Culture
Results are not the point?
The phrase “results are not the point” often confuses people new to Lean thinking. It confused the shit out of me, not having really understood it even after my first few books. This is a shame, because it’s such a simple thing. On Friday night, Danny got really drunk,...
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Why Agile became meaningless
Uncle Bob recently wrote a post about The True Corruption of Agile. I think it will be a defining post for me because, as I’ll explain in my next post, I’m ready to give up on Agile. It has become meaningless due to the corruption Uncle Bob describes, and...
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What if Carl Sagan were a hack?
I was watching the first episode of Cosmos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson talked some about how stellar of a scientists Carl Sagan was and what an impact Carl had on Neil personally. Carl’s abilities were important for his advocacy, because a) it lent him credibility, and b) it allowed...
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“What did you learn?”
When something bad happens to someone (firing, demotion, bad review, big failure), it’s natural for managers to ask that person “what did you learn?“* Unfortunately the answer is rarely what a manager wants to hear, and it’s also largely useless.** Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem,...
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Teaching TDD: The importance of expectations
I read this interesting article from Justin Searls about the failures of teaching TDD, and his proposed improvements. Uncle Bob wrote up an excellent response on how Justin’s grievances are valid but his solutions misguided. Justin’s article included an excellent image which he calls the “WTF now, guys?” learning...
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Agile Game Development is hard
I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to write a blog post about why Agile software development is inherently more difficult for games than other software. I searched for some fundamental reason, such as games being works of art, or being entertainment, or being more difficult to test, or...
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Removing external hiring as a tool (Part 3 of 3)
In this post I hope to explain how hiring externally as a tool for fixing problems ultimately leads to a weaker organization. When I began writing this post, I was having a hard time. Whereas the post talking about what a bad idea firing is was easy, the situation is...
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“Delighting customers” is Lean’s secret handshake
Whenever I see the words “delighting customers” (which is, let’s face it, an awkward phrase) in a non-Lean context like a job description, I can feel the author winking at me. It tells me “we try to be Lean and if you get our drift you probably want to...
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Removing firing as a management tool (Pt 2 of 3)
So in my last post, I wrote about the possibility of taking hiring and firing off the table as a management tool. In this post, I will focus on the firing. Firing itself has two halves: individual dismissal as a way to fix performance problems, or layoffs as a...
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Removing hiring and firing as a tool (Pt 1 of 3)
Inside of Mike Bland’s response to my Project as a Ship post is this comment of how he organized his Google Grouplet: I had no power to hire or, truthfully, even fire anyone. The best I could do was persuade whoever was interested to participate, to give them the clearest...
