management
Collecting software methodologies
I’ve always enjoyed reading about software development methodologies and approaches (my favorite essay is Frederick Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet“), probably less because I love software and more because it’s interesting to see how people, who are inherently fallible, translate their hopes and desires into instructions for an inanimate machine. When you mix the innate [...]
IBM does Hack Day
I was pleased to see that the folks over at IBM recently ran their own Hack Day modeled on the ones we’ve been doing at Yahoo! (which had its own inspirations, of course). IBM is still one of the giants of American business — #10 on the Fortune 500 list — so this is [...]
Yahoo! Hack Day tomorrow, and some of my inspirations
Tomorrow at noon, we kick off our fourth Hack Day at Yahoo! It runs from noon tomorrow until noon Friday, followed by demos Friday afternoon and a party. As I write this, I am fielding questions from Yahoo hackers who are planning to stay here all night tomorrow night putting together their [...]
Peopleware
One of the Great Books in the management-of-software-development canon is Peopleware. I’ve quoted lighty from it before, and wrote a column about the book for InfoWorld a couple of years ago. It still sits within easy reach in my home office. Kevin Kelly features Peopleware in his Cool Tools blog, and does [...]
Management lessons from Saddam
I’ve always been fascinated and entertained (i.e. amused) by the types of business books that become en vogue at various times. A few years ago, I started noticing a particular type of book that took a historical figure unrelated to business and extracted key lessons from that person for application to your business. [...]
Free / cheap / open source project managements systems — recommendations?
A colleague asked me if I knew of any “free, cheap, or open source” project management systems that are “as simple as twiki (which is about decentralized sharing and coordinating of documents), but is focused on tracking / sharing events and tasks.” (We use twiki heavily at Yahoo!) He had already found a [...]
Disconnected from the desk actually means more connected
In Jeremy’s “where almost doesn’t matter” post, he mentions that I often gather my stuff and say, “I’m living out of my bag for the rest of the day.”
So why do I do that? Tim Converse nails it for me:
My hunch is that what being unchained from your desk makes possible is [...]
Tactical is the new strategic
I was talking to a friend recently who works in a large Silicon Valley company about the expectations of managers within large companies and we discussed how big company managers routinely describe themselves as either “tactical” or “strategic.” Typically, those who say they are “strategic” talk down to those considered more “tactical,” directly or [...]