The Sherpa Project

I just returned from the Seed Conference and all I can say is wow. This was a wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspirational event. If another one comes up, I highly recommend attending.

There was a lot of interesting information that was presented both directly and in-between the lines of the talks. It’s great to see so many inspiring individuals giving talks and hanging out at the conference. There were a ton of fresh ideas and a strong sense of innovation that was felt throughout the day.

Carlos Segura, Jason Fried, Edward Lifson, and Jim Coudal all gave great talks with good content.

If I had to boil it down to a few over-arching themes - the conference was really about truth, happiness, pride, innovation, and getting real.

I also can’t say enough about the location of the event. As someone who sits in a typical office environment most of the week, it was refreshing to be in an environment that encourages learning and has inspiration at every turn. It was also nice to be surrounded by individuals that are pushing the boundaries of our industry and unsatisfied with the status quo.

Over the next week or so, I’ll try to get around to posting some of the notes that I have from the event (1/2 a Moleskine full).

I blogged before about my initial impressions of Natural Capitalism. I’ve finally completed the book and I can highly recommend purchasing a copy or downloading it.

If you want a preview of the (very dense) book, take a look at A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism article that was published in Harvard Business Review.

Sometimes, it’s good to unlearn.

Think backwards, throw out your preconceived notions, forget about dependencies, and ignore your constraints.

If you search long enough, you just might find the right problem to fix. When you focus on the right problem, you might actually surprise yourself with what you can come up with.

Q-Drum solved the right problem.

The real problem…

A novel solution…

Vision statements usually suck. Interface has one that doesn’t:

To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits — by 2020 — and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence.

Nice.

A couple of years ago I put together some collateral to use when “selling” agile to potential clients. As part of the effort to educate our sales team about agile methods I wanted to provide some strong evidence for our sales team to use.

The only numbers that I had seen at this point were the numbers cited in Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide by Craig Larman. To say the least, the numbers were very impressive: Of those polled, 93% saw increases in productivity, 88% increases in quality, 83% improved stakeholder satisfaction, 49% reduced costs, and so on. I dropped these numbers in the collateral and I made every one of the sales members happy.

A few months later I was looking for some deeper numbers and I started to dig deeper for more quantitative data. The first place that I went to look for numbers was the study used that came up with the above numbers (by Shine Technologies in 2003).

When I started digging deeper, I realized that this survey has huge room for error. I’m not an expert on surveys or quantitative methods, but what I read didn’t leave me feeling convinced that it was worth publishing and standing behind the results.

After digging a little deeper, I noticed that these numbers (that I had been advocating) were based on a web-based survey that had only been taken by 131 people. Yes, 131 people and web-based. Ouch.

You can find the survey here.

Now, I don’t want to completely discount the survey and/or the results. This is important information; but I’m just not comfortable presenting these findings as “evidence” that agile works. I’m just not comfortable putting them up on my company website and I’m not comfortable putting them in my presentations. I believe in agile methods, I just don’t believe that this study “proves” that they are a valid alternative.

An interesting thing that I have noticed is that many individuals and many companies have used this survey as justification for agile initiatives. Last week (at Agile 2007) I saw these numbers presented multiple times in slide decks and I’ve seen them on plenty of web sites of vendors that are offering agile services.

Anyway, I just thought that this was an interesting bit to share about how you should always know more about the survey results and numbers that you use to backup any claims. Make sure you can stand behind your numbers and that you find out the information behind the numbers.

I was a podcast freak when I had a long commute to work. Now that I only live a few miles from work, I only have a few podcasts that I regularly listen to. One of the few gems that have made it to the top of my list is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Podcast from Stanford.

Great people, great talks, great presentations.

Check them out if you don’t already subscribe.

I’ve got to say that group over at Dr. Dobbs Journal have to be the most difficult bunch of guys that I’ve ever had to deal with around spam. The funny thing is that I signed up for a subscription a while ago and never received a single issue. The only thing that I’ve received are constant renewal messages (starting only one or two months after I originally signed up).

So, for some reason, DDJ took this is a an opt-in to send me non-stop spam. I have been completely unsuccessful in getting these guys to remove me from their mailing list (surprise) and I’ve even tried calling to be removed (no luck there either).

If you’re thinking about subscribing to DDJ, I’d think again unless you insist on being abused by their marketing department.

I’m hoping that no response to my 7th renewal notice (see below) might magically remove me from the list.

Continuing on with the TIBs…

A while ago I was asked what the purpose of a business should be. After a lot of thinking and bouncing ideas off of various team members, we determined that the core purpose of a business was to make a profit. I’ve come back to that discussion in my mind many times and I’ve come to the conclusion that we were wrong. Business should be about more than profitability.

After we played around a little with our initial answer, we decided business was about more than profitability and we concluded that it was about creating customers (the Drucker answer). Based on my current thinking, we were still wrong.

The answer to the question obviously varies business-by-business and individual-by-individual. The most interesting part of this question has been to watch my answer change over time. My answer now is very different than it was two years ago. I would say the my current view is somewhere between the thinking of Guy Kawasaki and John Mackey.

I have started to ask this question at the companies that I have interviewed with. It’s very interesting how many different answers you can get based on this one question. The one thing that I’ve learned is that the answer to this question can let you see deep into the values and intentions of the individual (and likely the company) that you are speaking with.