I’ve been a part of my fair share of painful interpersonal issues within teams. It’s easy to view those situations as failures, hoping to avoid them in the future. A lot of times my advice is the opposite, embrace it. Seek out healthy conflict instead of unhealthy consensus.

I know a lot and one thing I know is that I don’t know everything. I’ve always attempted to surround myself with people who know they don’t know everything, who are genuinely curious. Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his recent book, takes this as far as suggesting that leaders avoid at all costs people who think they know everything. Ultimately, the issue is that people who think they know everything won’t be aware of any facts that conflict with their view of the world. They inevitibly end up in a lonely artificial dark cave.

“When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary”

Intellisense for your MSSQL Query Analyzer, brought to you by red-gate. And you thought I didn’t like intellisense….

I’m not much for reviewing or recommending web applications. There are loads of sites out there for that. I don’t mind, however, mentioning apps that I’ve used for a while and continue to use regularly. Specifically, two I use every week come to mind.

I’ve recently been dabbling with a return to the gym after over a decade hiatus. I can’t stand gyms but I was able to find the closest thing to a non-gym you’ll ever find in a gym. I get bored almost instantly in a gym so I need variety but can’t justify spending cash on a personal trainer.

Enter HyperStrike. Once you’re setup in hyperstrike, you can jump in and print out your workout for the day and you’re done. It’s a low cost, free at this point, alternative to a personal trainer. I never have to think about what I’m going to do in the gym and it’s different everytime. The other major feature is that they’ve used motion video capture to make little movies of every exercise. It’s the fastest way I’ve seen to learn a new exercise properly besides a personal trainer. Books are fine but unless their flip books, this is much better.

The other app is a correspondence game app called Its Your Turn. I’ve technically been a member there since 2002, however, I only recently returned to active use. It’s a simple concept. Start a game with someone. Make your move, then go back to whatever you were doing. You’ll get an email when it’s your turn to move.

This is one of the few web apps that’s been around since pre bubble, is still going, and has hardly changed over those years. It’s a simple, ugly site that works. The haven’t messed anything up by implementing ajax, johnnie 2.0, tagging, or any other flavour of the week. I was using their free service all these years up until about a month ago when I signed up for their paid account. I admire any web app that has the patience to wait over 4 years to land my sale.

I recently made a few somewhat uninformed statements regarding Ruby On Rails. As always, Joel has a take on it. Had I read this before I could have just said “what that guy said”.

“Ruby is a beautiful language and I’m sure you can have a lot of fun developing apps it in, and in fact if you want to do something non-mission-critical, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun, but for Serious Business Stuff you really must recognize that there just isn’t a lot of experience in the world building big mission critical web systems in Ruby on Rails, and I’m really not sure that you won’t hit scaling problems, or problems interfacing with some old legacy thingamabob, or problems finding programmers who can understand the code, or whatnot. So while Ruby on Rails is the fun answer and yes I’ve heard of 37 Signals and they’re making lovely Ruby on Rails apps, and making lots of money, but that’s not a safe choice for at least another year or six. I for one am scared of Ruby because (1) it displays a stunning antipathy towards Unicode and (2) it’s known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace, you’ll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall. Those things might eventually get fixed but for now, you can risk Ruby on your two-person dormroom startup or your senior project, not for enterprisy stuff where Someone is Going to Get Fired.”

Um, I’m not sure what to say….Depending on your view of vi, this is either the most usable or unusable search engine on the net.

“Using the commands of vi to search the web.
Edit your search results like a vi document.”

Speaking of processes, there’s also a Capability Im-maturity Model. The levels:

0: Negligent

-1: Obstructive

-2: Contemptuous

-3: Undermining

Hmmm…..CMM, CIMM, can you tell them apart?

Okay so we know there are some sucky parts of agile processes, is there anything good in there? Most of the great parts look surprisingly similar to the bad parts. For starters:

“YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR BRAIN!”

If you work in software, and you’re not a robot, then you want to use your brain. Sure, 8am the day after your 30th birthday you may want to coast but in general most people want work that requires them to be present, contribute and think. How many people do you know who ‘phone it in’ during their day jobs only to spend all their off hours on a project they’re utterly passionate about?

If you’re a business owner, do you want a process that attempts to get every team member thinking about your business goals in every decision they make and every action they take? Or do you want a process that requires a small subset of people to think and then hand off their attempt at documenting those thoughts to a team of glorified line workers?

Am I biased? Of course I’m biased, because I’m not a robot. I’m biased to providing real value to business owners while providing a model to work in that places value on that wrinkled piece of sponge held in people’s brainboxes.

Traditional processes creep in when intelligent, collaborative models are forced to scale too aggressively. It’s difficult to control this model and that scares people. You can have the control back but only by introducing more traditional models that have a proven record of stifling innovation. They come at the sacrifice of that individual intelligence. You really can’t have it both ways.

Being cheap and independent, I’ve tried a lot of free conference call services. While I haven’t had to chance to run enough calls on this service to comment on the call quality, in terms of features this is the slickest service I’ve seen.

Sign up and you get a dedicated reservationless bridge for yourself that includes more base features than any service I’ve seen, including free call recording:

“LiveOffice’s FreeConferencing lets you record your conference calls at no cost. Not only is recording your conference call free, but it’s as simple as dialing the phone plus the audio file from your recorded conference is saved in MP3 format for superior audio quality and flexible playback. Your recording will be made available online within sixty minutes of your conference call concluding and will remain available for a minimum of the next thirty days.”

That’s not even the slickest feature, that title falls to their web control panel. With the control panel you can not only control your call, you can see who’s on the call and what number they called in from. No more calls filled “who just joined the call?” and “who just dropped off the call?”.

That’s not all (this is turning quickly into an infomercial), with the web control panel you can dial out to participants although there are some restrictions around the use of this feature. I believe you need five inbound calls for every one outbound call.

Cause Paul Graham says…

“Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders.”

“If it’s corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them do things only the wrong people would do. Popularity in high school seems to be such a test. There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup world. For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it’s hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric - or Microsoft, actually.”

“I think that’s one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

Taken from “The Power of the Marginal” article. It sounds interesting to me but I’m sure on the day I head back into a traditional office I’ll magically come up some great justifications for the opposite.

Another sweet looking coworking space, this one in gastown in Vancouver.

Via Todd.