10 Reasons Change is an Antipattern
Embrace change, then stab it in the back
July 9, 2008
My list of top-ten irritating phrases of recent times, somewhere after "leverage" and "we're a people company", would have to include "embracing change". Shelves in the business sections of major book stores groan with the weight of manuals that profess to be able to tell you how to change, guide you through change, and how to deal with change. Frankly, there are a lot of people out there in need of a smacked bottom.
It's not that the desire to change for the better is wrong, but in line with the definition on wikipedia - a solution "that appears ... [more]
Strategy for the Irretrievably Pragmatic
It's like the future, but yesterday
July 5, 2008
My Dad used to say that the reason many politicians are so totally ineffectual is because of the ironic and paradoxical fact that to be a good politician you need to be able to wield power wisely, and yet those who are drawn to power are often, by that fact alone, the worst people to be given it. In fact he still says it, but these days I might counter with the thought that it’s just possible some of them go into politics to make the world a better place and get contaminated along the way, dealing with all the snakes who seek retribution for having had no friends at school. But a place where t ... [more]
The ABC of the ESB
SOA what you gonna do about it?
June 24, 2008
When the future's architected
By a carnival of idiots on show
You'd better lie low*
We're a smart lot in technology. Give us a complex business problem and a short amount of time and we can do wondrous things with some cryptic text and a compiler. We constantly develop new ways to structure intricate business systems and information. We can scale up, out, persist data as rows in a table or objects in a tree; we can build tiered architectures that limit rippling change and we can, if we put our mind to it, innovate to such an extent that small companies can come from nowhere to ... [more]
Magnificence in the Mundane
Making friends is easy; keeping them is harder
June 14, 2008
It's a complex old business maintaining relationships these days. Like many people I end up managing friends like some perverse to-do list. If I haven't seen someone for a while I might remember to send them an email, they might reply, more time passes and we might repeat the process before saying "Crikey - it's been ages since we had a beer.. let's go out". So we do. A good time is had by all and we swear we won't leave it so long next time. And yet life dictates that we do. But one of the hallmarks of real friendship has to be that comforting ability to pick up conversations exactly where yo ... [more]