Friday 31 July 2015

Competence Development: The Cone of Incompetence


Competence Development: The Cone of Incompetence

Managers are responsible for competence development in an organization. 
But, for some reason, this doesn't always happen.

Steve McConnell has described the Cone of Uncertainty in his books. 
his graph tells us that project estimates are wildly inaccurate at the start
and only become better over time, when more is known about the nature of the project.
I now think that there is also a Cone of Incompetence.
The Customer
At the far left of the Cone of Incompetence is the customer.
The customer has thought long and hard about a new project (usually more than a year)
and now that he finally decided that he wants it, 
the customer wants it delivered in just two months.
There is usually some arbitrary deadline that happens to be outside the customer's scope of control, therefore negotiation about the deadline is impossible, because the customer "cannot" change it.

The Account Manager
A bit to the right is the account manager, who is a little more competent than the customer.
Unlike the customer the account manager knows what a timebox is,
and he knows some benefits of iterations and frequent delivery, with weekly customer feedback.
He just doesn't know how to sell it, because the customer doesn't want all that.
So the account manager ends up selling a big requirements study,
because the customer feels safe owning a big document with a detailed specification of a product. The customer won't read it, but the customer will be happy. And that's important.

The Project Manager
In the middle of the Cone of Incompetence we find the project manager.
She is more competent than the account manager because she knows exactly how risky
the project is going to be, with an impossible deadline,
no timeboxed regular releases, and little or no customer feedback during the project.
Nevertheless, she is very eager in getting the project going, and the project manager assembles
a team consisting of 45 first-time employees, interns, gnomes, trolls and pizza delivery boys.
When added together this team should be able to burn exactly the number of days
that was estimated in the requirements study. She might even have had time
to write down a Risk List. But it is somewhere at the bottom of the pile
that now contains the new high priority features that the customer has sent her.

The Software Developers
Further to the right we find the software developers.
They are more competent than the project manager because they understand all the risks
and know that the project is never going to make the deadline
with any manageable product of sufficient quality.
However, they still enjoy working on the small parts that they have been assigned to.
Code is code, after all. But in the hurry to finish their assigned tasks, 
the software developers forget to test half of the stuff they wrote.
However, as for the quality of the project, they couldn't care less, because they were not involved
in all the wrong decisions that have already been made in the first place.

The Software Testers
On the far right side of the Cone of Incompetence we find the software testers,
who are the most competent people in the organization, and who will make sure
that lousy products do not get shoved out of the door to customers.
Unfortunately, the software testers don't exist.
Because software testing means overhead.
And overhead costs must be cut because of the losses already made in previous projects.
This, of course, was a decision made by…

The Managers
Meanwhile, the managers are doing their best to promote competence development 
in the company. But, somehow, it just doesn't happen.

- See more at: http://noop.nl/2008/02/the-cone-of-inc.html#sthash.DMXfGD6p.dpuf
http://noop.nl/2008/02/the-cone-of-inc.html

You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneous recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube  
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube

Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?

Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com        gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com        just for fun.
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com   All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education.  TurboChargedReading uses these skills significantly faster.

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”

Thursday 30 July 2015

Forget big change, start with a tiny habit:




www.tedxfremont.com What if someone told you to floss only one tooth everyday? Or start the new year, not with grand resolutions, but with a simple challenge.. like ONE pushup a day? BJ Fogg shows us that the key to lasting change does not lie in planning big, monumental changes, but in thinking really, really small. Chosen by Fortune Magazine as one of "10 New Gurus You Should Know", Fogg directs the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University. www.bjfogg.com

You can TCR specialist and language dictionaries that are spontaneously accessed.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube 
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube

Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?

Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com  All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education. TurboChargedReading uses these skills significantly faster
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com        gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com        just for fun.

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”

Wednesday 29 July 2015

An End to Innovation? Not Likely.

River rushing underneath the canal - an essential conduit of business.

An End to Innovation? Not Likely. 
Philip Auerswald

The Great Age of Innovation has come to an end!
At least that is what Robert Gordon and Paul Krugman, among others, would have us believe.
This isn't the first time we have heard that an end to innovation is near,
and it won't be the last. Techno-Pessimists were wrong in the past and they're wrong today.  
An end to technological evolution is no more likely than an end to biological evolution.
The underlying reason is the same in both cases:
the nearly unbounded power of combinatorial possibilities.

The Great Stagnation
The latest round of techno-pessimism got going in the spring of 2011,
when my George Mason University colleague Tyler Cowen published a widely read treatise
titled The Great Stagnation arguing that the good ideas, that is to say, the best ideas,
for moving human societies forward have already been discovered and put into practice.
While the economic crisis, fiscal irresponsibility, and other transient factors
may have contributed to the “Great Recession” in the United States, Cowen argued
that the roots of America’s economic slowdown are deeper:
we have picked the “low-hanging fruit” of technological progress, and as a consequence, 
further economic advance will be slower and less dramatic than it was the past.
If prosperity feeds at the banquet table of knowledge, then we’re down to the leftovers.
In Cowen’s words, 
The American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies.
Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing,
and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize
that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it.
That is what has gone wrong. 
Cowen substantiated his claim with a carefully constructed fact-based argument,
but his strongest points are still the intuitive ones. Think of a person born in the United States
in 1891 or thereabouts (my paternal grandmother, for example) who looked out at the world
on her sixtieth birthday, in 1951. The reality before her would have been
almost wholly unimaginable at the time of her birth. Electric lights, the telephone, automobiles
and airplanes, even flush toilets. All of these would have been either extremely rare
or nonexistent in her childhood. But what of someone born in 1951 looking at the world today? Sure, we have cell phones and Facebook. The tools of medicine are quite a bit fancier.
But, fundamentally, the architecture of modern life has not changed much.
A US household today is only incrementally different from a US household sixty years ago.
That, essentially, is the core point of The Great Stagnation
Cowen goes on to note that most of the technologies that have defined the modern world—
those that would have seemed marvelous to my grandmother on her sixtieth birthday—
were first introduced at the end of the nineteenth century. Their impact on the economy
peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. It was these technologies that drove the growth in both industry
and government during the Industrial Age—the age of economies of scal
that I describe in chapter 1 of The Coming Prosperity. The story of the social and economic changes wrought by these new technologies is, as I have argued, the economic subtext
of the twentieth century. Cowen is not alone in making this argument.
Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel similarly received considerable attention
for a fall 2011 piece in The National Review titled “The End of the Future.” 
New York Times economics correspondent David Leonhardt echoed the themes
in The Great Stagnation in an essay titled “The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good
that pointed to a surprising contrast between short-term and long-term trends
at the time of the Great Depression: 
Underneath the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was
 quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster
and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said,
the 1930s constituted “the most technologically progressive decade of the century.”
Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends—which is to say,
between short-term fluctuations and longterm changes in the basic structure of the economy.
No decade points to the difference quite like the 1930s:
cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best. 
(Note: Cowen updated his view substantially in his most recent book, Average is Over.)

The Vanishing of Investment Opportunity
All is well so far. But, haven’t similar predictions of impending technological stagnation been made—and proved wrong—before? Yes, on a fairly regular basis.
In fact, the last flurry of techno-pessimistic outpouring was in the in the 1920s and 1930s—
exactly the time when, as Cowen and Leonhardt both accurately report,
the great inventions responsible for past prosperity were peaking in terms of their aggregate impact. In chapter 1, I quoted John Maynard Keynes, who stated in 1929 that “it is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the nineteenth century
is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of living is now going to slow down.”
Similarly, here is Joseph Schumpeter himself, in a chapter from 
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy titled “The Vanishing of Investment Opportunity,”
paraphrasing the view of his own techno-pessimistic contemporaries: 
Most of my fellow economists [ feel that] we have been witnessing not merely a depression
and a bad recovery, accentuated perhaps by anti-capitalist policies,
but the symptoms of a permanent loss of vitality which must be expected to go on
and to supply the dominating theme for the remaining movements of the capitalist symphony;
hence no inference as to the future can be drawn from the functioning of the capitalist engine
and of its performance in the past. 
This is about as succinct a summary as is possible of the arguments recently advanced
by Cowen, Thiel, and Leonhardt. 
Of course, the mere fact that arguments similar to those in The Great Stagnation 
have been advanced, and proven incorrect, in the past does not prove
that contemporary versions are without merit. As I expect is evident both from my summary
of Cowen’s argument and my decision to feature it here, I am largely in agreement
with at least one dimension of the core point he is making: that both scientific invention
and market-based innovation are, in some sense, getting more difficult as time goes by. 

Creating New Combinations
Some years ago I organized a panel at a meeting held at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City (where I am currently affiliated) that focused on the relationship between technological complexity and the long-term future of innovation. Among the panelists who consented to participate
was Ben Jones, a brilliant young economist recently graduated from the doctoral program at MIT.
At the meeting, Jones summarized findings from two of his papers, “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?” and “Age and Great Invention.” These papers intrigued me because they offered a painstakingly argued validation of a conjecture
I had been forming in my own mind at the time—that increases in the complexity of technology compelled scientists to specialize ever more narrowly in order to make significant advances,
but at the same time they increased the returns to the difficult task of bridging disciplines
to create fundamentally new economic combinations. 
Jones found that the average age at which great inventors arrived at their breakthroughs
was about six years later for inventors working at the end of the twentieth century
than for those working at the beginning of the twentieth century (see figure below).
This finding supports the notion that the “low-hanging fruit” of scientific discovery
has been harvested by earlier generations; as a consequence, for any given scientist,
future advance will be increasingly challenging. Young scientists can compensate for this
increasing “knowledge burden,” as Jones terms it, by specializing ever more narrowly
within a disciplinary area of study. But, such specialization comes at a well-known cost:
an intellectual narrowing that, in the limit, results in knowing everything about nothing
and nothing about everything. It is due to precisely this dynamic that the phrase “it’s academic”
has sadly come to be synonymous with “it’s irrelevant.” 
Yet, despite evident costs to society as a whole, such long-term trends cannot be easily shifted, much less reversed. The reality today remains much as Jones found it to be a decade ago:
without increased specialization, scientific discovery slows or ceases; without teamwork
and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, technological innovation slows or ceases.
If technological complexity increases more rapidly than the average human life span,
these two observations combine to suggest a sort of fundamental limit on the human potential
to generate technological advance. 
Will it someday be impossible to live long enough to acquire the knowledge needed
to make advances on prior knowledge? Will new learning come to an end? 
No. An end to technological evolution is no more likely than an end to biological evolution.
The underlying reason is the same in both cases: the nearly unbounded power
of combinatorial possibilities (see chapter 7 of The Coming Prosperity). 
If the current generations of techno-pessimists fail to see the creation of new combinations
at work today, it’s simply because they either can’t glimpse them from where they sit,
or they’re just not looking hard enough. Granted, the technologies that drove past prosperity
in the United States—electric lights, the telephone, automobiles and airplanes, flush toilets—
re today improving only incrementally in comparison with the past.
But those very same technologies are only now reaching the majority of the world’s population.
The resultant productivity gains are massive and reverberating in an epic fashion on a global scale. That process is just beginning. 
What’s more, the infrastructure technologies that will define the nature of both business
and government in the coming century are just now coming into use.
Where twentieth-century technologies reshaped the world around economies of scale,
twenty-first century technologies will shape the world once again,
this time around economies of collaboration. For a new generation of innovators,
overcoming complexity is the paramount challenge. As Martin Weitzman has astutely observed, “The ultimate limits to growth may lie not as much in our ability to generate new ideas,
so much as in our ability to process an abundance of potentially new seed ideas
into usable forms.” Contemporary tools are, unsurprisingly, particularly well suited
to contemporary challenges: assessing the effectiveness of new combinations,
rather than generating new building blocks. 
As to whether that process—sorting the good ideas from the bad in a complex world—
will itself ultimately get so difficult that human progress will terminate altogether
in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth centuries? 
We can answer that when the time comes. For now, it's academic.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9 of The Coming Prosperity, with slight modifications.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/techno-pessimism-wrong-1930s-today-philip-auerswald


You can TCR specialist and language dictionaries that are spontaneously accessed.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube  
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com         gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com         just for fun.
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com    All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education.
                                                                              TurboChargedReading uses these skills significantly faster.

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”

Tuesday 28 July 2015

Here are some things people who do not wear make-up understand.

It is essential to look attractive.

Here are some things people who do not wear make-up understand.
Casey Imafidon

We live at a time when the media celebrates mere external beauty and popularity.
To keep up with the trends of fashion and constant societal demands,
people try to alter and tailor their lives by hiding what is underneath
and exposing people to another false image – one that is masked with makeup.
But where are your self-confidence, kindness, and goodness?
Here are some things people who do not wear makeup understand.

1. They understand being appreciated for who they are
They are realistic and true to themselves. When they are with people,
they don’t have to be worried that they are being stared at for looking like a comic heroine.
They can relax and enjoy being appreciated for their natural selves.

2. They can save time
It takes time to apply make-up and try to look out of the ordinary.
All that time can be spent doing something worthwhile, perhaps being punctual
and reading an exciting book.

3. They don’t need to satisfy anyone
They understand that people’s tastes differ. They don’t try to adjust their standards
to meet these tastes and look cheap. Rather, they validate their self-worth
by looking pleasant and appealing primarily to themselves.

4. They can save money
Let’s be realistic with ourselves. Beauty products cost money, and most of the time 
there is no guarantee of a return on investment for the amount you put into it.
People who do not use makeup can save money
and time doing and trying to pursue other worthy endeavours.

5. They become more appealing in other ways
At face value, perhaps, people will be attracted to you for your appearance.
But this is never lasting. What is sustaining are such immaculate qualities like kindness,
warmth, and affection. These amazing qualities do not need to be beautified by makeup,
but by age and by appreciation of not only yourself, but also the world around you.

6. They can build sustaining relationships
People who do not wear makeup can be who they are and command attention.
Whoever is attracted to them is concerned about what is underneath their skin
and is comfortable with their total appearance. These kinds of relationships
are built to last, since they are not built upon a selfish foundation.

7. They have self-confidence
They do appreciate what they have in their bodies and their inner selves.
They do not lack or try to hide flaws or inferiority.
They have dealt with that already and are confident of what they showcase to the world.

8. They can deal with life’s changes
Whether we like it or not, we will all be victims of time and age.
People who don’t wear makeup refuse to run from this fact.
Rather, they can deal with life’s changes and instabilities.

9. They define their own happiness
They know what happiness means. They can relate to the simplicity
and amazing details of life rather than the sophistication and luxury that makeup offers.
They don’t have to cover anything, especially their glad smile.

10. They do not worry about skin damage
They don’t have to fear or worry about the highly allergenic and harmful ingredients
that are contained in many makeup products.

11. They do not need to follow the pack
They think independently. They do not need to be victims of what the media propagates, particularly, that you need makeup products to be complete.
They are already complete and comfortable with who they are.

12. They can be listened to
Because they have focused on building other aspects of their lives
rather than just their facial appearances,
other people are more interested in what they have to offer.
They are not stared at, but listened to for their inner power and inner beauty.

13. They are treated with respect
Since they have confidence and respect, people can relate and identify with their positive energy. They are treated with respect and never abused or considered less than their counterparts.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/13-things-only-women-who-dont-put-makeup-all-the-time-understand.html


You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneous recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube  
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com         gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com         just for fun.
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com    All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education.
                                                                              TurboChargedReading uses these skills significantly faster.

 To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”

Monday 27 July 2015

6 Weird But Successful Small Business Ideas

One upon a time, this was an idea that became necessary for success.


Maximal Exposure provides Online promotions for your business.
Using S.E.O., Website, Blog & Social Media accounts; we will take your business to the next level (Blog comes free with website purchase). - See more at: http://maximalexposure.net/#sthash.T5...

I can TCR music, poetry or self development material for internal knowing.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading YouTube  
How to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Emotions when Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com    All aspects of regular, each-word reading and education.
                                                                              TurboChargedReading uses these skills significantly faster
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com         gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com         just for fun.

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”