Quiet quitting is a term that’s been floating around for a couple of months now. Yet, it stands for a concept that’s been around for centuries. Someone goes to work, and is less engaged than she used to be for some reason, eventually starting to look for a new job, and some months down the road you find that person leaving the company for greener pastures – maybe to be the worst on a team again and learn something new, maybe because life circumstances changed, maybe for another reason. Let’s explore my thoughts on this.
Continue reading On quiet quittingCategory Archives: Leadership
Technical and personnel leadership
Remembering Jerry: Quality Software Management Volume 1 – Systems Thinking
It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, we are going to take a look at what I consider the first book in Jerry’s seminal series on managing quality software: Quality Software Management Volume 1 – Systems Thinking published by Dorset House Publishing in 1992.
My Arxta-Moment
Stick around long enough in the consulting business, and you might notice something I will coin the Arxta-Moment in this blog entry. I’m pretty sure, I’m not the first one to notice this, yet, I’m unaware of someone giving it a name. Let’s explore some history, and look for some advice from Jerry.
Continue reading My Arxta-MomentAutomation with a human touch
It’s been a while since I read from Taiichi Ohno about the Toyota Production System and from Goldratt about the Theory of Constraints. Thus far I thought, both have close to nothing to do with each other. Today, however, I got an insight that brought the two closer together for me. Let me explain.
Continue reading Automation with a human touchRant: I f$%&ing hate working remotely!
Just to set the tone straight: I hate traveling for work just like the next person. But today, I’m covering why I hate working remotely even more than that.
Remembering Jerry: Becoming a technical leader
It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. In the coming weeks, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. I struggled with the order I want to go for these books, chronological, topic-wise, in the order, I read them. Even after consulting my network, I don’t have a clear picture there, so I will basically just go with “whatever I want to do this week”. So, the first book I picked is Becoming a technical leader – An organic problem-solving approach published by Dorset House in 1986.
Troubling vs. Nurturing Organizations
Just a few days ago I got an inspiration driving my intellectual curiosity to the point that I finally decided to write a blog entry about it. It’s been a long time since I wrote regularly here, so bare with me.
The source of the inspiration stems from Virginia Satir’s The New Peoplemaking book and my observations over the years that workplaces sometimes are put into family metaphors. That triggered a thought while reading from Satir about troubling vs. nurturing families to adopt her words to organizations. I will probably invite you to join in my thought experiment while I keep learning from Satir’s almost 50 years old work in the following blog entries – I hope.
Continue reading Troubling vs. Nurturing OrganizationsInterview with Jerry Weinberg
Last year, I interviewed Jerry Weinberg on Agile Software Development for the magazine that we produce at it-agile, the agile review. Since I translated it to German for the print edition, I thought why not publish the English original here as well. Enjoy.
Continue reading Interview with Jerry WeinbergWorking in a distributed company
In my courses, one or more of the participants almost always raise a question like this:
How do you set up a team across many sites?
Almost always when digging deeper I find out that they are currently working in a setting with many sites involved. Almost always they have a project organization set up with single-skill specialists involved. These single-skill specialists are almost always working on at least three different projects at the same time. In the better cases, the remote team members are spread across a single timezone. In the worst cases I have seen so far, it had been a timezone difference of ten hours.
I will leave how to deal with such a setting for a later blog entry. Today, I want to focus on some tips and tricks for working with remote team members and remote colleagues.
Tripit reported that I was on the road in 2012 for 304 days. I hardly believe that since I stayed at home for our newborn son Nico the whole June back then. (I think they have had a bug there.) But it was close. I have worked with remote team members and remote project teams in distributed companies since 2006. I hope I have some nuggets worth sharing.
Continue reading Working in a distributed companyThe generalizing cook
The agile community is full of stuff on generalists. Ideally, you should be able to juggle coffees for your developers while riding a one-wheeler, and playing the guitar to “Master of Puppets” from Metallica at the same time. Oh, and you really should have found that bug while doing all that.
That’s a task close to impossible. Let’s take a step back, and take a look into another field of work: cooking. How do you react to generalists there? Let’s see.
Caution: Before reading on, make sure, you had enough to eat. (Or didn’t, depending on how fast you can get weak.) This blog post includes references to lots of yummy meals, and contains itself 2000 kcal.
Continue reading The generalizing cook