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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?

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.

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.

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.