My favorite part of this brilliant essay is that he goes someplace positive and surprising. Twist!

(Via Rands In Repose.)

Videos #8 and #9, just break your heart.

Via Mashable

Via iran.whyweprotest.net

The planning fallacy: “

We blame bureaucracy for being wasteful and taking too long when things like the Denver International Airport or Boston’s Big Dig arrive years overdue and billions over budget. But it’s not just huge organizations and the government that mess up planning. Everyone does. It’s the ‘planning fallacy.’ We think we can plan, but we can’t.

Studies show it doesn’t matter whether you ask people for their realistic best guess or a hoped-for best case scenario. Either way, they give you the best case scenario. It’s true on a big scale and it’s true on a small scale too.

While I don’t agree w/all of the article, I do think it’s important to keep in the back of one’s mind that plans themselves have less value than a well oiled “planning process”, with feedback loops matched to the stakeholder or responsible party structure that should be clear at the beginning of every significant project. I believe one of the great strategists from WWII said “plans are useless, planning is priceless” (Eisenhower or Churchill?).

It’s also worth pointing out that while 37Signals regularly rants against planning up front, they do start w/a kernel of a direction, and document/communicate quite efficiently all along the way. So maybe rather than “don’t plan”, they should say “start with a simple idea, and document and communicate along the way”.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Project Management and Workflow:

If I move a muscle, I’m dead. Jane, who I’m pretty sure is a Werewolf, is jumping from one player to the next, testing will and looking for weakness. She’s looking for a sign of guilt or discomfort and it’s not just her. The room is full of people looking for someone to lynch.

The game is Werewolf and I’m both exhilarated and terrified, which is odd because I’m paid to play a real-life version of this horrific game every day.

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

(Via FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right.)

It’s not failure that companies need to avoid, but rather “failing expensively”.

The White House finally got around to setting up a MySpace page. It is spare and tasteful and doesn’t say MySpace anywhere on the page, unlike the White House page on Facebook which is clearly a Facebook page. The page is dominated by the most recent White House blog post, which currently features a YouTube video of Obama shooting hoops with the UCONN Huskies women’s basketball champs. Every time he shoots, he gets nothing but net, while some of the girls choke. (Maybe they were a little nervous playing against the President of the United States).

Here is the video:

(Via TechCrunch.)

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The Most Easily Referred Companies are Naturally Social

One benefit that may not get accurately measured in the world of social media is that companies that are very social are easier to refer.

I’ve theorized in the past posts that companies that combine the highly wired tactics involved in social networking platforms with the highly engaged tactics of traditional networking seem be the ones that just naturally generate more referrals.

(Via Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.)

‘Can I work remote?’

I cringe. It’s Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He’s a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, ‘This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.’ Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

(Via Rands In Repose.)