The right thing is to plan, organize and execute with long-term results in mind. But nearly every manager is so driven by short-term metrics that they fail to account for longer-term effects of their decisions and actions. As a result, they accomplish less for themselves and for their organizations, making them less effective and less […]
Software, software everywhere
January 23, 2012
Software is different from other technical stuff. It’s abstract, invisible, and runs at extremely high speed. So the people who are good at working with software tend to be different from “ordinary” engineers. They have to be good at visualizing the abstract processes and the mathematical algorithms that make up the procedures implemented in software. […]
Constant Reinvention = Survival
January 26, 2008
Nothing lasts forever. Even the best-conceived business strategies eventually become constraints on growth. Consider Dell. “Dell succumbed to complacency in the belief that its business model would always keep it far ahead of the pack.” But the competitors got better while Dell failed “to invest in new business lines, talent, or innovation that could provide […]
Loss Leader
January 26, 2008
My colleague Joel Harrison is good at encapsulating learnings from his experience. In 2006, while I was visiting him at his startup company, Abrevity, he said, “You can’t justify a new product based on a cost analysis of the first-generation product. You have to have a vision.” Joel and I had experienced the frustration of […]
Is your software on fire?
January 26, 2008
The spectacle of Dell laptops on fire in the summer of 2006 due to Sony battery problems has prodded me to think about product failures. There is nothing so attention-getting as a fire in a conference room. Few people who see this sort of failure will forget what they have seen. Software failures may not […]