Having worked in large organisations for most of my adult life, I have regularly been bemused by what happens in project estimation and reporting; how a series of intermediaries go through some sort of Chinese Whispers processes until there is an unsustainable deviance between what is reported and what is real. Quite often, that which is reported becomes that which is perceived as real, and we all know that perception is reality.

There is an incredibly large body of literature to do with projects, their management and their regular failures to meet cost, time and quality objectives. Most of the time, the “blame”, for want of a better word, is laid squarely at the feet of IT as a profession. We’ve tried many things in our varied attempts to “solve” this, focusing on the requirements gathering process via time-boxing and fast iteration, improving estimation processes using a plethora of tools, seeking to simplify coordination failures by disaggregating work packages and keeping project teams small, using enterprise bus architectures with reusable common components in order to simplify the design process, having regular design and code walkthroughs, sophisticated post-implementation reviews, what-have-you.

And yet the cases of sustained success are rare.

More recently, I have been looking at the psychological aspects of all this, both from an individual viewpoint as well as from an organisational one. Is there a group-think problem? Do I (and people like me) fall into a trap of self-deceit? And if so, where does this self-deceit enter the process? Unless you recognise a problem you cannot fix it.

It is with all this in mind that I chanced upon Richard Feynman’s submission to the Rogers Commission on the reliability of the Shuttle. Tragic as the occurrence was, we are all honour and duty bound to learn from it so that we can avoid repeating it.

You can find the full text of the submission here. I think his last sentence says it all:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

More to follow; let me hear what you think.

Some of you may have read my post yesterday on Hugh De Pree’s Business As Unusual, the book charting the principles by which Herman Miller became the venerated company it is.

Hugh records four principles enshrined by the founders of the firm: Trust. Stewardship. Equity. Innovation. [I guess he could have held the record for the shortest management book in history by publishing it as a four-word book. Could have been reminiscent of Ogden Nash‘s poem On The Antiquity Of Microbes: “Adam. Had ’em.” And yes, despite Wikipedia, I’m sticking to Nash as the author.]

Much has been written about trust, about equity and about innovation. Stewardship rarely gets a look in, and for that topic alone the book is worth reading. In fact you don’t need an excuse to read it, it’s that good.

While on the subject of stewardship, Gerry Acher, the incoming Chairman of the RSA,  has issued a challenge that’s worth taking a look at:

Reduce personal carbon emissions to five tonnes a year

It’s intriguing, placing the onus of dealing with at least some aspects of the global warming crisis on people like you and me. It could just work. I’ve signed up anyway and will try the challenge out. Read the blurb. Read the blog. Decide for yourself.

Who knows, we may be approaching a time when personal carbon emission limits aren’t science fiction, and where we will start trading limits and capacity on a P2P basis. In which case we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Bit like Pascal’s Wager.

I must have missed it the first time around, and only saw it via Boing Boing (thanks, Cory!).

Reuters reported last Friday that “Book sales get a lift from Google scan plan“.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the story. Read it for yourself.

Someone’s finally figured out that letting people ‘taste” books actually helps sell books. Even obscure ones. Especially obscure ones.

I guess the penny had to drop sometime. As Doc is wont to say, they will make money because of the excerpts rather than with the excerpts.

I’ve been so taken with the writings of Max de Pree on leadership that, some time ago, I decided to look deeper into Herman Miller the company. And in doing so, I came across a book written two decades ago called Business As Unusual, by Hugh De Pree, who preceded Max as President and CEO.

In that book, Hugh quotes “DJ” De Pree, talking about how he felt at the start of the Great Depression.

“I figured we had one year to go before bankruptcy. When you face something like this, you realise something happens inside you. My soul searched and I realised the evils of the industry, which needed correction if I was to stay in business. I listed the following problems in the furniture industry:

• Four markets a year.
• Short-lived designs and the buyer’s first question: What’s new?
• Closeouts had to be sold, at up to fifty per cent off.
• Commission salesmen. Some had seven or eight lines and sold what was easiest to sell. They showed only what they thought were the very best values, travelled only when they wanted to travel.
• Stores took over. We were only a fabricator, with no business identity or plans.
• We had no opportunity for repetitive manufacturing.
• There was no contact with the ultimate user of the product.
• Low wages. Ignoring the ideas of people. Tough attitude towards labour. Responding tough attitude towards management.
• Up and down schedules as a result of all this, with layoffs on short notice, uncertain hours, short hours and short paychecks.” 

Amazing stuff, written three-quarters of a century ago.And I thought to myself, is this a manifesto-in-reverse for the Intention Economy and Vendor Relationship Management, as  evinced by Doc et al? Is this a manifesto-in-reverse for those firms that seek to make something of themselves in years to come?
I wonder.

I was reading the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review, and came across an article headlined Movies That Fight Back. You can follow the link and read the whole article if you wish to, my thanks to the publishers for keeping it DRMfree.

It appears that 90% of the piracy involving new film releases involve “in-theater camcorders”. Two techniques are discussed. One comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and pings the light-catching sensors in digital cameras and then “zaps it with a narrow beam of white light, producing large splotches on the recording”. A second technique,  from the “Content Security” unit at Thomson, seeks to exploit the frame-rate gap between film and video by inserting doctored frames, invisible to the naked eye, randomly within the film.

Serendipitously, I had been mulling over the latest in splog battling tools, Owen Winkler’s AntiLeech. In Owen’s own words:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

Regular readers will know precisely how I feel about poorly thought-out implementations of IPR protection and DRM. There are many reasons why I feel that way, but one of the most powerful ones is related to Unintended Consequences. I cannot help but feel irked when my freedoms and pleasures and conveniences are inhibited by “content-owner” attempts to prevent or punish “illegal” accesses to the “content”. For people like me, it is this irritation that formed the last straw, that made me look harder at what was happening in the DRM/IPR space, and then grow increasingly appalled. Enough said.
What intrigues me about the techniques referred to above is their judo nature. They use the energy of those that are apparently committing a crime to prevent the “crime” itself.

If DRM and IPR need to exist, then they need to learn from these examples. Everyone wants creative people to be recompensed for their creative activity. Everyone wants to pay for what they experience in viewing or reading or listening to something; but when that very experience is diminished, sometimes to a point of absurdity, by the protectionist measure, then there is something very wrong.

I shall be on the lookout for more examples.