kSensei Blog

How to Disagree

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it’s not anger that’s driving the increase in disagreement, there’s a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it’s easy to say things you’d never say face to face.

Paul Ghaham wrote this excelent essay

Busy vs. Productive

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

– Timothy Ferriss

What an Agile Process Looks Like - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Development teams that want to adopt agile methods need to know what a typical roadmap looks like. This book chapter from the new Becoming Agile shows you how to view Agile concepts from a phase perspective.

Haiku Productivity: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential | zen habits

A new way to make me focus on fewer, but more important things. As a way to allow myself to do more in less time.

Rachel Davies: How do you recognise an Agile company?

How do you recognise an Agile company? Looking around and making some observations is a good way to start.

all about agile software development

What are the qualities of inspirational leaders?

Geek To Live: The art of the doable to-do list - Lifehacker

There’s no better feeling than checking something off your to-do list. Yet it’s so easy to let a whole day or week go by without knocking one task off your list. How does that happen? Well, your to-do list must be a tool that guides you through your work. It all depends on how you write it.

FO - Lifehacker

In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable

Eisenhower

Careers: Lessons from LeBron James and Michael Jordan on Teamwork

As a leader, you need to set up a work environment that suits the talent you have on your team. If some members need structure, give them structure. If others desire autonomy, you need to make sure you give it to them. Of equal importance is role clarity. Team members must know what they’re responsible for or they’re going to become frustrated and nine times out of 10, they’ll fail.

What Toyota can Teach You about Personal Productivity - lifehack.org

Toyota pioneered “lean manufacturing” based in large part on creating value in the eyes of the customer and having products being “pull” or demand-based that would be responsive to the customer rather than “push” or supply-based from the production end.

Lean manufacturing also includes identifying and minimizing waste (including inventory), empowering employees and aiming for perfection in the processes.

The ‘Toyota Way’ can also be applied toward improving personal productivity.

Painless Software Schedules - Joel on Software

Why doesn’t anybody make a schedule? Two key reasons. One, it’s a real pain. Two, nobody believes that it’s worth anything. Why go to all the trouble working on a schedule if it’s not going to be right? There is a perception that schedules are consistently wrong, and only get worse as time goes on, so why suffer for naught?

Here’s a simple, painless way to make schedules that are actually correct.

FO Joel on Software

Are Great Teams Less Productive? — HBS Working Knowledge
While studying teamwork, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson chanced upon a seeming paradox: Well-led teams appeared to make more mistakes than average teams. Could this be true? As it turned out, good teams, which value communication, report more errors. In a recent research paper Edmondson and doctoral student Sara Singer explore this and other hidden barriers to organizational learning.

First on HBS Working Knowledge

Project Management Source: Lessons from Project Management: 101 ways to organize your life

Project Management (and life) Wisdom straight from the mouths of the horses – oops, I mean project managers

LANACION.com

Un amigo, Martín Candurra, comparte conmigo este articulo de Lanacion.com donde se reflexiona sobre la busqueda de talentos.

Cito del articulo:

Jocho Yamamoto, fue un samurái que vivió entre los siglos XVII y XVIII y que pensaba que o son posibles las hazañas humanas, a menos que quienes las realicen se encuentren afectados por un estado anormal de la mente. Traducido a nuestro lenguaje cotidiano, hay que estar muy loco para realizar verdaderos hechos excepcionales. ¿Serán estos los locos a quienes se les llama “talentos” y se los busca afanosamente?

A proposito de esta reflexión, Martín es un talento que tuve la oportunidad de reclutar para un proyecto complejo y que quizas podamos considerar una hazaña tecnica, en el cual tuvo una actuación destacada.

Solo basto una entrevista para “intuir” que habia talento y una “corazonada” para saber que lo queria en nuestro equipo.

The Lean Nature of Google’s Development Practices - Manageability

For the uninitiated, Lean Production is a set of princples and tools first conceptualized by Toyota in the 1980s (a.k.a. Just-In-Time, Kanban system) to support its auto manufacturing business. Mary and Tom Poppendieck subsequently leveraged the ideas and defined a set of seven lean principles for software development:

1. Eliminate Waste - Spend time only on what adds real customer value.
2. Amplify Learning - When you have tough problems, increase feedback.
3. Empower the Team - Let the people who add value use their full potential.
4. Deliver as Fast as Possible - Deliver value to customers as soon as they ask for it.
5. See the Whole - Beware of the temptation to optimize parts at the expense of the whole.
6. Build Integrity In - Don’t try to tack on integrity after the fact - build it in.
7. Decide as Late as Possible - Keep your options open as long as practical, but no longer.

The question I would like to pose is “how close does Google’s development practices match Lean software development?”.

In addition, what does Google do that goes beyond Lean Software Development?

Carlos Peres wrote an interesting article analyzing every lean principle and how Google is applying it to their processes.

9 tips for running more productive meetings | 43 Folders

Via 43 Folders

The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers - lifehack.org

What do the truly great managers of our world believe in?

1. Managers believe that people are innately good. Without this core belief and faith in people, great management is not possible.

2. Managers believe they do not work on their people, they work with them; they enable and empower them.

3. Managers believe that “empowerment” comes from within, and has more to do with self-motivation and innate talent than with the acceptance of authority. They get their cues from the person, not from the task or process.

4. Managers believe that all people have strengths which can be made stronger, and that their weaknesses can be compensated for to become irrelevant.

5. When it comes to training, the great managers do not believe they train people, they believe they train skills and offer additional knowledge.

6. Managers believe they coach and mentor people, and they love doing so — not “like,” love.

7. Managers believe that the people they manage are more than capable of creating a better future. They hold great faith and trust in the four-fold human capacities of physical ability, intellect, emotion, and spirit.

8. Managers believe in the power of positive, affirmative thinking, and they have a low tolerance for negativity. They are confident and eternal optimists.

9. Managers believe it is their job to remove barriers and obstacles so people can attain the level of greatness they are destined for. They believe that “can’t” is a temporary state of affairs, and that everything is only impossible until the first person does it.

10. Managers believe that their legacy will be in the other people they have helped to achieve worthwhile and meaningful goals. They believe that success is measured in people who thrive and prosper.

That’s why managers matter, and why management is vitally important.

First on lifehack.org

Fixing the Requirements Mess - Editorial - CIO

Mishandled requirements can torpedo a project at any time, from inception to delivery. Start down the wrong road and you arrive at the wrong destination. And even if you’re heading in the right direction, making fumbling changes midstream can be almost as deadly. Not integrating requirements with your test process can have you racing back late in the game to correct problems that might have been solved early on (and more cheaply).

None of this is easy. Business users often don’t know exactly what they want, can’t prioritize what they do want, request things IT simply can’t deliver (because of complexity or cost), or can’t describe their desires in terms that translate accurately into code. On the IT side, analysts, architects and coders regularly try too hard to please and don’t set realistic expectations for projects; they don’t use every means possible to guarantee that what they’re building is what the user really needs, and sometimes they even fail to make sure that they’re talking to all the right stakeholders.

Writing requirements is hard. It will always be hard. But with a handful of smart decisions you can create a requirements process that will produce positive results—and maybe keep your next project from becoming another statistic.

Great article from CIO.COM

How to Choose the Best Deal : Negotiation : HBS Working Knowledge

Weighing different options can seem as difficult as comparing apples and oranges. The first step is to find the equalizer—then proceed from there, writes HBS professor Michael Wheeler in this article from Negotiation.

Online Collaboration: What Are The Key Traits Of Ideal Online Collaborators? - Online Collaboration and Web Conferencing Breaking News - Kolabora.com

A recent survey conducted jointly by Mitch Ditkoff and Tim Moore of Idea Champions, Carolyn Allen of Innovation Solution Center and Dave Pollard of Meeting of Minds reveals that most people would rather have inexperienced people with a positive attitude than highly experienced people who lack enthusiasm, candor or commitment, on a collaborative work team.