Jinn of Quality and Risk

Whenever a team starts a project, it's helpful to openly discuss individual styles and preferences, especially in the areas of communication and decision-making. It's probably as important for the success of the project as having a good plan. We'll work better together if we both seek to understand (and take into account) how we each operate.

Jerry Weinberg: The four dimensions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [MBTI] are significant in the workplace because they describe four elements that determine much of a person's working style. For each dimension of the MBTI model, there is a pair of letters to choose from:

• Internal or External, according to how I prefer to get energy
• Sensing or iNtuitive, according to how I prefer to obtain information
• Thinking or Feeling, according to how I prefer to make decisions
• Judging or Perceiving, according to how I prefer to take action

[via Tony Bowden] 

Marissa Mayer: Google executives are very understanding of user experience needs. ...the value of Google is in not being cluttered, in offering a great user experience. I like to say that Google should be "what you want, when you want it." As opposed to "everything you could ever want, even when you don't." I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. Marissa Mayer was the first person at Google to work exclusively on the user experience, starting in 2000. 

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. — Maurice Maeterlinck, author of one of the greatest plays I've read: Monna Vanna (which he wrote as he was desperately in love, and losing). Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna is made of the same fibre as Shaw's Joan of Arc. 

Jerry Weinberg, in Quality Software Management Vol 3: as we develop routines to handle intellectual and physical problems, we find that our ability to manage well depends not on our ability to handle routine situations, but on our ability to handle exceptional situations. [via Tony Bowden]

Routine activity calls for standardisation and automatisation, not management. Groups of people engaged in problem-solving, construction, and scheduling require good management. 

The New Yorker: why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. ... The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. ... What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains. Interesting hypothesis, but I like to have a very clean desk! although my brain is neither empty nor fully sorted :-) [via cognitiveArchitects News] 

Mitch Kapor: The product, which is central to the whole undertaking, is a new take on the Personal Information Manager. It will handle email, appointments, contacts and tasks, as well as be used to exchange information with other people, and do it all in the spirit of Lotus Agenda... designed (along with Jerry Kaplan) in the late 1980's... optimized for entering small items of information in a free-form manner, and then adding organizational categories on-the-fly. 

/.: A federal judge has ruled that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) does not apply to the Web. U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz dismissed with prejudice a suit demanding that Southwest Airlines make its website more accessible to the blind, saying that the suit would create new rights for the disabled without setting appropriate standards. 

6 months ago: companies were convinced that the best way to build market share was to simply give away their widgets for free. Free trial makes sense. Free everything doesn't. Still, sometimes it's a good way to attack the market share of others, if there is something else at stake. For instance, it would make sense if the substitute is good enough in the short term, and if it enables a new platform for a better, innovative user experience. (Examples left to the reader.) 

I first heard this Sanskrit greeting while travelling in India and Nepal. Here are several "translations" (Sanskrit is considered difficult to translate accurately into Western languages) indicative of its benevolent and spiritual meaning:

• I salute the divine (qualities) in you.
• I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells.
• The divine in me greets and honors the divine in you.
• My soul bows to your soul.

See also more interpretations of what Namaste! means. 

Wired: More than 30,000 employees at Indian call centers, among whom Radhika becomes Ruth and Satish becomes Steve, are told to adopt American names and say they are calling from a U.S. city in order to put their American customers at ease. I'd recently heard something about this but couldn't quite believe it (my girlfriend told me of Susan Sontag mentioning it in a London talk).