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The Poetry of Programming
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s…
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Active Communication
So, in all of our dealings with customers, our active communication should fall into three camps: 1) Relationship-building 2) Strategic thinking 3) Exceptions & Problems There’s another kind of communication that happens all the time, that we want to avoid: 4) Information transfer ********************************************* Let’s think about these in detail: 1) Relationship-building: This ranges from…
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Perfection is the Enemy of the Good: Hiring
We have four core values at Silvertrek: The desire and ability to learn The ability to do something without waiting for it to be perfect The desire to take ownership in what you do The ability to be upbeat and positive, even in the face of adversity We hold ourselves accountable to these core values,…
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Thoughtfulness and the System
I’m living right now in Kiruna, Sweden, and the endless contrasts between the cultures, attitudes, and systems of Sweden and America afford me a wonderful chance to contemplate my opinions of things. This is a topic that rarely wears itself out, but there is one particular difference that highlights a choice that businesses must make—driving…
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Secret Sauce
Our least-kept secret is our processes, and it’s the only reason that we’re successful now and that we will be even more successful in the future. See, we do this thing called “checklists” that makes it really easy to get things done–you choose your task, and follow the checklist. There’s a checklist for payroll, there’s…
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Just do it NOW!!!! (Or What I Learned from Observing my Wife)
I thought I was being smart. See, I figured if I just waited for a while, their would be less effort spent on doing the dishes. You can pile them all up in one spot, and then you can batch-process the whole lot. And the clean dishes in the dishwasher? if you need ’em, just…
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Focusing Stone
I’m all over the place. I’ve got people calling me from all of my various clients asking me to help them with this-or-that, I have two clients waiting on proposals, I’m starting work on an unrelated building project, I have financial statements I’m cleaning up, I’m trying to be home with my wife and four…
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The Four Activities of an Administrative Team
I often see the the office treated as some unwanted necessity. They’re viewed as the phone-answers, the mail-openers, and the go-fers. People refer to laying off people in the office as “cutting overhead.” It’s thought of as a group of uninspired people who only feel that they’ve done their job if they get in your…
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A Crutch or a Platform?
If you have a really dialed system in place, you don’t need excellent workers. McDonalds does it all the time: with unskilled workers from a huge variety of backgrounds, they can make the same Big Mac the same way every time. McDonalds realized early on that in order to scale in the fast food industry,…
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Design for the concrete, allow for the abstract
The best designed systems are made easy for the people who think in concrete, in the here-and-now to understand. Software system? Make things happen on-screen, not behind the scenes. Management system? Show people clearly the if-this-than-that rule. Customer facing system? Instant response, instant gratification. Vendor-facing system? Immediate pay. Government system? Show voters that it makes a…