Steve Freeman

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there—lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold [...]

About a month ago, Michael Feathers wrote another post that cited Gordon Ramsey. That reminded me to follow up my earlier post with observations from a couple of episodes from UK series 4 that make the point (thanks Channel 4).
First up is a curry restaurant in Nottingham (which has no shortage of competition) opened by [...]

This post has been stewing for a little while, and now I’ve been kicked into writing it up by Naresh Jain’s post on Lessons Learnt from Restaurant Business.

Since Channel 4 in the UK started supporting the Mac for their online replays, I got hooked on Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares series1. I’ve never [...]

From Guy Kawasaki interviewing designer Hartmut Esslinger,
If a young person wants to be a great designer, what should he or she do?
Finally, a young person with the right talents needs to have infinite desire and never give up. I apply a simple test with young students: smash a teapot into pieces and then hand [...]

Karl Scotland has a post on whether Kanban is only suitable for mature teams. (in case you haven’t guessed, he thinks not).

The magic of Kanban is that it all it really does is make the current situation explicit. If the team is in a position to respond then they will figure it out and do [...]

So, Jurgen Appelo is unhappy that some of the more experienced Agile names have been telling him what to do. In particular, apparently they’ve been doing so without understanding complexity theory; he’s not reacting well.

In between the ranting, much of what Jurgen says is obviously true. For disorganised teams, adopting Scrum and nothing else will [...]

From one of the Lean mailing lists. It was posted in the context of Lean adoption, but seems to apply to just about anything…

I believe there is only one pre-condition. The leadership of the company must believe “The status quo is no longer an acceptable way of doing business”. […] One of our associates [...]

From a history of the development of SIMULA

In the spring of 1967 a new employee at the NCC in a very shocked voice told the switchboard operator: “Two men are fighting violently in front of the blackboard in the upstairs corridor. What shall we do?” The operator came out of her office, listened for a [...]

I picked up the New Scientist for my in-flight reading on the way to JavaZone and came across a fascinating article.

For those who don’t have a subscription, it turns out that willpower is a limited resource, like exercising a muscle. Different people have different limits, but when they’ve used it up they need time to [...]

Johanna Rothman has a nice post about why people with responsibilities need assistants. As she points out, most organisations have been stripping out administrative support except for the most exalted positions, which makes sense until one looks at the bigger picture. Is it really better that people who are supposed to be busy with activities [...]