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Referencing in advice to client. Good book.
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Give it five minutes – (37signals)
“Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss.
There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.
Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.
So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes.”
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Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! | Video on TED.com
Doodler vindication!
“Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.”
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Conway’s law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Conway’s law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1968:
…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
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How Sara Blakely of Spanx Turned $5,000 into $1 billion – Forbes.com
Good self-made woman entrepreneur story:
“Sara Blakely is the youngest self-made woman to join this year’s billionaires’ club–turning $5,000 in savings into a new retail category”
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Self-tracking for health, fun and profit? – Input Output
My latest on Active Information:
“About a decade ago, I was working with my favorite co-conspirator on a universal task viewer service, which was an adjunct to our event-driven architecture. In order for something to appear in the task viewer, it had to be “trackable” (include the proper interface).
Over the course of our design sessions, and throughout the next few months, we kept identifying business and system actions that should be trackable. It became apparent to us that nearly every business and system action could be trackable, following an interface pattern similar to making document objects printable.
I hadn’t thought of “trackable” — and the running “hey that’s trackable” joke — in years. However, reading Counting Every Moment on self-tracking in the recent Economist Technology Quarterly bounced trackable up my memory stack.” -
Jump to Kanban in Lean manufacturing distilled section
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Kanban is the New Scrum « The Hacker Chick Blog
“The thing I’ve grown to dislike about Scrum are it’s time-boxed sprints.
Working with startups, Scrum sprints are almost always way too long. When your sprints are too long then releases are infrequent (deferring revenue) and the team is forced to wait too long before being able to adapt to changing customer needs. This is wasteful because it means you’re continuing to move forward with outdated information.
On the other hand, if sprints are too short, big features need to be arbitrarily chunked into smaller tasks, which aren’t useful to the customer on their own & can obfuscate what the team is trying to achieve”
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10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy | Brain Pickings
“People who think well, write well.”
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Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs – NYTimes.com
“It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
Archives for March 2012
Link Collection — March 4, 2012
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High Scalability – High Scalability – Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!
“Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler, searched for a concrete way to create an intuitive understanding of just how fast is a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, which was the speed of their new computer circuits.”
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CFOs boost tech spending as they cut elsewhere, seeking competitive edge – WSJ.com
“This is the best time to get outsize returns if you know what you are doing,” says Dr. Brynjolfsson. “It is also the best time to lose your shirt if you don’t know what you are doing.”
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Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle – NYTimes.com
“Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.”
