I’ll start with the punchline: Getting to market faster is not important at all. Every company I have ever worked with in the past 15 years pressured the development staff to deliver functionality faster. We need to get to market first! Quicker! 4 months??? Make it 1!!! It has been nearly universal. I see it…
I love holiday lights. They are bright and festive and make the cold dark times of the year more fun and bearable. One movie that really inspired me was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. He decked out every inch of his house. Growing up a family had put blue lights all over their house and it was…
Several movies I have seen recently (Karate Kid, The Last Airbender) made me think of movies that were based on previous works. This isn’t universal, but a common theme I see is that the newer version removes all of the charm from the older version. Modernization, somehow has become synonymous with bland and charmless. Here…
Imagine you received this letter: Dear [You], I am about to graduate high school and have been accepted to several good colleges. However, I believe that the cost and the potential benefits of the college life are no match for real world experience. Drinking, partying and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on books, room/board…
Worst Remake Ever. Previously, this honor was held by Willy Wonka with Johny Depp; what an abomination. However, my current winner of the prize was the recent remake of The Karate Kid with Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith. The plot shifted from a 16-year old New Jersey kid moving to Southern California to a 12-year…
Most of us are not the CEOs of our organization. We are somewhere in the middle. Yet we all have, every day, an opportunity to provide leadership from the middle. Leadership comes in several flavors. Here are some that I find valuable. Movement Leadership When you are in a meeting and everyone is looking at…
One annoying thing about Hybrids is that oil changes are expensive. Doing the maintenance at Nissan was over a hundred dollars. Last time I did it, the service was mediocre and I had to wait quite a while. This time, I decided to try something new. I actually thought the place was a JiffyLube, but…
Marketo is growing on all fronts. As the engineering team grows, their appetite for more shovel-ready projects increases too. Thus, the design team needs to scale. I am looking for a UX Designer who can run design initiatives within a fast-paced multi-disciplinary environment. That’s greek for “lots of people all talking at once”. The company has something special…
Of course, the expression says the opposite. However, I reject the expression. If a tree falls in the forest, it does kill the rabbit it lands on and it does make a sound. Reality is reality. The truth is the truth. However, future decisions are not based on historical reality, they are based on historical…
I was feeling stressed the other day and I wondered how much stress I feel compared to others. I decided to ask around a bit. Me: You ever feel stress to the point where it is causing physical discomfort or bring you close to tears? Like throat swelling and heart pounding? People I asked: Yes,…
In sports, you either win or lose or tie. And when it comes to final championships there are no ties. If you win in Basketball 110-109, you get the win and they get the lose. In football, if you are within 1 inch of the end-zone, that means you are NOT in the end zone. To…
make-work [meyk-wurk] –noun work, usually of little importance, created to keep a person from being idle or unemployed. Origin: 1935–40, Americanism ; n. use of v. phrase make work Sadly, I see this every day. The building I am in just had the outside repainted. It wasn’t in disrepair or dirty. I looked at it before and looked at it after. Looks the same to me. Oh wait…the pinstripe used to be red, and now its black.…
I had several interesting experiences yesterday. In all of the cases, the subject of my work was much more or much less complicated than what I initially thought. Some examples: Case #1: I was working with an engineer who had a problem with CSS. He is only loosely familiar with CSS, so he was freaking…
As we are getting close to finishing election season, I am noticing a very specific common experience. The media is the number one victim of this. They are “following the narrative”. By this I mean that they have a hypothesis about the world and will do anything to support that idea. Any new information that is the…