Moneyball
Here's what I did to make me better at shipping software (which is slightly different than the question asked.) I read moneyball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball) - a book about using sabremetrics to create a winning baseball team and realized that everything I knew about being a great programmer and creating a great team was wrong. The key takeaway I took from the book is that the things we think make a great baseball player (such as RBIs and HR) aren't what help win a game. There are better stats, such as on-base percentage. In the world of software, I correlate between winning a…
It's still challenging to predict the outcome of a baseball game. Sabermetrics can project the outcome of a 162-game season, but a playoff series is too small of a sample size. Lewis stresses this in Moneyball.
Extraordinary until proven otherwise. Extraordinary conservatism results in extraordinary ignorance. I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their…
Is it really right wing? Why? I've just read multiple articles about how slow Dr's are to adopt it even though, empirically, it is more effective. I figured they rejected it for the same reason people always reject things: "that's the way we've always done it". Now granted, those articles could have been biased, but I had no idea there was any sort of left wing vs right wing thing going on. Stupid politrix. The entire movement reminded me of Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
Thanks for the information. I seriously thought it was much more like the Moneyball situation where it was just a bunch of old schoolers not accepting reality & empirical evidence and instead relying on standard practices and conventional wisdom. P.S. We just fully implemented Twisted at TicketStumbler :) (I heard you guys use it, and love it, at Justin.TV).
Michael Lewis gets amazing access for the pieces he writes about finance. Not too technical, but he really gets into the characters that are involved with different parts of the industry. He's also one of the lucky writers who can write about anything that piques his interest at a given time (Moneyball, Blind Side, and essays in the same vein), so those are worth checking out as well. Atul Gawande is a great medicine writer. He was at Slate for a while, but he's been writing for the New Yorker for the last few years.
Some of my favorite books: - Moneyball. A really engaging story about how game changing startups can turn a centuries-old industry on it's head....er...it's actually about baseball, but the other part is true too. - Crossing the Chasm. It's a roadmap for introducing a new product. Gives a framework for thinking about the "who" and "why" of a new market. - Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie. It's actually not a book but rather a short paper. Shows how the sales learning curve is similar to the manufacturing learning curve. - Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of…
Perhaps, but during the initial design stages it is the core job function to figure out how to improve the current workflow quality. If folks don't clearly define the finish line, than a project will run out of budget eventually as scope creep turns it back into the same useless mess. Proper restructuring usually means firing people that do not recognize they are in a business setting. The Big Brain fallacy is a common bias with people too blind to recognize what other professions bring to the table, and ultimately are unproductive in a large project. Every manager should read Moneyball…