Being good at business development involves nothing more than a sincere interest in clients and their problems, and a willingness to go out and spend the time being helpful to them.

– David H. Maister, True Professionalism

Marc wrote his refutation.

I am not mad. I am me.

Well, even after reading his refutation I would still say that he is mad. When I say that Marc is mad I don’t mean that he is “suffering from a disorder of the mind” or “angry”. I mean that sometimes he is either “temporarily deranged by violent sensations, emotions, or ideas” or “feeling or showing strong liking or enthusiasm”. I also mean that he is crazy as in “possessed by enthusiasm or excitement” and “intensely involved or preoccupied”. All things I believe Marc would agree with.

By the way, Marc is also fun, good-natured, affable, witty and clever.

I really liked this article which lists ten cheap actions you can take today to improve your IT team’s performance.

However, the one I would like to implement, code in a conference room, wouldn’t be cheap and I certainly couldn’t do it today.

Get a conference room big enough to hold everyone. Put the very best hardware in it. Mix in comfy chairs, both working and lounging. Food is good, too. Make sure there’s plenty of wall room for diagrams, white-boards, and so on.

Apart from being an oxymoron, there is a very simple reason why estimates cannot be “accurate” – we simply do not have the data necessary to be accurate. It is a sad fact that the earlier the estimate is made, the less data we have available, and therefore the less “accurate” we can be. The only time we have sufficient data to truly warrant the label “accurate” is at the very end of the project when all the variables have been resolved.

– Phillip Armour, The Business of Software, Communications of the ACM, November 2002, Vol. 45, No 11.

I’m listening to Marc trying to explain to Tony the reasons behind his belief that the wind would keep blowing if time stopped. Marc is also trying to work out the colour of time – apparently this would change depending on which direction you were going!

Yesterday Tony quoted Weinberg on selecting team members.

Whatever else it does, this model makes managers over-anxious about selecting people for teams, and under-anxious about exercising their control function throughout the life of those teams.

I seem to be surrounded by mad men. Does this mean that I need to rethink the selection process or do I need to find a way to control the madness that exists in the current team?

I know that will annoy a lot of people, but I really do believe it to be true. Almost all the business balls-ups I have seen – and I’ve seen plenty – have been due to people getting very simple things wrong.

Of course, success in business involves hard work. Lots of it, twenty-hours-a-day-for-five-years hard work. But if you love business, you’re up for that. With the right people and the right motivation, you’ll enjoy it most of the time (not all the time – business is not that easy).

– Mick Southon & Chris West, The Beermat Entrepreneur

I doesn’t seem easy to me today.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

– Albert Einstein

Apparently you can tell how people think by the way they move their eyes.

up and right (their right) – for constructed, imagined images e.g. you floating on air or you with blue hair

up and left – for remembered images e.g. scenes from your holiday

sideways right – for constructed sounds e.g. your boss talking in a donald duck voice

sideways left – for remembered sounds e.g. your favourite piece of music

down and right – for feelings and internal emotions e.g. the touch of silk

down and left – for internal dialogue e.g. what you say to yourself before you give an important presentation

straight ahead, defocused – for visual images remembered or created e.g. the faces of your close friend

– Sue Knight, NLP at Work

To confuse matters left handed people may have the meaning of looking left and right reversed.

I once hit a problem whilst developing that meant I could do no productive work for five days. Five days may not seem like a long time but when you only have 13 days to complete an iteration it feels like a lifetime. I was working with a new product and no one on my team had encountered the problem before and I found it very difficult to get support from the vendor who also hadn’t encountered the problem. I don’t remember how I fixed this but I remember how annoyed I was a few weeks later when I discovered that someone else in the company had previously solved the same problem. It turned out that there were three different teams all learning to use the same technology at the same time!

When I spoke to my boss about this communication problem he told me that although the company talked about knowledge sharing from time to time they had never been able to come up with a way to make this work.

I contacted the leaders of the other teams and pointed out that we were all busy struggling with the same things. We were all in agreement that we could benefit from each others mistakes and successes. However, no one could think of a sensible way to pass on the knowledge. All the suggestions we had involved writing documentation and no one had any time in their budget to write these documents. From past experience they also knew that the team members would resent having to write them and that no one would bother to read them.

I left the company not long after this and went away with the impression that knowledge sharing, whilst being a nice idea, didn’t really work in practice.

Tonight I was reading Nancy M. Dixon’s book Common Knowledge in which she discusses the pleasure we feel when we pass useful knowledge to other people.

The truth is that if we know something that we think someone else needs to know, it is difficult for us to refrain from telling them. It is almost a natural impulse to tell others what we know.

So why couldn’t we get people to share knowledge? Well it appears that one reason for this was that we tried to get people to write about their experiences instead of talking face to face. It seems that part of our willingness to share information is to do with the personal benefit we will receive from doing so – even if the benefit is nothing more than a smile or a thank you.

If we want people in our organisations to share what they have learned, we would be wise to create the conditions in which sharing results is of personal benefit

Instead of dreaming up document sharing systems to solve the problem we probably should all have met for pizza once a week and the knowledge would have flowed naturally.

Tony quotes Weinberg.

Under a performance appraisal system, placating or irrelevant managers can think, ‘Well, I won’t bring that up right now. I’ll save it for the performance appraisal in December.’

Before I gave my first performance appraisals I asked my boss if he had any suggestions as to how these should be run. He said, “Nothing that is said at an appraisal should surprise the person who is being appraised”. Good advice.