I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a fanboy. Maybe not so much an Apple fanboy as a software fanboy. My fascination with software goes back to the very first time I had a computer demonstrated to me as a kid, and today, Apple is probably the only company whose products give me that feeling […]
Category Archives: English
Systems Thinking Applied to Management with Russell Ackoff
If you’re a student of Russell Ackoff’s teachings, you should rapidly click yourself over to the Ackoff Center blog, where you will find a link to a rich set of video lectures with Ackoff himself: “When the course was announced the registration requests were so high that a lottery with random drawing had to be established […]
Release More Often Without Risking Anything
Joakim Holm has written an awesome post about breaking through the wall of conventional thinking, smashing a dilemma into pieces, and finding a third option along the way. One day soon they realize that “Hey, we’re pretty good. We can take advantage of that and release more often without risking anything.” via Breaking through the […]
Experiential Learning (No More “Silentium”)
Over the last five years, I’ve taught lots of classes to lots of people. If I knew it before, I’m convinced of it now: lecturing is not the most effective way to help others truly learn. The problem with lecturing is that it doesn’t really do much to change someone’s behavior, at least not in […]
Pit of Specialization
In an effort to prove I’m not a perfectionist, I’m publishing this work of art I just created, while sketching out some ideas for an upcoming talk. Being a specialist can be a double-edged sword. Have you experienced this pit? Did you like it there, or did you find a way to get out of […]
Common Pitfall: Planning Alone
Many organizations forget that planning is all about the planning. You’ve probably heard the saying: “The plan is nothing, the planning is everything”. For me, that means that the process of planning itself is, to a large degree, what creates belief in and understanding of the plans. The plans will break anyhow (we’ll still do […]
Is Thinking Allowed?
When I was still working as a contract programmer, I was on an assignment where the boss was from the United States. I didn’t meet him very often, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. One day, he surprised me though. I was sitting in my chair, leaning back for a while with my […]
This Week Online – Saturday, May 14, 2011
This week I managed to squeeze in three days of consulting and two days of public teaching. Side effect: less time over for reading. Still, here’s some of the stuff that piqued my interest online this week. Bright and Terrible Jay Yarow of Business Insider published a short post about what’s it like to fail […]
This Week Online – Saturday, May 7, 2011
Here’s a mixed list of some of the things I appreciated online this week. They might turn out to be useful to you as well. Fake and Shapes Randy Rice published a blog post that listed different testing tools that came up during a tutorial session he hosted at StarEast 2011. I don’t work as […]
Some Help Examining Your Engineering Practices
At Citerus, I worked with my colleagues to create a basic form we can use to take a quick inventory of the current engineering practices in the teams we work with. It was originally in Swedish, but I just translated it into English for use at a client. We’re not dogmatic, so neither is the […]