I'm not a pianist myself, so I asked a friend who is a Pianist Management & Transformation Consultant. He is highly knowledgeable on these things.
via parlezuml.com
Click through to read the entire note on "Hiring A Pianist".
Supervision matters. If an employee unexpectedly volunteers for a project that can only be performed behind your back, something bad is going to happen.
via dilbert.com
"One of the dilemmas of management is that, by their very nature, processes are established so that employees perform recurrent tasks in a consistent way, time after time. To ensure consistency, they are meant not to change- or if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. This means that the very mechanisms through which organizations create value are intrinsically inimical to change[!]"
"Unfortunately, some managers don't think as rigorously about whether their organizations have the capability to successfully execute jobs that may be given them. Frequently, they assume that if people working on a project individually have the requisite capabilities to get the job done well, then the organization in which they work will also have the same capability to succeed. This often is not the case. One could take two sets of identically capable people and put them to work in two different organizations, and what they accomplish would likely be significantly different. This is because organizations themselves, independent of the people and other resources in them, have capabilities. To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well."
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via flowtown.com
A WEAK currency, despite its appeal to exporters and politicians, is no free lunch. But it can provide a cheap one. In China, for example, a McDonald’s Big Mac costs just 14.5 yuan on average in Beijing and Shenzhen, the equivalent of $2.18 at market exchange rates. In America, in contrast, the same burger averages $3.71.
That makes China’s yuan one of the most undervalued currencies in the Big Mac index,
via economist.com
A discipline like Extreme Programming requires a radical upgrade in both technical and social skills, especially for programmers. It requires become transparent, accountable, and responsible. Mostly I see people trying to get different results with basically the same techniques they always used, just rearranged slightly.
via blog.azullo.com
Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.
...
Source: ProgrammableWeb, May 2010.
Will 2010 be remembered as the tipping point when Software Architecture became "composite" instead of monolithic? Five years after the first official mash-up was published? Critical building blocks are still worked on, like OAuth, while new types of clients are appearing almost daily. It seems now that the momentum behind composite applications is inescapable
via infoq.com