Boardmad…still mad for it !

Staff Surveys

Hmmph…secretly what everyone believes?!

Home from a week in Hong Kong on business…hoping I’ll get back to what passes for normality quick! Jet-lag is weird…for me I often feel like I’m on the deck of a moving ship when I’m 30 storeys up in an office somewhere! Bit nauseating??! But this trip I managed to kick my sleep patterns forward pretty fast (hitting the pool and steam-room each morning really helps – try it!)

Just pulled down Queen – Absolute Greatest Remastered. It’s like someone pouring gently warmed, aural ambrosia in my ears. Listened to ‘Somebody to Love’ and got shivers…Freddie’s voice was/is unmatched.

Social disorders

Two of my favourite subjects borg’d into one. Social Media and Data Visualisation…and yes I appear to be firmly in the heart of this so I’m kind of a mess :0)

The office has now (in it’s dubious wisdom) decided to block xkcd.com….my epitaph for a site that keeps me laughing every single day

Given the recent conversations in the office and our amusingly exotic mix of technologies one comes across during a brief review of even a small part of the architecture I’m responsible for this post really does make me laff (inside I’m crying)….sob!

Apparently Scott Kurtz (author of PVP Online) didn’t think this was much of a strip and kind of just tossed it out there. It’s one of the mysteries of ‘what makes funny’ – I nearly laughed my morning latte down my nose.

Think it’s as much to do with the attachment I have to the characters in this strip I’ve followed for a long time now, Skull’s naivety, Cole’s cynicism and world-weary realism and of course…well it’s a gag on Star Wars. Why wouldn’t you love it?

Or “21 Ideas about leading Innovation”

1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

2. Treat innovation as an import-export business.  Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization, keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all together.

3. Look for and build intersections places where people with diverse ideas gather together.  And when you get there, talk to to the people you don’t know, who have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas that you find weird, don’t like, or useless.  If you are squirming a bit, it is a good sign.

4.  Treat your beliefs as  strong opinions, weakly held.

5. Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

6.  Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

7.  Have the courage to act on what you know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

8. Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

9. Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing a “forgive and remember culture.”

10. Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and less painful.

11. Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

12. Hire people who make your squirm.

13. Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

14. Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they wrong.

15. Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

16.  Sometimes, the best management is no management at all.  Know when and how to get out of the way.

17. Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them.

18. Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

19.  Innovation entails creativity + implementation.  Developing or finding a great idea is useless if you can’t implement it or sell it to someone who believes they can.

20. Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

21. Innovation requires selling your ideas. The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales.  If you can’t or won’t sell, team-up with someone who can.

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Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

[Linus Torvalds]

Contrast this with the monumental effort needed to initiate, elaborate and get momentum behind big programmes…and we continually, year after year are surprised that flagship scaled projects have difficulty delivering. The eternal and utterly human triumph of optimism over experience.

Make the right, informed, smart and pragmatic changes to key functional components within your architecture. Publish the API’s to your solution, be utterly transparent to those that would leverage your product and be generous with your time and FR’s…’Field of Dreams’ stuff folks! If you build it – they will come.

Here endeth the lesson…off to watch footie and drink beer. Apparently someone’s scored and the ITV ad break made everyone in UK miss it.

RoFLMAO

Pay your goddamn license fees, get the Beeb funded properly and stop bitching people.