Street Vendor Restaurant Industry Gray Market player. (more)

Marketing/Product Development Collaboration: Merging the Two Cultures (more)

Fearing he wouldn't be able to get her confirmed for a real appointment, Barack Obama gave Elizabeth Warren an interim appointment to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under a White House plan, Ms. Warren would become an assistant to the president and a special adviser to the Treasury secretary responsible for overseeing creation of the bureau, which was established in the sweeping financial overhaul measure signed in July. (more)

Venkatesh Rao asks: In StephenCovey’s famous important/urgent 2×2 diagram, why is the Not Important/Not Urgent quadrant even there (other than for geometric completeness)? If you’ve always got things going on, the other three quadrants always trump the NI/NU quadrant after all, so do things in it ever get done? Do they need to? (Time Management) (more)

Elizabeth Warren (born 1949) is an American attorney and law professor. She is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School -- where she teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law -- and has devoted much of the past three decades to studying the economics of Middle Class families. In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, she became the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the U.S. banking Bail-Out (formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program - TARP). In that role, she has provided a critical check on the U.S. Department Of The Treasury and has been a leading advocate for accountability and transparency. (more)

Christian Tietze: You Don't Need a Wiki – Being Content with Your Software • Zettelkasten Method. Manfred favors WikiLink note connections because they are so darn fast to create if you know the title of the note you want to link to. That’s a situation I don’t ever find myself in. 2011-10-18-KuehnConnectedtextThePersonalWikiSystem (more)

Jeff Patton on Design Studio Recipe (more)

aka Lean Software Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development (more)

John Hagel sketches a FAST Business Strategy process. FAST = FocUs, Accelerate, Strengthen, Tie It All Together. This approach urges executives to move along parallel paths, operating on two very different time horizons: one horizon takes a five to ten year view of the business and the second horizon zooms in to a much more tactical six to twelve month view of the business. The one to five year horizon that is so loved by traditional business strategists actually receives very little attention in the FAST approach... Fo Cus is the key activity on the five to ten year horizon. This requires senior management to develop a common view on two key questions for their business. Five to ten years from now, what will the markets that we participate in look like? Then, what kind of business we will need to have in order to continue to create value in these markets?... On the six to twelve month horizon, Accelerate and Strengthen are the key requirements. By Accelerate, I mean identifying a few key operating initiatives that have the potential to significantly accelerate the movement of the company towards the long-term Focus.... On the same time horizon, Strengthen also comes into play. Here, management needs to ask, what are the major organizational obstacles that are preventing us from moving even faster to achieve our operational objectives? Then the question becomes, what can be done over the next six to twelve months to "de-BottleNeck" the organization and strengthen our organizational capabilities so that we can move even faster in the next six to twelve month cycle?... Tie it all together integrates these three streams of activities... Few companies today have adopted anything like a FAST strategy approach. You can use five questions to determine whether a company is pursuing this approach... The FAST strategy approach provides a robust framework for incremental (and Iterative) Innovation.

Fifty Three, the team behind the critically acclaimed Paper Sketching app, has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Dayna Grayson of New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Georg Pettschnigg, Fifty Three's CEO and co-founder, says the new round of funding will help jump-start Fifty Three's move into the Enterprise space, where he hopes the creative tools that made Paper popular can also revolutionize the kind of productivity typically done on the office White Board.

Steve Yegge on Good-and-Bad Agile Software Development, and Project Management/Product Management at Google. Well, people pretty quickly demonstrated that XP was a load of crap. Take Pair Programming, for instance. It's one of the more spectacular failures of XP. None of the Agileytes likes to talk about it much, but let's face it: nobody does it... One of the (many) problems with Bad Agile is that they condescendingly lump all non-Agile development practices together into two buckets: WaterFall and Cowboy. Waterfall is known to be bad; I hope we can just take that as an axiom today. But what about so-called Cowboy programming, which the Agileers define as "each member of the team does what he or she thinks is best"? Is it true that this is the only other development process? And is Cowboy Programming actually bad? They say it as if it's obviously bad, but they're not super clear on how or why, other than to assert that it's, you know, "chaos". (more)

Mary Poppendieck sees serious confusion about the Scrum role of Product Owner and its fit with the classic role of Product Manager... In this company, the Product Managers found it impossible to handle both the customer-facing and team-facing jobs at the same time. So most teams had added an additional person to assist the Product Manager by preparing stories for the team, and called this person the Product Owner. The job of these Product Owners resembled the classic role of business analyst... Critical tradeoffs between business and technical issues often fell to these Scrum Product Owners, yet they had neither the first hand customer knowledge nor the in-depth technical knowledge to make such decisions wisely... Product Managers who lack the time, training, or temperament to handle both the customer-facing and the team-facing responsibilities of software development have two options. They can appoint Scrum Product Owners for each development team, or they can provide high-level guidance to a development team capable of designing the product and setting its own priorities. We observe that the second option generally works better, because an intermediary Product Owner brings a single perspective and limited time to the complex job of designing a product... The entire team needs to be part of the design decision process. Team members should have the level of knowledge of the problems and opportunities being addressed necessary for them to contribute their unique perspective to the product design.

most promising political commentator on TV? Via The Daily Show (more)

Robin Marantz Heng asks: Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up? (Adult Hood) The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid Internship-s or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life. (The Family, Life Cycle) (more)

pseudo-ApprenticeShip

Charles Murray has a new book coming out: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 ISBN:978-0-307-45342-6

(Yes, it's also a book by Eli Goldratt. See the Theory Of Constraints page. But that's not what I'm talking about here... but maybe I should rename this page Infinite Game Goal?) (more)

Phil Jones is working on Mind Traffic Control, a To-Do List built on Google App Engine. (more)

aka Scientific Management

Eric Ries emphasizes how Iterative development lets you test your Business Model. Referencing Steve Blank's Customer Development model. Agile Software Development is not always well adapted to the Start Up experience. That's not entirely surprising, because most agile methodologies have their roots in big companies (BigCo). They are specifically designed to build products in situations where the problem is known but the solution is unknown. Thus, they engage in rapid communication between the engineers and an authoritative in-house customer or Product Owner, who can give them fast resolution on feature decisions as they come up. This is a huge improvement over ever-more-detailed specification documents. But startups routinely face the problem that they don't even know what problem they are trying to solve... We were always convinced that the next feature we were about to ship would be "the big one" that would fix the product and help us make our paltry monthly revenue targets - only $300 a month in those early days. But these dreams of the instant fix never materialized. No one major release solved the problem, because the problem wasn't a lack of features. We eventually realized that our initial product concept, which had seemed so brilliant at the whiteboard, was fundamentally flawed. But because we took a disciplined approach to Learning we were able to find out before it was too late. Because we had tried every variation of features, had measured the behavior of the people we were bringing in, and were committed to a revenue plan, we were forced to change direction.