Johanna’s on a (very excellent) rant about forced ranking. I concur. Some people are convinced that forced ranking is a Good Thing. Usually they have arguments such as “everyone needs to know where they stand,” or “we need some way to weed out...
I wrote a little article (posted on stickyminds) about how our interpretation of an interaction can get us in a tangle.Sometimes we hear someone say something, and conclude that we’re being treated unfairly or we’re under attack. A friend of mine wrote to...
Via Dave Smith: Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 lessons by Evan Robinson.Evan’s 6 Lessons.Lesson One, then, is this: Productivity varies over the course of the workday, with the greatest productivity occurring in the first four to six hours. After enough...
It seems that Agile is out of the early adopter phase and people are starting to ask about how to do Agile organization wide.So I’ve been pondering change for an Agile organization.One thing I’m quite certain about is that traditional...
Brad Appleton starts his new blog with a post The first thing to build is TRUST.Agreed! If we want to deliver great software, we have to attend to building trust and relationship. The quality of interactions determines the quality of results. Here are five pragmatic...
Susan Annunzio posts on the Fast Company blog:One of the most interesting findings of the Contagious Success research is that in high-performing groups, the leader “protects” the group from the larger company, whether lobbying for more resources or...
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a fund raiser and was seated next to a person I didn’t know. I struck up a conversation, asked a few questions, and learned that the person next to me was a manager in a IT department.This week, I had lunch with another manager...
A couple of weeks ago, at the Better Software Conference in San Jose, I lead an informal session on Retrospectives. I agreed to put the notes from our session up on my blog. This is a combination of the notes and my editorial comments :-)I use a framework for...
I’ve been spending time on planes lately, and have had plenty of time to catch up on my reading. (Well, I made some progress, but I’m really not caught up.) Some of the books have been better than others and some have been quite astonishing.I was struck by...
