Re: [xml-dev] RE: XML As Fall Guy

[Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>]

Business leadership -- the inspiration of a viable, stable,
financial-resource-wielding culture -- is something very special.  Wall
Street recognizes this fact (but not necessarily the leaders who do it).

Technical leadership -- the inspiration of a viable, stable,
technology-resource-wielding culture -- is at least equally rare.  (The
completion of this thought is left as an exercise for the reader, with
my warning/ suggestion that it's probably more complex and subtle than
one might think.)

On 11/29/2013 02:32 PM, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 10:53 AM, <cbullard@hiwaay.net
> <mailto:cbullard@hiwaay.net>> wrote:
> 
>     At the core was a team of civil servants who specified it, designed
>     it AND managed its fabrication and fielding.  This team had been
>     together developing these systems for three decades:  German Rocket
>     Scientists.  The Von Braun Team.
> 
> 
> In short, what de Marco and Lister call a "jelled team".  Unfortunately,
> we don't know how to create those, only how to destroy them.  The
> chapter on teamicide  in /Peopleware/ starts thus:
> 
>     What's  called for here is  a concise  chapter entitled "Making
>     Teams Jell at Your Company."  It should have half a dozen simple
>     prescriptions for good team formation.  These prescriptions should
>     be enough to guarantee jelled teams.  In the planning stage of this
>     work,  that is exactly the chapter we expected to write.  We were
>     confident.  How difficult could it be to cut to the heart of the matter
>     and give the reader practical tools to aid the process of making teams
>     jell?  We would apply all our skills,  all our experience;  we would
>     overwhelm the problem with logic and pure brilliance.  That's how
>     it looked in the planning stage....
> 
>  
> 
>     Between  plan  and  execution,  there  were  a  few  distressing
>     encounters with reality.  The first of these was that we just couldn't
>     come up with the six prescriptions needed for the chapter.  We got
>     stuck at zero.  We'd been prepared to scale our expectations down a
>     bit, but not this much.  ("Zero Things You Can Do to Make Teams
>     Jell"?)  It seemed clear that something was wrong with the under-
>     lying notion of the chapter.  What was wrong was the whole idea of
>     making teams jell.  You can't make teams jell.  You can hope they
>     will jell; you can cross your fingers; you can act to improve the odds
>     of jelling; but you can't make it happen.  The process is much too
>     fragile to be controlled.
> 
> 
> Instead, they explain seven ways (in the 2e, nine ways) to /prevent
> /teams from jelling, a much simpler matter.  Alas, in 2013 all of these
> ways are still in regular use by management — and they explain why both
> Clueless and Sociopath managers (without using those terms) are
> interested in preventing teams from jelling.
> 
> A truly great book, whose only defect is that those who need it most
> will never heed it.  I see that it has a new edition this year; I
> suppose I'll have to break down and buy it.
> 
> -- 
> GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at
> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures