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?

Hate something, change something, make something better. Another key source of inspiration for this blog is one man’s pursuit of a better, cleaner, diesel engine, that of Honda’s Chief Engineer Kenichi Nagahiro. The advert works because it transmits a meaningful message: it reminds us there’s always choice and we as individuals have the ability to make change happen.

Click here for the full visual and sing-along version to ‘Hate Something, Change Something’. You know you want to.

Steven Levitt reminds me of a younger version of Tom Peters. I heard him speak at a luncheon gathering recently and he certainly lived up to his reputation as co-author of Freakonomics. I like Levitt because he strikes me as being genuinely exceptional at what he does. Most important of all, he speaks sense and management listens (or at least nods in unison).

A quote I learnt from a history lesson decades ago is this: ‘Everyone knows what’s right, but only the Spartans do it.’ As I recall, it was uttered by an old man at an Olympic Game after a young Spartan gave up his seat in an arena full of firmly seated Romans.

Like the boy who cried out at the sight of the naked Emperor, Levitt said the problem with the business today is that they think feedback is no longer important.

Levitt’s lessons on success seem simple:

• Think differently in an obvious way
• Go where innovation is valued
• Get feedback then follow through (instead of succumbing to conventional wisdom).

Perhaps by continuing our search for excellence, we are now connecting more and more people committed to ‘make things new’ (paraphrasing Ezra Pound). Newness increases appeal and enough appeal can create the tipping point that makes change possible.

Levitt shows us how economics can be much more than bamboozle-by-bean-counting. He’s a brilliant example of how we can turn selfish programming into green energy. Marvellous.

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?

Here’s a chance to swap your bit part for a major role in the Agile re-telling of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for your organisation.

Starring:

• You as Dorothy
• Agile as the Emerald City
• Agile adoption path as the Yellow Brick Road
• Session presenters (Duncan Pierce and me) as the Wizard of Oz

See you at XPDay London 2008

I’ll be co-presenting ‘The Yellow Brick Road’ at XPDay London in November. The session will be a self-contained workshop as well as a potential kick-off session for a year-long programme where you will learn about and practice peer-coaching to transform your way of working from suboptimal to agile. You will get the chance to work with peers in similar organisations and draw on a wealth of experiences, from learning how to deal with real problems to brainstorming and selecting effective solutions. We hope to create a setting where you will be able to give and receive support as you apply solutions through an iterative and collaborative process of plan-do-inspect-adapt.

To find out more about XPDay London, go to: http://www.xpday.org/

I met a number of people who expressed an interest in learning more about Agile this evening at an event organised by the British Computer Society’s Business Information Systems Specialist Group (BISSG). Here’s what I found useful when I first came across Agile.

Online Resources

• Agile Software Development
• The Agile Manifesto
• Kaizen (Continuous Improvement)
• Scrum – Go to http://www.agilealliance.org/ and search for ‘scrum’. Scrum is an implementation of Agile that I’m most interested in currently, mainly because it’s most suited for teams who are used to Waterfall development (the old-fashioned, most prevalent way of developing software). XP is probably too difficult to adopt as a first stab at Agile for most Waterfall-oriented teams, hence Scrum is possibly a better (easier) place to start because it focuses more on how people do things rather than what they should do.

Must-Read Books

• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres
  An excellent introduction to the Agile values and principles along with the practices of XP. This is the second version of Kent’s book (this one’s published in 2004 and the first was in 1998). If you’ve got time, it’s worth reading both versions to see how XP has evolved.
• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
  Not specifically related to Agile, but a must-read for any self-respecting developer. However, this book isn’t only for techies. It lays out the best practices that I think every IT professional should know if they’re involved in the software development lifecycle in any way, shape or form. To non-coding readers: don’t feel compelled to read it all, skip over the code samples, but the majority of the content makes for an easy and interesting read about how quality software should be developed.
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
  For me, this was an brilliant introduction to Agile software development and the concepts of Lean.
• Agile Project Management with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber
  This book provides a great high-level overview of what Scrum looks and feels like.
• Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
  An excellent handbook on how to start using Scrum. It’s worth knowing at least the fundamentals of Agile and Scrum before introducing Scrum into your team (and/or organisation). I would suggest reading Henrik’s book after looking through Ken’s and Mary’s books.

‘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.