Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

From Crabs to Crabmeat

Here's my latest stickyminds article.  It's about turning waste into by-products.

Summary: Sometimes we don't see the forest for the trees—or, as Clarke Ching writes in this article, the crabmeat for the crabs. Are there by-products of the work you do that are currently considered waste, but which might actually be useful? Clarke offers some examples of by-products found in a number of organizations and invites you to reconsider the by-products in your own company.

I quite like this one because I found it easier to write than most.  I got the idea for the article while reading the book Rework.  They have a page or two about by-products which sparked all sorts of interesting thoughts in my head.  I hope maybe this article does the same for you.

Charles Green on the 3 things you need to know to be a management consultant

Do read this clever overview of the 3 simple things you need to know to become a successful management consultant.  It might make you a lot of money; it might impress your friends and colleagues; it might not!

Car salespeople hate it when ...

Car salespeople hate it when you say "I don't care about your problems.  I only want to buy a car from you cheaply".

Car salespeople hate it when you say "But surely you must be making some profit on this deal?  Would it be better for you if I went somewhere else?".

Car salespeople hate it when you say "No I want to do this on the phone; I don't want to come into your office.  And, no I don't want to build a relationship with you; I want to buy a car."

Car salespeople hate it when you say "Look, your car is just a very expensive can of beans.  I'm not wasting your time, but your not the only one selling 

Maybe I'm generalising above, but I've been trying to buy 2 new cars this week and I only started enjoying it when I realized that I could get a far better deal with far less manipulation if I did my negotiating by phone and repeatedly repeated the 4 above.  They much better negotiators than I am ... but only when I'm following their script, in their offices.

Excellent Agile Article from Johanna Rothman

Johanna has written one of the best articles about Agile transition I've read in a long time.  It tackles one of the areas where new agile teams struggle most: integrating testing with development.

I like it because it's very, very pragmatic and workable.

http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&ObjectType=COL&ObjectId=16089&tth=DYN&tt=siteemail&iDyn=2

I shall be recommending this article for many years.

Dan Pink: No Commissions for Sales people

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/business-thinking/7752986/Forget-carrots-and-sticks-they-dont-always-work.html

"So, with some trepidation, he approached his sales team with the bizarre idea of scrapping sales commissions altogether and simply paying people a healthy flat salary. The response surprised him."

Martin Gardner, Puzzler, dies aged 95

“I just play all the time,” he said in an interview with Skeptical Inquirer in 1998, “and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24gardner.html

Do read this: http://all-thats-interesting.tumblr.com/post/621661228/i-bet-you-werent-expecting-this-ending

For a laugh.

Cats

So we got two cats from the shelter. Brothers, tabby, four years old;
they look identical. We call then pink and blue because those are the
colours of the collars I bought them so that we can tell them apart. I
wanted to do what my Dad did in similiar cicumatances when I was
growing up and snip the fur off the end of one of their tails but my
wife wouldn't let me. She said it would look silly and there was no
way she was taking the cats to the vet and telling registering them as
Long Tail and Short Tail. Our other concrern was that Alice, our
almost-five-year-old who isn't supposed to use scissors unsupervised,
would chop the extra fur off Long Tail's tail because she wants to
call them sooty and sweep.

So all was going well then I took Mr Blue for a wee walk outside, he
paniced, tried to run away, I tried to stop him, he tried to stop me
stopping him and he scratched me and bit deep into the palm of my hand.

I lost a surpising volume of blood and my favourite shirt which was
torn badly and had to be binned. I also got an infection and very
nearly ended up with a long stay in hospital which is one of the risks
of diabetes. I did lose 2 weeks of typing because my right hand was
shredded so badly. I guess I could have typed with the indamaged hand
but I'm a touch typist and it's real hard to type like normal folk
when you can type properly; plus one of the side-effects of infections
if you're diabetic is that your blood sugars race up really high which
is very tiring on top of the effects of taking antibiotics and
fighting an infection so I had no oomph in me for work.

Did I mentioning lost my favourite shirt? I bought it in 1997 when I
first arrived in Ireland and I'd really only just started to feel
comfortable in it. I'll miss that shirt long after the cats are gone.

But none of that matters now coz I've got two cats! And they're the
best cats in the world!

I'm running a free "Agile for businesses which need to make more money" course in Glasgow this coming Thursday.

http://agilescotland.blogspot.com/2010/05/agilescotland-agile-for-businesses.html

Elliot Jaques – Hierarchy

I’ve often said that there were only 3 useful things I learned from my MBA. 

The first was the difference between how successful and effective managers spend their time (successful managers focus on the needs of those up the org chart and they climb it quickly; effective managers focus on the needs of theirs customers and those working on them but they don’t necessarily get promoted very often; only a small percentage of managers are both successful and effective). 

The second was Kirton’s Adoptor/Innovator theory (some people like small, adaptive, incremental changes; some like radical, new, leaps; it’s a continuum but birds of a feather tend to flock together). 

The third … I forgot.

But today I remembered!

Actually, my friend Greg reminded when he sent me this link to Elliot Jaques’ obituary from 2003.  One of the very first papers I read during my MBA was about Jaques and it was a refreshing, if shocking, change from most of the touchy-feely tom-peters-esque stuff that I’d previously read (and loved – if I’m honest) about managing.  Basically, what Jaques said, is that hierarchies are there for a reason – if you flatten the hierarchy then be very, very careful you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

Actually, he was saying a lot more than that but rather than me trying to summarise his decades of remarkable (and seemingly ignored) work in my poorly spelt Chinglish why not read this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1425176/Elliot-Jaques.html instead.

And, if you don’t dismiss his ideas outright then why not pop over here and download Julian Fairfield’s free business novel Levels of Excellence which features many of Jacques’ ideas.   (You’ll need to register then login first).  I stumbled across the book in Melbourne airport just after it was published as a paperback in about 2002/3 and I remember enjoying it immensely.  I’ve not read it since … but I suspect it’s still worthy of your valuable time.  I’ve recommended the book a few times since then but it was out of print.  Now it’s available for free.  Go grab it!