Sometimes you find yourself treading water. Just staying afloat, going nowhere, and no one’s coming to throw you a life buoy. Your stuck. Patience can be a virtue but at some point it becomes a vice, it becomes wishful thinking. If your the only one trying to make it better, make a change, everyone else is stalling, sabotaging, coasting, looking the other way, or just plain pretending that this just isn’t their problem, you have to wonder, is it time to get out of the water and try something new? Me, I think so. I think the risk of change is far better than the death spiral of patience and tolerance in intolerable situations. Sometimes things need to get broken, abandoned, left behind, to make something really worth keeping.
Posts tagged as:
structure
March 30, 2010
Patience is a vice?
January 24, 2010
Acceleration
The world is accelerating. Change is the only constant. Our evolution is in our hands. What’s your approach to it all?
Challenge or Accept
Create or Use
Revise or Repeat
Diverge or Remain
Different or Same
Lead or Follow
Tell or Ask
Recommend or Complain
Risk or Safe
Listen or Shout
Me? I think the advantage falls to those on the left side of the “or” rather than the right. How about you?
January 22, 2010
Face time
If you can work from anywhere, which many can these days, why go out of your way to get somewhere to do that work? Why waste time commuting? Why break that time quickening moment to get out of your pajamas’s and go somewhere?
If office face-time drives you nuts,
If your boss wants to see you because they are a control freak,
If your peers want you within arms reach because they want to socialize,
If your staff needs you to be there to work out every detail in a meeting or you just can’t trust them,
Then change something fast.
Make a drop in center rather than an office for those collaboration sessions, socialize over lunch or dinner together, and if all else fails change jobs or loose the needy peers and un-trustworthy staff.
Do something because your wasting the one finite quantity you have – time.
December 31, 2009
There is always a third choice!
Interesting situation yesterday. We had been debating at length how to present a simple user interface to quite a complex function and have lost a fair bit of time to it.
We felt we had two choices. Leave it as is, which is sub-standard at best, or continue to try and improve it and spend considerable time on it. Our perspective had us stuck there. We thought we only had two choices.
Then Alex came along and echoed the rules that we are supposed to live by. Simplify it! Take it out. A light bulb came on. We took it out.
We actually had three choices but didn’t see it; leave something that doesn’t work that well as is, continue to invest in it, or don’t do it all as it isn’t worth the trouble of making anyone use it or anyone improve it.
This was a software situation but I think these rules apply to everything in all walks of life.
December 9, 2009
Meetings
A while back I wrote about meetings being outdated, but I think this nails it far better.
From the 37 Signals Blog
December 3, 2009
I love unruly lots
I think there are three types of teams and probably a million more in between, but for this purpose let’s look at the two extremes and one in the middle.
At the worst extreme is a team that is dysfunctional. They don’t like what their doing and who their doing it with. They don’t like where the team is going. They are along for the ride for as long as it takes them to get off. This situation sucks for everyone. The people involved, the funder, users, clients, everyone. No one wants to be in a team situation like this.
In the middle of the curve you have a team that works on the surface. People have signed up because they don’t mind the people their with, they don’t mind what the team is doing and they didn’t have anything better to do anyways. They show up on time, wait in line to be told what to do and generally like cruising along with everyone else, and oh yeah, every now and then they will look up and consider the overall objectives and throw their thoughts in on how to get there if anyone asks.
At the other end of the extreme we have the third type of team. They are an unruly lot. Barely manageable. Usually rude. The only thing they all have in common is they all love the outcome that everyone is after and they don’t give a damn about what it will take to get there. They are constantly giving advice, making decisions and asking for forgiveness later and no one who has half a brain cares cause these people get things done - they are goal focused. Notice I didn’t say that they question the goal. They are 100% on board with where this team wants to end up. They just question why it is taking so long to get there and why everyone else is holding them back. They have allot of opinions on how to get there faster.
If you belong to, fund or are counting on one of the first two team types, well let’s just say life is too short to hang out there for long, and if you managed to land yourself in the midst of the unruly lot, prepare to be amazed and hang on, what a ride it will be.
December 2, 2009
Seth’s Blog: How to be a great client
This has got be one of my favorite Seth posts to date. I’m sure it won’t be my last. Highly recommend the read!
Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
…
Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
November 28, 2009
What’s wrong with I don’t know?
What’s wrong with I don’t know?
We don’t like the vacuum it creates. The uncertainty it leaves us with. It makes us nervous. So we make stuff up. And then we make all sorts of assumptions and plans around the made up stuff.
What a waste of time and what a waste of energy to keep convincing yourself and others to believe in something you made up. “I don’t know” may be uncomfortable but it sure is easier and allot more reliable than pretending.
November 17, 2009
Creating intellectual capital gets easier and easier
One year ago it costs us about $5,000 per year per developer for the software operating system, development environment, tools, MSDN subscriptions, etc. etc.
We then changed our viewpoint and focused on leveraging cloud computing and the open source community.
Our costs today per developer for software are $0. Zero dollars for a developer software environment per year.
Combine this with the elimination of server hardware and software, IT infrastructure support and maintenance, moving from a large office environment to a virtual work place with a drop in as-you-need-it office, and leveraging free video conferencing and the savings are off the chart.
The creation of intellectual capital is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
November 15, 2009
The worst things startups do
From the worst things startups do at Scobeleizer
I think he saved the best points for last in his list (below) but click the link to read the whole thing, fantastic post:
“10. You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions. Look at Posterous (the video embedded on this blog). They have a blog publishing tool. But are their comments threaded? No. Will they be eventually? Yes! Why didn’t they do them threaded up front? Because they set priorities on other things that mattered more. That’s actually a good sign for a startup: if you have only four engineers you can’t do everything. If there’s one thing I like about Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, is that he doesn’t try to do it all. In fact he prides himself on NOT doing things. It takes great leadership to say “no, Scoble, you can’t have more than 500 members on a list.”
11. Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar. You’re a startup, you should be picking the best of breed for everything you do. If you are using Microsoft Office “just because” then you are making a mistake. Have you considered Jive, SocialText, Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Wave before making your choices? Have you really looked at ways to make your small company more productive? Or you just going with the same stuff your dad’s company used?
12. You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so. Are things going according to plan? If not, fix them. But sometimes you just made bad assumptions about what the market would want from you. That’s OK! But don’t take a year to change directions, change quickly and you’ll have a chance to save the company.”
