Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
In any major change you deliberately want to challenge positions and point of views. There is no use in attempting a shift from high risk hero driven development to low risk method driven development ala Model driven Enterprise Architecture if you don…
For those of us in the Enterprise Architecture, impressing the value of discipline on the world that is incentivized to ignore it, is par for the course. Whether it’s due to great expectations, unrealistic timelines, lack of coherent planning, or…
For those of us in the Enterprise Architecture, impressing the value of discipline on the world that is incentivized to ignore it, is par for the course. Whether it’s due to great expectations, unrealistic timelines, lack of coherent planning, or all of the above, ensuring and enabling others to follow a method or process with trust that success will not come from taking shortcuts is a Herculean task.
So when we transitioned to a Capability-Driven Startup Incubator model, we essentially doubled down on the belief that if done in a disciplined way, we can help entrepreneurs launch companies that are successful, profitable, and not hampered by capability debt (debt of suboptimal decisions made for expediency or based on incomplete information, or by wrong people in wrong positions.) You’ll see the results of that bet start appearing in the public light next quarter so you can judge whether our bet is paying off.
It is from a discipline perspective that I ran into a very curious piece on Chicago digital startup community that appeared in PandoDaily. It centers around defining the “Midwest Mentality” of pragmatism, as follows:
Pragmatism is defined as dealing with issues on a practical level, rather than a theoretical one. What does this mean in the context of startups? Well, it means that there is no “let’s build a cool tool and then figure out the business model”. No. In fact, if you do that here, you don’t belong. That’s a plain fact that I have found very few people disagree with.
And while the author (Trevor Gilbert) goes on to provide both pros and cons of pragmatism, he spends the majority of the article blasting pragmatism in context of digital startups. He delves into working hours, missing the point that amount of work doesn’t usually correlate to success. Those of us with kids don’t just stop working once we go home – I see many of my married with kids counterparts firing up the laptop after their kids are in bed. But we can debate whether parents working 9pm to midnight is more productive than their single counterparts spending that time having fun at a bar – either is simply anecdotal and should be taken with several grains of salt. It’d just be nice if Trevor thought to research his arguments a bit more.
And in that failure of discipline, he makes and then fails to expound on the major point of why Chicago startup community is so different from Boston or Silicon Valley:
Without hot startups, you are left with the problem of attracting investment and talent with names observers don’t truly know.
Here Trevor inverts the causality in support of his argument. That is shoddy at best, sensationalist at heart, and substandard thinking at worst. The cause of few “hot startups” is not our pragmatism. It’s the fact that there is a “problem of attracting investment and talent with names observers don’t truly know.”
If Trevor actually listened to the Chicago VC community, their investment dollars usually go to people they have built a relationship with – over several years. It’s not that talent, intelligence, adaptability, and stick-to-it-itiveness of the idea don’t play a role. It’s that in order to be rated on these measures, the prospective entrepreneur has to clear a very high barrier to entry of building a relationship with the prospective funders. Perhaps it’s a throwback to the old Chicago politics paradigm of “we don’t want nobody nobody sent.” But perhaps it’s not strictly a Chicago issue (here’s a WSJ article bemoaning that fact nationwide), just more pronounced here. Regardless of cause, this state of affairs limits our city to be the backwater of seed investment dollars. Either way, I’m not sure that “Midwestern Mentality” has much to do with it.
AAB
For those of us in the Enterprise Architecture, impressing the value of discipline on the world that is incentivized to ignore it, is par for the course. Whether it’s due to great expectations, unrealistic timelines, lack of coherent planning, or all of the above, ensuring and enabling others to follow a method or process with trust that success will not come from taking shortcuts is a Herculean task.
So when we transitioned to a Capability-Driven Startup Incubator model, we essentially doubled down on the belief that if done in a disciplined way, we can help entrepreneurs launch companies that are successful, profitable, and not hampered by capability debt (debt of suboptimal decisions made for expediency or based on incomplete information, or by wrong people in wrong positions.) You’ll see the results of that bet start appearing in the public light next quarter so you can judge whether our bet is paying off.
It is from a discipline perspective that I ran into a very curious piece on Chicago digital startup community that appeared in PandoDaily. It centers around defining the “Midwest Mentality” of pragmatism, as follows:
Pragmatism is defined as dealing with issues on a practical level, rather than a theoretical one. What does this mean in the context of startups? Well, it means that there is no “let’s build a cool tool and then figure out the business model”. No. In fact, if you do that here, you don’t belong. That’s a plain fact that I have found very few people disagree with.
And while the author (Trevor Gilbert) goes on to provide both pros and cons of pragmatism, he spends the majority of the article blasting pragmatism in context of digital startups. He delves into working hours, missing the point that amount of work doesn’t usually correlate to success. Those of us with kids don’t just stop working once we go home – I see many of my married with kids counterparts firing up the laptop after their kids are in bed. But we can debate whether parents working 9pm to midnight is more productive than their single counterparts spending that time having fun at a bar – either is simply anecdotal and should be taken with several grains of salt. It’d just be nice if Trevor thought to research his arguments a bit more.
And in that failure of discipline, he makes and then fails to expound on the major point of why Chicago startup community is so different from Boston or Silicon Valley:
Without hot startups, you are left with the problem of attracting investment and talent with names observers don’t truly know.
Here Trevor inverts the causality in support of his argument. That is shoddy at best, sensationalist at heart, and substandard thinking at worst. The cause of few “hot startups” is not our pragmatism. It’s the fact that there is a “problem of attracting investment and talent with names observers don’t truly know.”
If Trevor actually listened to the Chicago VC community, their investment dollars usually go to people they have built a relationship with – over several years. It’s not that talent, intelligence, adaptability, and stick-to-it-itiveness of the idea don’t play a role. It’s that in order to be rated on these measures, the prospective entrepreneur has to clear a very high barrier to entry of building a relationship with the prospective funders. Perhaps it’s a throwback to the old Chicago politics paradigm of “we don’t want nobody nobody sent.” But perhaps it’s not strictly a Chicago issue (here’s a WSJ article bemoaning that fact nationwide), just more pronounced here. Regardless of cause, this state of affairs limits our city to be the backwater of seed investment dollars. Either way, I’m not sure that “Midwestern Mentality” has much to do with it.
AAB
For those of us in the Enterprise Architecture, impressing the value of discipline on the world that is incentivized to ignore it, is par for the course. Whether it’s due to great expectations, unrealistic timelines, lack of coherent planning, or…
This is the sixth posting in a series on architecture standards. In previous postings we discussed the standards terminology, the documentation of architecture standards as well as the embedding in the organization and the life cycle of architecture st…
“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” – Oscar Wilde You’ve all heard the typical anecdotes about the speed of growth of the Internet and Twitter. Here is…
As I read my Twitter feed on my smartphone, I am noticing a slowly growing trend. More and more websites recognize that I am using a mobile device and are serving up there content for a mobile experience. I really appreciate this feature so I can k…
April Fools day has been celebrated as far back as 1632, if you believe in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and bad math, or possibly as far back as 500 BC (if you are of Iranian descent). Regardless, it is a day to approach with some wariness if you ar…
April Fools day has been celebrated as far back as 1632, if you believe in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and bad math, or possibly as far back as 500 BC (if you are of Iranian descent). Regardless, it is a day to approach with some wariness if you ar…
Referencing in advice to client. Good book.
tags: cio
Give it five minutes – (37signals)
“Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss.
There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.
Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.
So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes.”
Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! | Video on TED.com
Doodler vindication!
“Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.”
tags: TED creativity doodling
Conway’s law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Conway’s law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1968:
…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
tags: organization systems
How Sara Blakely of Spanx Turned $5,000 into $1 billion – Forbes.com
Good self-made woman entrepreneur story:
“Sara Blakely is the youngest self-made woman to join this year’s billionaires’ club–turning $5,000 in savings into a new retail category”
Self-tracking for health, fun and profit? – Input Output
My latest on Active Information:
“About a decade ago, I was working with my favorite co-conspirator on a universal task viewer service, which was an adjunct to our event-driven architecture. In order for something to appear in the task viewer, it had to be “trackable” (include the proper interface).
Over the course of our design sessions, and throughout the next few months, we kept identifying business and system actions that should be trackable. It became apparent to us that nearly every business and system action could be trackable, following an interface pattern similar to making document objects printable.
I hadn’t thought of “trackable” — and the running “hey that’s trackable” joke — in years. However, reading Counting Every Moment on self-tracking in the recent Economist Technology Quarterly bounced trackable up my memory stack.”
Jump to Kanban in Lean manufacturing distilled section
Kanban is the New Scrum « The Hacker Chick Blog
“The thing I’ve grown to dislike about Scrum are it’s time-boxed sprints.
Working with startups, Scrum sprints are almost always way too long. When your sprints are too long then releases are infrequent (deferring revenue) and the team is forced to wait too long before being able to adapt to changing customer needs. This is wasteful because it means you’re continuing to move forward with outdated information.
On the other hand, if sprints are too short, big features need to be arbitrarily chunked into smaller tasks, which aren’t useful to the customer on their own & can obfuscate what the team is trying to achieve”
10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy | Brain Pickings
“People who think well, write well.”
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs – NYTimes.com
“It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
tags: nytimes goldman leadership
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Related posts:
“Dead Letter Office” is a lovely and hearty shiraz sourced from the McLaren Vale and Padthaway wine regions of South Australia. While drinking a bottle of Dead Letter Office recently i started to sketch this post about asynchronous message-based integration architectures. The dead-letter-office concept is an important form of exception-handling, though it contributes to complexity […]