or unhappiness and problems as the case may be.Hal Macomber points to an article by John Brandt in Industry Week.”The sad truth about unhappy companies: They won’t be around much longer,” says Brandt. Unhappy companies share a set of traits that make...
Julian Elve points to an article on How to be Happy in his post on Positive Psychology.Now there’s something worth knowing :-)Also see Keith Ray’s post on the Paradox of Happiness.I’m reminded of one of the sayings of Virginia Satir: “The...
My mother used to say that to me when I was a child and didn’t exhibit sufficient independence of thought. I was reminded of that (annoying) phrase recently at a talk I gave on influence and managing your boss.My premise is that influence depends on:1) having a...
I’ve come across a couple of references lately that state that aglile methods won’t scale because they are people-centric — they rely on highly-skilled, people who are capable of working together to produce software.When has this not been true? Any...
I believe that great managers are made, not born. And there are some minimum qualifications to become a great manager. A while back I wrote about one of them, the ability to delegate and trust people to achieve results.The other entry criteria is liking to work with...
I walk through a variation on this statement (originally from Norm Kerth) at the beginning of a retrospective:The Retrospective Prime DirectiveRegardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he/she could, given what...
I came across this list of guidelines for learning on Jason Kottke’s site (via Ned Batchelder).Post script: Dale Emery points out that this list is remarkably similar to David Bohms work on Dialogue, which has been made popular by Peter Senge and others....
When I work with a project team on a retrospective, one of the first things I attend to is the safety of the group. I define safety as the ability to speak your truth without fear of ridicule, rejection, or retribution. Once in a while, someone has a strong reaction...
Yep, that’s me. One of the key ideas in Tom De Marco’s book Slack is that people need a little slack in their schedules to reinvent and change. Humans who are busy all the time don’t have the time/ability to reflect and create new hypotheses on how...
Dave Hoover has an interesting post on where to look for the source of errors, Assume it is Your Fault.I was fortunate to learn this lesson on my first programming job (very very long ago). We didn’t have a separate test group, so we tested each others code. I...
