I am just infatuated with the ideas of continuous improvement and collective intelligence.  That lead me to study the Scrum method of software development.  It centers around self organized, self managed teams, and bite-size tasks.

The term “Scrum” comes from Rugby.

Here are my notes from Agile Project Management With Scrum. Now, I am not convinced scrum is the end all, but the self organization is lovely.  I am interested in taking the best practices from Scrum, Kanbam,  RUP, and many others to form a comprehensive, scalable solution.  See, scrum isn’t suited for very small projects, but the concepts ...

The following is describes the only way to possibly grow your company. The “doing” is very straight forward. Everyone knows they need to work hard, plan and delegate. The stick is “when” and “how much”. Knowing that will keep the company growing gracefully most of the time.

From just about any startup or management book, we know the following is involved:

1. Skilled labor
2. Planning
3. Delegation 

Skilled Labor

Remember spending all day learning about and practicing your professional skill? It gave you excitement to think about doing it so well for your company. Now you are doing it ...

Rig yourself a standup desk and never look back! After breaking my chronic addiction to sitting down a couple years ago, I have since been glad I did.

There’s even a bit of science behind the notion of standing up at your desk job. For example, standing up an extra two hours a day looks like it can burn 350 calories. In addition, you will be more productive and energetic.

I LOVED standing up. The soreness in the calves go away after a couple of weeks, and it’s smooth sailing from there. I never experience any soreness, just ...

Recently I had to replace a programmer. It was an easy decision, but that doesn’t make it fun.
It seemed that his actions were saying “please, can you fire me?”. After I let him go, I gave him some notes on where I thought he could improve. All of which were communicated multiple times during his employment of course. I have put the list below, with a few modifications.

• version control reports have no detail
• disruptive comments during meetings
• need to be convinced of what the client/Bixly wants too often
• quick to put down very well educated programmers ...

I think this firing thing is getting to my head. It’s so useful to rid the chaff and spend your time on what is worthy, even when it comes to customers.
The customer was a nice fellow. He just didn’t see eye to eye when I would charge him for Bixly’s services. Here are personality traits of a bad customer:

• Didn’t think we should charge him for solving his problems
• Started to force us around unreasonably
• Makes us worried to take any calls from his area code
• Pulls the “this was in the original contract” with ...

A man walks into a Hotel conference room and asks to have fresh squeezed orange juice for all of his audience. It has to be squeezed within two hours of being served. Nothing bottled! In truth, he doesn’t want this service because he knows it would be expensive and out of their normal mode of operation. But depending on the answer he gets back, he will make a decision about reserving the room or not. What would you say as the room manager? I will explain.
Some real time wasters have embittered my reading lately. Let me tell you ...

Look at ANY calendar. So similar. Even with the UI tech that’s out there, all the same. I would love to see something different. The calendar I created below has a simple adjustment: hot spot priorities. So, we should call this quick mockup a hot spot calendar.

To illuminate the concept, think of two different events on your calendar. Maybe one is taking out the trash, and the other is publishing your magnum opus. One of those is more important. But every calendar you put it on (yes, even Google) shuts down your ambition by helping it blend in ...

A client of mine asked about our experience with different CMS’s available today. I gave him the following thoughts and review:
In my opinion, most CMS’s are built for no one particular. They try and contain your site, and any application therein, rather than compliment it. A CMS must be able to predict all of your needs. I haven’t found the crystal ball to do that, and I suspect it would be unreasonable to program anyway. Trying to reach a perfect generic state is the root of all CMS evil!

Many times the client’s needs don ...

I was heavily influenced by Dr. Athithan back in my college days. His studious drive was like none other. Also his ability to think differently, and spur me to do the same. So this blog post has some roots there.

I have read heavily in the business domain since entering it full force. It’s saved me time, money, and general sanity. It struck me though how little time I was spending thinking on my own. Books present wonderful ideas, but am I creating a dependency? Should I be satisfied with finding great ideas and never creating them? Isn’t ...

Politics aside (this is not a political blog), this video is a fabulous historical look at the effect the Federal reserve plays on the money that you and I make. Eye opening.

After thinking so much about running an organization, my mind has become dislocated from traditional theory therein. I would even say that my role with my companies is not to run then, but to engineer them to run.

That has lead to other thoughts on the traditional view of management. Particularly from my point of view as a person that loves to build – I see management as something that is better to decrease rather than increase.

Take a generic scenario: A direct report comes to you with a problem. You solve it by giving him/her management (direction, guidance , dictatorship ...

Our unconscious self determines more about our success than researchers once thought. In this study researchers tested two groups of people. One group were fed success oriented words, while the other were fed neutral words before the task. One group did better.
These results… reveal an unconscious process that has both an advantage over conscious processing and an ability to serve a person’s current goals. Such unconscious processes may be responsible for far more of human ability than is yet recognized. Physorg

So I hereby declare a success commandment: Immerse Thyself into one’s dream. Think it, study it ...

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s as we know it today, worked 30 years in restaurant supply sales before making his big move. He knew what worked with customers, and was known to give his clients such advice. Such valuable insights he gained from knowing his costumers over so many years. Along came an opportunity to make a restaurant his way, and out comes McDonald’s.

Charles Merrill had a bottom up philosophy, responding to the public’s lack of education about stock ownership, gave them free education through his advertising. Listening to his customers more deeply than anyone else ...

The fun part about business is the raw challenge of having to face SO many important decisions. It’s not that these are simply a sea of inch-deep and mile-wide decisions, but truly miles deep and wide. It’s like drilling for oil. Look at the decisions you have to make today: you can create a new product, you can re brand your old one, you can expand or change your target audience, you can hire at a low or high wage, you can school or buy books, you can buy books from well established authors or fringe insightful ones ...

I was reading an article by Geoffrey Moore about core and context competencies. It’s a great perspective to consider, in fact Peter Drucker expressed the same idea much earlier. The idea is simple. That part of your company which is unique in the market, the value you are adding to the world, is your core competency. The other parts are context, though they might be mission critical, they don’t define you. Accounting, IT, lunches, etc. Outsource them. This is a neat primer on the subject, in addition to my graphic below.