Aerodynamic lift is easy, right? Thousands of planes use it everyday to carry around things and people. A very well understood thing, right?
Well. Not really. Actually, not at all. Everybody knows that planes fly. But no-one know why. I’m not making this up.
Scientific American has a great summary of the problems all the common theories suffer, and why we still don’t know how such a basic effect actually works.
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Should you hire the “best" people?
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Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union and most decorated officer in the Soviet Union.
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A meritocracy - a system in which influence and responsibility are based on talent, effort and achievement - is often considered to be most rational and effective form of governance.
It exists in my different forms, and can range from very formal (promotion to a advisory board for example) to very informal (the “whoever does it decides how it is done” approach of a lot of open source projects).
But whatever concrete form your meritocracy takes, at its root, it has this thought:
“The best people should decide”
So, does it make sense to hire the best people?
Scott E Page thinks: No.
Basically, his argument is that in order to solve complex problems, you need a diverse set of people to work on it. But looking only for the “best” people will create a monoculture of people who all think and act the same, leading to the always same results:
"Yet the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions.”
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The WWII sabotage manual that sounds a lot like standard corporate culture
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In 1944, the OSS, the precursor agency of the CIA, published a book that had tips for would-be-saboteurs that wanted to help the Allies win the war, but didn’t know what they could do.
It gives some practical efforts on how to sabotage companies and organisations without doing any physical harm, just by acting in a certain way in the working environment.
I could add some snark to this, but instead, I just present you with some highlights. See if they seem familiar:
- Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
- Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
- Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable"and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
- nsist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products
- Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
How many organisational Anti-Patterns can you count?
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How big are data breaches nowadays?
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MGM - Resorts is a Hotel-operator based in Las Vegas. The company got hacked last year, and the intruders got access to personal data of persons who stayed in one of the MGM hotels.
Now, the dataset appeared on a hacker forum, and now we know how large it is:
10.6 million datasets of personal information like home address, email address, phone numbers and date of birth have been leaked.
The data of 10.6 million people. That’s how big data breaches are nowadays.
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Getting rid of plastic bottles
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Notpla creates food packaging from seaweed and plants that is edible, and simply disappears.
Is that a way to say goodbye to plastic bottles?
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Oh great. Now we have radiation-eating fungi.
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A fungus found in the area around the Chernobyl reactor mutated and now is able to turn radiation into chemical energy. Meaning: It eats radiation. Neat.
Humanity. Turning the world into a horror-show for 10.000 years.
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How will we deal with the ever-growing number of interconnected devices that work just fine?
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So, Sonos decided to discontinue support for its devices that have been released between 2006 and 2015. That means that they will eventually (probably sooner than later) loose all or part of their functionality. While Sonos offers a replacement program where users get discounts when they throw away their hardware and purchase new one, this has outraged a lot of Sonos customers.
They feel cheated, because from their point of view, the devices still work perfectly, and Sonos move will render them useless.
I think that creates an interesting conundrum for all of us:
On one hand, supporting old products sometimes simply doesn’t make sense. This is most likely the case in younger fields where there’s more product experimentation going into a final product. When products evolve quickly, it can become hard to support them through many years.
On the other hand, throwing away something that works perfectly fine is a waste.
So, there’s something deeper going on here: Digital products are supposed to be supported in theory forever. That’s what makes them so appealing. That’s what makes the extremely fast product cycles exceptable for everyone. The New Instagram turns into the Old Instagram once a week, but when hardware is involved, these cycles are not sustainable.
That’s a major point to consider. All software uses some kind of hardware to run on, and when the hardware is outpaced that drastically by the software, a lot of perfectly working hardware is going to the trash heap because it’s not compatible with the new software standards anymore.
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This is what happens when an AI sings about bikes
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The above is the chorus of the song lyrics the AI over at https://theselyricsdonotexist.com created for me when I asked it to sing about bikes for me.
Pretty neat, huh?
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The good people at Scrum Club Dornbirn asked me if I could do a short talk on the practical side of Scrum - specifically about one of the most often asked questions in new Scrum teams: "Who's my boss, anyway?"
I'm talking about organisational anti-patterns, chains of commands, self-empowerment and all things that can make working Agile such a pain.
Date: 11.03.2020, 18.30
Location: Digitale Initiativen, Hintere Achmühlerstraße 1, Dornbirn 6850
If you're a Scrum practitioner or want to become one and are located in the Bodensee area, I cannot recommend the Scrum Club highly enough. A monthly meet-up of people moving the Agile agenda forward. Check out their facebook page and make sure you drop by sometime!
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That's it for this edition of Let's Be Fwends. If you figure out how planes fly, high-five yourself and then let us know! ✈️
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