[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RE: XML As Fall Guy
Business leadership -- the inspiration of a viable, stable, financial-resource-wielding culture -- is something very special. Wall Street recognizes this fact (but not necessarily the leaders who do it). Technical leadership -- the inspiration of a viable, stable, technology-resource-wielding culture -- is at least equally rare. (The completion of this thought is left as an exercise for the reader, with my warning/ suggestion that it's probably more complex and subtle than one might think.) On 11/29/2013 02:32 PM, John Cowan wrote: > > > > On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:53 AM, <cbullard@hiwaay.net > <mailto:cbullard@hiwaay.net>> wrote: > > At the core was a team of civil servants who specified it, designed > it AND managed its fabrication and fielding. This team had been > together developing these systems for three decades: German Rocket > Scientists. The Von Braun Team. > > > In short, what de Marco and Lister call a "jelled team". Unfortunately, > we don't know how to create those, only how to destroy them. The > chapter on teamicide in /Peopleware/ starts thus: > > What's called for here is a concise chapter entitled "Making > Teams Jell at Your Company." It should have half a dozen simple > prescriptions for good team formation. These prescriptions should > be enough to guarantee jelled teams. In the planning stage of this > work, that is exactly the chapter we expected to write. We were > confident. How difficult could it be to cut to the heart of the matter > and give the reader practical tools to aid the process of making teams > jell? We would apply all our skills, all our experience; we would > overwhelm the problem with logic and pure brilliance. That's how > it looked in the planning stage.... > > > > Between plan and execution, there were a few distressing > encounters with reality. The first of these was that we just couldn't > come up with the six prescriptions needed for the chapter. We got > stuck at zero. We'd been prepared to scale our expectations down a > bit, but not this much. ("Zero Things You Can Do to Make Teams > Jell"?) It seemed clear that something was wrong with the under- > lying notion of the chapter. What was wrong was the whole idea of > making teams jell. You can't make teams jell. You can hope they > will jell; you can cross your fingers; you can act to improve the odds > of jelling; but you can't make it happen. The process is much too > fragile to be controlled. > > > Instead, they explain seven ways (in the 2e, nine ways) to /prevent > /teams from jelling, a much simpler matter. Alas, in 2013 all of these > ways are still in regular use by management — and they explain why both > Clueless and Sociopath managers (without using those terms) are > interested in preventing teams from jelling. > > A truly great book, whose only defect is that those who need it most > will never heed it. I see that it has a new edition this year; I > suppose I'll have to break down and buy it. > > -- > GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at > http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures
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