The Art of War

February 5, 2007

I finally got to The Art of War. I had been intrigued by this book for a while. Tony Soprano praised it in one of the first seasons of the Sopranos. Someone else recommended it to me as a book for people interested in management. Maybe I’m just unimaginative, but most of The Art of [...]

Business process and … reincarnation?

January 29, 2007

So, I’ve owned a copy of Michael E. Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery for about a year and a half now. Something about its size (over 400 pages) and the grandiose subtitle “The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company” put me off. I think the timing was also bad. I purchased it near the [...]

Geeking out

October 10, 2006

In August, I attended an Usability Professionals’ Association Meeting “Obsession: the Sympathetic Heart of Design“, given by Tom Brinck. Among other things, his definition of “Web 2.0″ was the ability for people to “geek out” about stuff they like. Geotagging photographs and now organizing my bookshelf and rating books online seem to be two shiny [...]

12 signs of a great workplace

August 1, 2006

When I read First Break All the Rules, I really identified with their list of 12 questions that differentiate good workplaces and high performers. This list helped articulate some important predictors of success and characteristics of failures I had experienced. Here, I have tried to link this list of 12 questions to what I liked [...]

Make mistakes faster!

July 21, 2006

So, a guiding and very freeing philosophy at my former workplace was “make mistakes faster”. It is part of the iterative and incremental philosophy of development. Instead of doing a huge waterfall process where the team works for months building the perfect design, architecture code, whatever, we should work iteratively and incrementally–deliver paper prototypes, functional [...]

uninescapable – the uncertainty cost of subcontracting

July 20, 2006

So, my most excellent friend Chris has loaned me his copy of Stumbling on Happiness. It is giving me interesting things to think about including this: According to the author, there is something called an “inescapability trigger” that brings our “psychological immune system” of denial, looking to the bright side, and generally improving our experience [...]