Shield yourself…

Some time ago, I was walking down a city street when a cyclist crossed a red light and ended up on the ground with a cab almost on top of him.  My first reaction was “serves him right, he shouldn’t have gone through a red light” – other people ran over to help him.

I walked on with a little shame at my reaction thinking “that wasn’t me", I am more sympathetic than that”.  I had been affected by the attitudes and behaviours of my current client who were highly competitive and aggressive.

What is worse is that I know how to avoid this, I was taught how to “shield” myself by these guys at Lightning Path.  They taught me a lot of other good stuff that is extremely useful to me as a consultant too.

Take a look at their site, they are friendly down to earth people, apparently they train the military too.

Soccer Team RACI…

Suppose a soccer team had a RACI matrix:

	Scoring	Tackling	Clearing	Passing	Preventing Goals
Goal Keeper	I		R	R	A
Striker	A
Midfield		R		A
Defender		A	A	R	R

This is clearly rubbish!  However you attempt to create a RACI matrix for a soccer team the result will be unusable.  Why is this?  Because it is a team sport. Everyone in the team needs to take responsibility for winning the game and doing whatever it takes in collaboration with other team members.

This means that strikers defend when necessary and defenders score if they can.  The key is collaboration between all parties in real time, rapid adjustment of roles and responsibilities to take account of new situations as they develop.  If a defender breaks through on run then a forward or midfielder should drop back to cover.  All this should be automatic and seamlessly executed.  The pinnacle of this was the Dutch total football – perhaps we can learn something from this in business…

“Failure is Wonderful”

I just read an article on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History website called “Failure is Wonderful”.  The article talks about a Creativity Round Table, held at Washington's Cosmos Club in late April.

There are several important points were made that is:

Laurie Kahn stated “Much of creativity depends on listening, asking the right questions, and being able to see things differently.”

Greg Mortenson replied "Listen with your heart and trust your intuition, not solely your logic.”

"When people ask you a question or ask how to solve a problem," Mortenson advised, "be hands-off so that they can figure it out using resources and thinking creatively."

Laurie Kahn asked, "How do you sustain creativity?" Mortenson's  experience taught him you need to "take care of yourself" and "be in touch with yourself".

"Don't just think outside of the box," Mortenson added, "live outside of the box. Take risks. Don't be afraid to fail. Failure is wonderful."

The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming

While browsing Jeff Atwood's blog, I rediscovered something from my very early IT education, The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming.  There is a downloadable copy of the commandments on TechRepublic.

Multi-tasking Must Die: 5 Ways to Single Task

Thank you to Mike Cottmeyer for this link to The Slacker Manager.