The Mindset

I know. It’s been ages (well, weeks, but still). Don’t worry, everything is OK. Even great! So, what I’ve been up to?
Well, I hate to say it, but I just got a little tired with writing. No, not for good. But I felt I needed a break. I found myself spending 9 hours a […]

Dear CEO,
What do your people feel when they wake up in the morning and have to go to work? Is it something like “I wish I could just wake up when the weekend starts”, or is it more like “oh well, I guess I have no choice, do I”? Or is it something completely different?
You […]

One of the things I hated as a teenager was being told I should grow up already. Whenever I was told that, my immediate reaction was “You don’t understand anything. YOU grow up!”. Undoubtedly a typical reaction for a teenager. Not to say an immature reaction, which is what got me that far in the […]

A couple of days ago Kathy Sierra wrote about the difference between who companies say they want to hire and who companies actually want as their employees.
When I read Kathy’s post it sounded awfully familiar. Sure, I have seen the exact same phenomenon with my own eyes: companies allegedly looking for smart, innovative, independent people, […]

Here’s a pop-quiz: what do [take a long breath] Agile, Peer Reviews, JUnit, Pair Programming, SCRUM, velocity charts, burn-down charts, Bugzilla, Subversion, lint, ClearCase®, RequisitePro®, ClearQuest®, RUP, UML, MDA, TDD, BDD, XP, ISO, CMM, and (my personal all-time favorite) Refactoring have in common?
OK now, let’s see. If you found it easy to come up with […]

A couple of weeks ago I heard a developmental psychologist say that children learn by emotional experience. When you’re trying to explain to a child that something is forbidden, for example, he may understand your words, but unless you can somehow reach him at an emotional level, chances are he will repeat the same behavior […]

We are always in a hurry! That’s what modern life is all about. Always trying to move faster, to make it first, or better still to make it now.
Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that life (and business) shouldn’t be a race. It should be a journey. And like any other journey, we […]

A few years ago, I tried to introduce a systematic code and design review process to the organization I worked for. For months, I repeatedly received the same answer: “We know this is a good idea, but our developers won’t like the idea of their code being read by their colleagues. And anyway, we really […]

In a recent post, my friend Tom Harris writes about the process of learning at work. As you might know, this is one of my favorite topics.
Tom describes something similar to a decision tree to help you come up with a plan regarding how you want to treat the process of learning and the process […]

Have you ever came out of a project kickoff meeting without a clue on how the product should look like and what it should do?
The project kickoff meeting is a good opportunity to present an overview of the project, give a high-level schedule and introduce the team. But sometimes the owner of the product forgets that most […]