Simon Sinek gave a passionate explanation as to why he hates the term ‘Soft Skills’; A majority of experts surveyed were against the term; Even the U.S. Army has a problem with referring to leadership and communication skills as ‘Soft’.
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Category: Articles
Non-Technical Development Managers Are Like Head-Chefs Who Can’t See, Taste, or Smell
I have made no secret of the fact that that I find non-technical managers useless in the delivery of software, but today while recording a podcast, I realize they have another fatal flaw: they can’t evaluate the performance of their team.
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Agile History: Kent Beck vs. Alan Cooper
It can be argued that Scrum is the compromise Beck and Cooper had such trouble reaching in the following interview. As the original website where this was posted no longer exists, I copied the contents from the Internet Archives and reformatted it to improve the reading experience.
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Defending “Never raise a problem without a solution”
I want to offer a soft rebuttal to the article The Problem with Saying “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions. By “soft” I mean to say that I do not disagree with the thesis, only some of the implied assertions. Bear in mind that critiquing “Implied assertions” can be deeply unfair in a work that is intended to be taken literally.
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Are we working or playing?
Recently I’ve been talking to companies that want me to improve staff productivity. The opening conversation tends to be about the same: they pitch me on their company and what a “great place to work” it is. They brag about how smart the people are, how much fun everyone has, and how it’s more like a family that a bunch of co-workers. They describe all the perks like massages, video games, beer-on-tap, coffee bars, and how much everyone loves them. “Sounds like you have it all together,” I say after hearing all of this. “Well,” they reply, “I just wish we could get a bit more out of them.”
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My Response to “How to *never* complete anything”
The following is my response to Ewan Valentine’s blog post “How to never complete anything” that I discovered on Hacker News. Once again, I ask for people’s indulgence for posting a reply on my own blog rather than in the Hacker News comments. I find writing on my own blog a bit easier than wading into the surf that is the sea of many perspectives.
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