Recently I got to see a talk by Uwe Lübbermann. He is the “central coordinator” of Premium Cola. He founded and runs Premium Cola with a so-called “operating system”, which he has already exported to other companies. Well, companies is not really the right term, because they all work very differently from what is considered …
Category Archives: Food for Thought
Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that?
After about 2 or 3 years into my agile journey there was a time when I would listen to a talk or read a book and be like “Yeah, it’s exactly like that! I wish someone had told me 3 years ago! It would have helped me a lot! Why didn’t anyone tell me that?” …
Radical Gratitude Applied
2 weeks ago I read a nice piece about how to be luckier overnight: Being grateful about adverse things changes your perspective. I really liked it and have tried to do this more conciously. Admittedly, there are a few things I refuse to be grateful for in any way whatsoever, but for most nuisances in …
Open Friday – Lernende Organisation mit Open Spaces
[English summary: I’ve translated my experience reports about regular, company-wide Open Spaces into German.] Bei sipgate haben wir supergute Erfahrungen mit regelmäßigen (alle 2 Wochen) Open Spaces gemacht. Auf Englisch habe ich dazu schon mehrfach gesprochen und geschrieben. Inzwischen gibt es den kompletten Erfahrungsbericht auch auf Deutsch, bei der Informaktik Akuell. Wenn Dich nur das …
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You can learn to present! – Public Speaking #3
Somebody has recently asked my husband (a great speaker!) for tips on how to learn public speaking. The asker was, among other things, concerned about his voice being too monotonous. My husband recommended an acting class and I agree. I’m confident that the basis of my being comfortable with public speaking was an acting class I …
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Talking about failure – Long Way to Lean #1
When I give my talk “Thank God it’s Open Friday!” people always tell me how much they liked hearing about our failures on the way to a solution that works well for us. It’s surprising to me, because our previous trials with a slack day are only loosely related to the very successful end result. …
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Mass Interviews – Menlo #7
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] Menlo does a lot of things different from other companies, Hiring for example. And I don’t mean “different” as in Google, i.e. you get grilled by a succession of 6 people or get interviewed by a good-sized portion of your …
Replace Rewards or What are you celebrating? – Menlo #5
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] There is an interesting passage in “Joy, Inc.” about change saying that when you take away one reward system you have to replace it with a different reward system – one that encourages the behaviours you’d like to see …
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Estimation: Back to Hours – Menlo #4
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] At sipgate most teams estimate in Story Points. It was what you did back in the day when we started with Scrum and we’re used to it now. It works well enough for us. I’m not a great fan …
Watching Users – Rebuttal
Have you seen this cartoon lately? With the caption “How it feels to watch a user test your product for the first time” I laughed when I first saw it. I’m pretty sure I’ve retweetet it from this guy (his source (their source)). Ever since, I can’t shake the feeling that I betrayed my User …