Due to covid-19, my local library was closed for two months. Actually, other urban systems in my state opened much earlier, so part of that period was due to a lack of agility by the library system’s managers. This segues to the title of this post. I took the closure as an opportunity to finally …
Category: Talks and Books
“Agile vs. Waterfall” Started with “Aristotle vs. Plato”
The interest in Dead White Male Philosophers is limited to a tiny slice of the population, I realize. Especially in my home country; as far back as the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” …
Stop Calling These Practices “Radical!”
TED talks by managers who try radically weird leadership practices and get amazing results… those are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? If the way most companies are run is a problem, more would change, right? Sorry, but no. The reason companies succeed while using standard practices is because they are competing against companies …
Executives Who Really Want Diversity Must Reconsider their Public Words
Imagine the scene: A large hotel conference room in America filled mostly by white males in dark suits and plain shirts. A coterie of darker-skinned servers works the sea of tables. An older white male emcees the proceedings, and another asks everyone to bow their heads in prayer before delivering a Judeo-Christian blessing. After lunch, …
Save Electronics Design Costs by Thinking Safety Second
If you’re reading this on anything bigger than a phone, turn the device over. Depending on where you in the world you got it, you might see a label with one or more sets of letters like CE, UL, or FCC. You might be surprised to learn what goes into getting those letters, and what …
Start Your Startup with the Customer’s Needs
Millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money are funneled into a wide range of startups every year. Any taxpayer might reasonably ask, what do we get for our money? Quite a lot, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): “Some well-known firms, such as Qualcomm and Symantec, received early support from the NSF program. …
What an Older White Cis-Male Learned at a Diversity Conference
I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo, straight cis-male using he/his/him pronouns. I hope I got that right. I have learned it’s not my place to claim I am an “ally” of minorities, but I am trying to be. Throw in that I was raised upper-middle-class in the American South and own my home debt-free, and …
To Succeed, He Threw Out the Management Books
In 1980 when Ricardo Semler took over SEMCO, a manufacturing plant with 100 workers and $4 million in annual earnings, it was nearly bankrupt. By 1989 he had introduced many radical changes, and his outline of those and the results were published in Harvard Business Review (HBR). When Semler first took over, he tried to …
Agilists Still Face Tesla’s Enemies
As you read this, give thanks to Nikola Tesla. An extraordinary genius whose career spanned the turn of the previous century, his inventions are the basis for the systems powering your device and transmitting this post wirelessly. He had so critical a role in the technology undergirding our life today, the author of a 2018 …
DevOps was Born of Bad Agile
Nathan Harvey, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, is at the forefront of the DevOps movement. What is DevOps, you ask? AH-HAH!! Exactly. That is part of the reason I went to hear him speak, because the definitions I had been hearing did not make sense to me. They all just sounded like what Agile …