The University of Chicago seems to produce a lot of interesting economists

Via the TEDBlog, Emily Oster presents a very interesting analysis of HIV infection in Africa. I see it as a nice example of the importance of using evidence to make decisions.

Alan Russel presenting on regenerative medicine at TED

Key take away points from CITCON Asia-Pacific 2007

At the end of CITCON, each attendee shared their key take away points but now that I've had more time to reflect on it, I have a different answer:

• The Agile school of testing is really just Context-Driven testing given a particular context.
• Keep remembering... focus on solving problems; don't focus on selling solutions
• I'm wary that many people are not focusing enough on maintainability when making decisions about automated testing strategy, tools, and techniques.
  
• Assuming that I already had a full Agile testing baseline (i.e., test driven development, automated story tests), and I had to choose between adding iterative user testing or adding an exploratory tester, I'll choose iterative user testing.
  

Let's be pragmatic

When you say "let's be pragmatic", do you mean short-term pragmatic? Or do you mean long-term pragmatic, which means paying attention to sticking to values and principles?

Strengths-based performance reviews

Doug Turner asks a few What Ifs for performance reviews:

• What if the annual discussion focused solely on strengths? This doesn’t mean that we ignore poor performance or look the other way when inappropriate behavior occurs. This does mean that we identify and recognize the strengths of the employee and look for ways to leverage those strengths to compensate for any areas of weakness.
• What if the performance review form focused on recognizing the employee for accomplishments – and nothing else? Why not make the annual documentation of contribution and performance all about the good things? There is plenty of opportunity throughout the year to document performance issues and concerns. Focusing on the positive may be just the thing to turn poorer performance around and restore hope.
• What if companies spent as much money on training managers to identify and leverage strengths as they spend on training managers to identify and manage deteriorating performance? I think strengths training would have a much bigger and longer-term impact on the organization.
• What if employees and managers actually looked forward to the performance review time? What if they saw it as a time to celebrate successes and accomplishments rather than a time to document lapses and missteps?

Matthew May on Toyota Aisin fire case study

Matthew May of Elegant Solution fame, blogs about the 1997 Aisin fire incident which is used as a case study at Toyota:

If the supply of alternative parts is used to try to meet the overwhelmingly big needs of Toyota as a first priority, that would mean renouncing Toyota's social responsibility as well as going against our corporate philosophy

Akira Takahashi, Executive Vice President Toyota

So instead they supplied their competitors first...

How's that for sticking to values?

Over-specialisation leads to over-sized teams

Over-specialisation means that there is no small team that has enough knowledge to accomplish any project.

Deming on YouTube

Via Lean Blog,

I discovered these videos introducing Deming and his concepts. I especially like Part 3 about the fallacy of performance-based pay and the superiority of cooperation over competition.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:

Incremental infrastructure in the real world

Via the TEDBlog,

Ethan Zuckerman describes developing incremental self-funding infrastructure in Africa through the mobile phone networks.

If this can be done with phone networks and power stations, profitably, why would doing this with software infrastructure be so difficult to imagine?

I really like Zuckerman's concept of "entrepreneurialism-first" vs "infrastructure-first". That's the Agile/Lean way for sure.

As an aside, Don Levy's comments on the TEDBlog entry points to an interesting LA Times article on what I would describe as evidence-based aid vs marketing-based aid.

Zero waste manufacturing

Via the Good News Network,

Apparently the Subaru factory in Indiana has operated for 3 years without sending anything to the landfill.

Not the same kind of "zero waste" in a Lean context but this is impressive nonetheless.