I recently came across a rather fantastic competition from Agile 2007.

‘Developer Abuse’
This one’s errily accurate. Remember: it doesn’t have to be this way.

‘Being Agile is Our Favourite Thing’
This entry’s quite clever, entertaining and hilarious. Watch it with your team. Play it loud. Sing along. Do whatever it takes to maximise your Agile reach.

Imagine: It’s 7.30 am. Another fun-filled weekday is only a tube ride away. On your descent down into the station what do you see? Not just one, but two information boards. If you squint you’ll see the sticky tape. The posters are homemade.

You can tell that whoever put the posters up are doing their best to help. They’re actually offering information. The boards are there to workaround a problem.

To show my appreciation, I decide to blog about them, so I take some pictures. Someone resembling a station manager approaches me, uncertain of my next move.

‘What are you doing, miss?’ he says.

‘I was just taking some pictures,’ I reply.

Then, as though struck by inspiration for want of something more to say, he says, ‘You’re not allowed to take pictures, miss.’ By this point I feel like a time traveller’s wife, revisiting Dickensian times.

‘But I think these posters are really very useful,’ I say. He smiles. I realise I have his attention, so I ask the question that my friend Jim and I have been asking ourselves for the past three months: ‘Why is the stairwell closed?’ I had speculated that perhaps it was due to a health and safety issue, to which Jim replied at the time, ‘It seems to me the only danger if it were open is that they might actually have to clean it.’

‘I don’t know, miss. I can’t really remember. It seems so long ago,’ replies the nice man.

Suddenly, another official appears on my right and thrusts a card under my nose. ‘Please call this number if you have any complaints,’ he says. This is fast becoming a minor situation. Like the time I was arrested by the Moldovan police.

‘But I don’t wish to complain,’ I reply. ‘I was just asking for information.’

The official who gave me the card stares at me and says, ‘Please. Please call up and complain about the stairwell. THEY haven’t done anything about it for ages. There’s nothing we can do. Someone cut their hand using the staircase ages ago.’

Perhaps that stumbling someone was under the influence I thought, having traversed up and down the staircase on a number of occasions myself and emerged hands intact.

I knew it! The people working at the station were trying to be helpful. They wanted to run the station as best they could. So who are these people known as ‘THEY’ who are blocking instead of helping? How many THEYs and THEMs do you work with? What if I told you there is only US?

Question: What do Tom Peters and Steven Levitt have in common?
Answer: They make a living out of having and using a rare and precious thing that has made them kings. Their magic is no secret: it’s common sense.

Tom Peters Says

Tom Peters is a classic great speaker. He’s charming, inspirational and a brilliant performer. It was interesting to hear him speak about excellence in the enterprise 25 years on from when ‘In Search of Excellence’ was first published. According to the title of his talk, he’s ‘Still in Search of Excellence’ – an observation that’s at once disconcerting as well as hopeful. Disconcerting because, from experience, we haven’t solved the problem yet (in spite of the number of man years spent in this pursuit); hopeful because it gives us something to do. Problems are good. It’s often the solutions that make things go from bad to worse. I’m constantly reminded that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

Tom began by assuring the audience that we were all leaders – weren’t we? He then went on to say: ‘We all know we’re phonies and because we’re afraid to expose our weaknesses we don’t ask the interesting questions. It’s our job as leaders to ask interesting questions.’

Tom described the essence of enterprise as:

• Cause – worthy of commitment
• Space – for encouragement and initiative
• Decency – respect and humane
• Service
• Excellence
• Servant Leadership

He then hollered a typical management mantra to the crowd like some punk rock star: ‘Park your brain at the door dude and row the slave ship!’ then lowering his voice, he continued: ‘But we have computers to row the slave ship.’

According to Tom, our only chance to succeed in globalisation is to leverage the creative and intellectual skills of our teams. Starbucks is a good example of a human function being replaced by a machine. Since coffee making is done by a machine, what Starbucks buys is individuality in their staff. When asked why Starbucks staff are constantly smiling, one manager said as a matter-of-fact: ‘We hire people who smile.’

Tom, like Levitt, fully acknowledges that he has nothing profound to say. Instead, what he does has been described as ‘blinding flashes of the obvious’. So here’s the latest newsflash: ‘Put your people before your customers,’ says Tom Peters. What will you do?

‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.’

– The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

Dawkins’s examination of the biology of selfishness and altruism has led him to assert that “we are born selfish”. The manifestations and consequences of his assertion in terms of people and software development are what I have coined (the art of) Selfish Programming.

Together we can thwart it and may be even turn it into ‘environmentally-friendly’ energy. Welcome.