrated in the story by Roger von Oech about a creativity teacher who invited a student to his house for afternoon tea. They talked for a while, and then it was teatime. The teacher poured some tea into the student's cup. Even after the cup was full, he continued to pour, and soon tea overflowed onto the floor.
Finally, the student said, "You must stop pouring; the tea isn't going into the cup." The teacher replied, "The same is true with you. If you are to receive any of my teachings, you must first empty out the contents of your mental cup." His point: without the ability to forget, our minds remain cluttered with ready-made answers, and we're not motivated to ask the questions that lead our thinking to new ideas.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Design by looking at Nature

Steve Jobs mentioned that human can learn a lot from the nature and use those in design. Here is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac Ross Lovegrove presents his recent work. Here is a link from his wonderful presentation at TED talk conference.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Performance Evaluation

If you are like me, you would be a big fan of outsourcing tasks that you are either not capable of completing (like ordering things, creating legal documents or whatever is your skill gap) or loathe doing (like filing, copying, estimating numbers for some boring planning or responding to tons of administrative tasks).

One observation I have is seeing our most talented people are doing tones of administrative at different points. Would it be better to focus on what we are good at?

This brings us to one of these tasks - performance evaluation process (one I loathe passionately). Wouldn’t be better to focus on people’s strength rather than telling them “You need to improve on x and y area” and judge them based on some stupid grading system. Imagine if we have a Mozart in our team and wanting him (a great composer) to be good at audit, running reports, and tracking projects! I feel many managers killing talents this way unintentionally.