Ten Faces of Innovation

Author:

Tom Kelly

Premise:

This book discusses the importance of innovation and how it separates good organizations from excellent organizations. The Ten Faces of Innovations also details the different personas that can foster & create innovation within an organization.

Review details:

You can find the full review on my blog, Review of The Ten Faces of Innovation.

Made to Stick

This is a book definitely worth reading.  I maintain my own blog so as opposed to having duplicate content, I’m going to link over to that post.

Made to Stick Review.

Slide:ology – My Initial Review

In an earlier posting I included a link to an excellent presentation by Nancy Duarte, the author of Slide:ology. Since then her book has come out and I was able to get a copy just before I left for vacation so I thought I would take it with me.

So I started reading the book on the airplane to Kauai. From the very beginning of the book, and by the beginning I mean the acknowledgments, I found the content to be first class and enlightening. I was so intrigued by the book that I found myself compelled to continue flipping pages to see what was on the next page. I spent 2 hours on the plane just flipping through the book and reading the highlights.

This is a first class book in every regard. The content is deep, the examples are spot on and the author uses her own lessons of great presentations in putting together this compelling book. My only complaint is that the book should have come out in a hardcover. This is a book that is going to get a lot of use but is also such a beautiful book that I would be distressed if the pages and its cover get beat up.

Making Money

One of the main things attracting me to work for Tacit Knowledge was that Tom Looy is Managing Director.  I don’t say that to brown nose because, well, I don’t need to.  Tom knows how I feel about him. When I first learned about Tacit Knowledge, I started reading Tom’s blog “Conversations with Andrew” and knew that this was someone that I really wanted to work with.

Anyone who knows Tom knows that he loves to read business books.  I’m usually more attracted to self-help books.  However, since I’ve joined Tacit Knowledge, I have been reading more business oriented books, the evidence of which is the past three entries I’ve left on this blog.

One of the books Tom recommends to just about anyone who will listen is “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt.  Goldratt is know as the father of the “The Theory of Constraints” which says that your throughput can be no greater than the slowest producer in your production line.  I haven’t intentionally put off reading “The Goal” until now.  Honestly, I’ve just been busy with other books, mostly books that are very specific to quality assurance or testing, such as “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” which Matt Short so wisely recommended to me, the two Gerry Weinberg books mentioned below in a previous post and Gerard Meszaros’ “xUnit Testing Patterns” which I am, I confess, still struggling through.

Of course, one of the reasons I enjoyed “The Goal” so much is because of it’s relevance to testers and quality assurance.

“The Goal” is a business novel and its protagonist, a guy named Al Rogo, takes his son’s boy scout troupe on a hiking trip, during which he makes observations about how fast the troupe moves.

“Looking ahead, I can see that how much distance each of us has to make up tends to be a matter of where we are in the line.  Davey (the second kid in line) only has to make up for his own slower than average fluctuations relative to Ron — that twenty feet or so which is the gap in front of him.  But for Herbie (the slowest kid) to keep the length of the line from growing, he would have to make up for his own fluctuations plus those of all the kids in front of him.  And here I am at the end of the line.  To make the total length of the line contract, I have to move faster than average for a distance equal to all the excess space between all the boys.  I have to make up for the accumulation of all their slowness.”

Does that not describe the testing department in a nutshell?

The interesting thing about this book, written in 1984, is that it is suggesting the very thing that we are currently in the middle of implementing at Tacit Knowledge, that being the idea of putting quality in front of the bottlenecks

“Make sure the bottleneck works on good parts by weeding out the ones that are defective.“

Concretely, for the software world, Tacit Knowledge’s proposal for doing this is to create a role that is part quality assurance and part business analyst.  The intent is to reduce the number of defective and/or vague stories going through development.  Jonah, the wise sage in the story, says something really great that I have learned many times.  In reference to clients that would come to him to solve mathematic problems, Jonah said that they wanted him to check their numbers, which were almost always right. What he learned is that …”if I checked the assumptions, they were almost always wrong.”

Again, this statement very much represents what I have found in my career in quality assurance.  I find the most problems by checking assumptions, which is why I feel that the new role we’re creating is going to help the throughput of the team.

Next, I’m planning on reading either David Anderson’s book on Agile management or one of the two Poppendiecks’ books on the subject of TOC applied to software.  Does anyone have any recommendations?