A problem-solving leader’s entire orientation is toward creating an environment in which everyone can be solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions, rather than personally solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
London’s Evening Standard from 1966: “Three girls, one of them named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same tonight.” So what? Thirty-seven years later I’m still here.
I was at Borders over the weekend and found the Twyla Tharp book. I wasn’t looking for it. It was on the Software Development shelf. It shouldn’t have been there but it was, so I felt that it was my destiny to buy it and read it.
It was meant to be . . .
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
And there was like a fierce wind that was pushing me, just to do this one thing like nobody had ever done it before. . . . But you know, popular music. It doesn’t attract people who are in it for the right reasons. They’re not called to do it. It’s not their destiny.
Katie Couric talks about Twitter:
I don’t think anybody gives a rat’s ass whether I am about to eat a tuna sandwich. I don’t even care. Some of it is so inane and narcissistic and bizarre I don’t quite get it. I don’t know why anyone would want to read it, much less why I would want to write it.
Unless “tuna sandwich” is a code phrase for “vagina.” In that case, I’d be very interested to read about Katie Couric eating a tuna sandwich . . .
”Be disloyal. It’s your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it’s the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent — and never let either of the two sides know your real name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don’t own, and they’ll go on raising the price they are willing to offer.”
Here’s conundrum of fame, as I see it: It’s always said that if you want to be famous, you must endure criticism. The fabled “trade off”…
…But the whole reason people want to be famous is to be loved. They’re love-addicts. Hating a celeb is like kicking a hemophiliac.
Like I bet Tom Hanks internalizes a shitty remark way more than, say, the HR lady in your office. He’s needy. That’s why he’s Tom Hanks.
All right, enough Psych 101. My Chihuahua looks like Billy Crystal and my Shepherd is Gheorghe Muresan. They need a development deal.
More of my customers have been asking me how to use agile processes, particularly Scrum, to help them manage offshore development. Since offshore development undercuts many of the practices that promote agile productivity, I ask them why they don’t just increase the productivity of their teams by thoroughly introducing agility? It seems that offshore development, with its potential for lower unit costs (dollars per programmer day), offers management hope that their losses can be reduced. Since the project is probably going to fail anyway, let’s minimize our losses by lowering our investment by using lower priced resources. A more optimistic, agile, way of looking at this problem is to fix the problem at home and increase the probability of success.
Many people worry that not knowing something is a sign of weakness, and that if a leader seems not to have all the answers they will lose the confidence of their team. Such people try to pretend they have the answer in every situation, making things up if necessary and never admitting mistakes.
However, this approach ultimately backfires. Sooner or later people learn the truth and figure out that the person never admits when they don’t know. When this happens the person loses all credibility: no-one can tell whether the person is speaking from authority or making something up, so it isn’t safe to trust anything they say.
On the other hand, if you admit that you don’t know the answer, or that you made a mistake, you build credibility. People are more likely to trust you when you say that you do have the answer, because they have seen that you don’t make things up.
Anyone who cannot speak clearly and simply should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.
Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere. . . .
I had mistakes, plenty, but I had no failures. We may not have won a championship every year. We may have lost games. But we had no failures. You never fail if you know in your heart that you did the best of which you are capable. I did my best. That is all I could do.
The role of the economist in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in light of what can be done, politics aside, and not to predict what is “politically feasible” and then to recommend it.
Take out the references to economics and public policy and you can probably apply the “what should be done in light of what can be done” approach in your own work. It’s the art of the possible . . .
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down peoples’ throats.
