Yesterday I remembered reading a quote from someone on Fast Company that it was sometimes a great act of leadership to cancel a project rather than letting it continue. Don't I know it. When the thought nags at me, such as yesterday, I looked on the FC website for more. Funny how the web is, you have to remember something verbatim or its gone. So, I didn't find the quote or any supporting anecdotes, but I did find a user group for Seattle that has cool talks such as from the guy who started Cranium. I joined the group as an afterthought, then went back to my pondering. (Plucking daisies: should I cancel? should I cancel it not?) (Or remember the image of the wife sitting in bed reading "Should You Get A Divorce" quite blatantly so you-know-who can see? Well, another image of a similar book: me at the office reading "Should You Cancel The Project" Of course no book exists and neither does the office, but you get the idea.)

The group gave me a warm welcome and wants to know all about my question. Ulp. Not sure this is worthy of a newsgroup, it's too anonymous on my part. The answers I want are something along the lines of "here is what I did in the past" and "it was / was not a good decision because...." But I would also want folks to know me, and help me make a decision based on my capabilities. That's beyond a newsgroup. 

The real thing that's nagging at me is when Scoble wrote about win32 programming. He said, "In 10 years Win32 programming will look about the same as shoveling coal into a steam engine." Of course the first time I read it I assumed he was talking about all programming that ran on the win32 platform, but now reading it obviously he means just straight win32 api calls, like you have to do in order to make a horizontal scroll bar in VB. But oh, the momentary terror, the sneaking suspicion that he was right! Sam Gentile's recommendation that we all use the command line compiler rather than VS, that VB and C# are just "syntactic sugar" (I love that!). As programmers, we're making it so easy that we have to admit that we are mere end-users. That certain features of Word are more difficult to use than most of the CLR is to utilize from VS. And we are migrating ourselves out of our identity as programmers and into a mere power-user state. (Against Sam Gentile's recommendation, of course). Talk about shoveling coal.

What happens when tools become too easy is that all that matters is your rolodex. Everyone has awesome ideas. Now, everyone can execute. Who can drive to market? Only the fat rolodex will survive.

So, given all this, does it lean towards me continuing with my project or canceling it?

Long ago my Mom gave me a great tool for decision making. You write the question down in a yes/no way. In the yes column, you list all the good things about choosing that path, and all the bad things. In the no column, you do the same. If it's a really complicated chart you start rating the strength of each of these consequences, but most you can see that the good things pile up (or bad things avoided) by choosing a particular path. That's your answer. Simple, huh?

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