A former colleague once told me a story that I think of whenever in a discussion of investing in technology to solve business problems…
Long ago (circa early 90's) he was pitching a consulting project to a major telco. The telco had put out an RFP to various development shops asking for help solving a classic problem — they had a number of different systems for billing, provisioning, customer service, etc. Their customer reps would have to physically go to different terminals to deal with different aspects of the support process, causing a lot of inconvenience and wasted time.
Of…
Recently I attended my 9-year-old son’s class to watch him take his turn at the regular 4th grade “Current Event” presentation. I beamed proudly as he nailed his short talk about flying cars, after which he took questions for ten minutes from the thirty or so kids sitting there. With many hands still in the air the Q&A had to be cut short for time, and my wife and I left, proud of the great work he had done preparing and presenting. I lamented only one thing about his presentation that day: of the dozen or so students he called…
New words are just the beginning
The vocabulary of Agile does more harm than good. In helping companies adopt Agile methods we find we need to correct mistaken impressions people have gotten from Agile literature. Our first task is often to help them unlearn unhelpful language so that they can set the right goals and get buy-in from teams. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” …
An open letter to Dave Hornik about VC tribalism
I recently had this interaction with Dave Hornik regarding his blog post urging entrepreneurs to get a direct introduction to him through his trusted network.
