Equational

The other day I was talking project management with a development manager, and I was not careful to wear my "member of the project manager club" social persona. Instead, I did what I usually do which is to focus more on competence and collaborations, and less on  titles. I little too late, I realized that I had just offended this person. The truth is, many of us include our job title in our social identity. Therefore when I did not show respect for the "social stance of project leaders",  this person felt personally aggressed, and to protect himself, needed to think that I was not being coherent. My daughter wanted to write a story recently. I gave here the following advice: You always have two choices: You can start with events and then describe the resulting emotions, or start with emotions and then describe the resulting events. Just apply this rule over and over.  An example:  "The man hit the dog, and everyone was sad" versus  "It was a s...

This weekend I watched Computer Chess and The Internship on Apple TV. Sadly, I feel that both film fail my test for being great. Computer chess is really pretty fun. It is not "funny" but brings enough retro geeky elements into the script to touch a lot of "über nerd" soft spots. If you are like me and have lived the late seventies and early eighties micro-computer revolution, then you definitely get value of the first three quarters of the film. The let down is the last quarter. I will not spoil your fun by giving you the plot, but I can say that the film tries to meet up with a broader audience by bringing in deep issues of faith within a "fantastic" settings. I just didn't feel this worked. The internship suffers a similar "try to broaden appeal" problem. The issue here is sex. Maybe it is the reediting for the Apple TV version, or I am just old fashion, but this film had way to much "open" sexual dialog (and scenes), and ...

Misfits of science Talented people are outstanding at what they do best... and often dysfunctional in one way or another. This post is about how to manage talented people. And especially about managing them within organizations that need a lot of collaboration (e.g. software development). I'll start with a quote from a TV show from the eighties: "Everybody that is worth the trouble is a little weird" (To be found in  episode three of the Misfits of Science )   I have worked with many talented people that were "pretty normal", yet I would need to argue that the majority of the "good people", those that are worth the trouble to "keep", from a management perspective, are also "focused in their own way". And even the talented people that did not show outward signs of "idiosyncratic" behavior, had their special side, which within work organization often showed up as social issues in abrupt or surprisin...