Wednesday 30 July 2014

Eight reasons never to hire a Unicorn

If you work in the Digital Advertising industry you most likely have come across the term 'Unicorn'. If you don't or haven't, here is a short background.

Unicorns are mythical creatures which have a large, spirally, pointy horn mounted to their forehead. Popular culture - predominantly little girls and pagans - have long since had a fascination with these creatures who are purported to have special healing powers and are symbols of grace and beauty.

Legend also suggests that only virgins can catch unicorns which, in this age of sin, perhaps explains why sightings are very scarce.

In short, Unicorns are rare, special creatures that are difficult to catch.

Drawing back to the Digital Advertising Industry which sometimes thrives on mythology, legend and magic, the notion of 'Unicorn' has been adopted into its lingo as a rare and special person who simply must be snared and put immediately to work dreaming up the next wearable tech idea to promote mouthwash and, in the process, make the world a better place.

Thursday 17 July 2014

Happy First Birthday 'This is Lean'!

Happy First Birthday to the Tumblr Blog, http://thisislean.tumblr.com/ !

The blog is dedicated to something called 'Lean' which is really big (ironically) right now. If you don't know what 'Lean' is then you probably aren't doing it and your output is all flabby, bloated and struggling to fit into its favorite pair of jeans. If your output suffers in this way, I urge you to read this blog and discover how to become Really Really Lean.

It is a crowd sourced web site so if you have any Lean Thinking that the world needs to know about, submit it here.


Friday 11 July 2014

Distributed Development : Avoiding The Fog


I've written about the challenges of distributed development as have many others, so I'm not going to bore you with another spin on the types of problems which crop up and new and improved ways of fixing them. What I am going to do is make a controversial statement and then try and pull a Houdini and explain myself out of it.

Communication can make for an opaque development process.

Ok, here I go.