The Cone of Uncertainty in Estimating

I attended a seminar by Craig Larman – author of Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’ guide. Though I couldn’t attend the complete seminar, there were a couple of good takeaways. The primary one being the “Cone of uncertainty”. Craig talked about this and correlated this to real life showing how we can use this [...]

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Alex Berenson’ The Number

I am not a numbers guy, and have always had trouble understanding the way the Stock markets function. I happened to chance upon “The Number” by Alex Berenson and picked it up for it’s tagline: “How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America”.
It was a good decision. This is a [...]

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Agile Estimating and Planning

MountainGoat Software Founder Mike Cohn is working on his new book “Agile Estimating and Planning“. This is work in progress….Mike is publishing the chapters for review as he writes for users to comment on. His chapter on Use Case Points makes good reading.
Also, Johanna Rothman’ new book “Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: [...]

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Gerald Weinberg’s advice for Technical Managers

The September 18th 2004, People and Projects newsletter from SDMagazine carries an interview with Gerald Weinberg. Extracts:
SD: What’s the most important piece of management-related advice anyone has ever given you?
GW: If you blame your employees, you’re a bad manager. You hired them, accepted them, supervised them, and directed their training. You’re responsible. If you don’t [...]

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Lest Ye Be as Little Children

My post on asking questions have generated a fair degree of interest in my readers and I have had a couple of interesting exchanges with a few of them.
Continuing the same thread, Prahalad and Hamel write:
Kids are naive. They don’t know what’s possible and what’s impossible. So they ask innocent questions (“why can’t you [...]

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Sane advice in these days of hatred

I grew up in Hyderabad and though our house used to be on the border of the old city and new city, invariably every time there was a riot, our area too used to be under curfew……I recall some of those days (which in fact were many…) with fear and trepidation….and it troubles me too [...]

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Learning Leadership

[Via SdMagazine] A PDF booklet titled “Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations”, available exclusively to the registered users of SD Magazine. This book emerged from the conversations between members of Paul Pangaro’s Developer Web Services team at Sun Microsystems and Dr. Michael Geoghegan, who devoted more than 25 years to [...]

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Chet on What they don’t teach you at B-schools

Chaitanya (Chet) Kamat, who heads the India Delivery Center Network of Accenture in India, shares his thoughts on what they don’t teach you at the B schools in an article in today’s Business Standard.
I was privileged to attend a 2 day workshop that Chet conducted while I was at Accenture for new Managers in the [...]

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So, what’s the worth of your Value Currency?

The first step in cultivating value is to make sure you possess knowledge.
Knowledge currency is social currency on steriods. It’s important, it’s powerful, it’s essential. Someone talking about the latest reality television show may attract a brief audience around the water cooler or the copy machine, but someone who tells people about Clayton M. [...]

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A hundred reasons for meditating daily

1. Transforms the quality of your life.
2. Enhances Physical well being.
3. Enhances social well being.
4. Enhances Emotional well being.
5. Reduces the level of stress (reduces Plasma Cortisol – the “stress” hormone)
6. Reduces cholesterol
7. Relieves anxiety.
8. Relieves Depression.
9. Increases anti oxidant protection
10. Enhanced brain function.
11. Increased mental focus
12. Enhances health and well-being.
13. No side affects
14. Reduces health care costs
15. Easy to learn
16. Easy to practice
17. Complete Rest
18. Tranquility
19. Centers you
20. Be in the moment
21. Be in the [...]

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