Kallokain

  …that the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible productivity of the men and machines of the establishments— that is, when each man and each machine are turning out the largest possible output. — The Principles of Scientific Management , by Frederick Taylor, 1911. The 20th century was a century of economic growth and technological development never seen before in the history of humanity. A significant part of the credit for this has to go to Frederick Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911. Taylor laid down the basic principles of mass production. The ideas worked well for many years, but there were hidden problems. One thing that happened, because the idea was that each worker and each machine should produce as much as possible as much of the time as possible, was that parts tended to pile up, everywhere. Different people, and different machines, doing different things, produce things at different rat...

Recently, I put my foot in my mouth while tweeting. This turned out to be a good thing, not only because it was an amazing feat of dexterity considering my age and body mass, but also because it lead to an interesting conversation, and thus, an opportunity to think things through, and to learn. I won’t recapitulate the whole conversation in this blog post, because you can easily look it up on Twitter . I’ll provide the tweet that kicked the discussion off though, and give you the gist of the conversation. I have invited everyone who was involved to read and review this blog post, so if I screw anything up, they can jump in and unscrew it again. It started with me tweeting:  That started up a conversation with Henrik Berglund and Beatric During. It did not take many tweets until I wrote: “There are plenty of things where SAFe has a very shallow implementation of important ideas. For example, they borrowed the idea of PI planning from Reinertsen, but ignored the limitations h...

Chrononauts V: Taking Flight by Henrik Mårtensson It's early in 2020, and I think it is appropriate to make a personal retrospective of the year that was. I am not quite as certain it is appropriate to publish said retrospective, but then again, if I decide not to publish it, I'll probably never get around to writing it. For me, 2019 has been a very good year, both privately, and at work. Let's get the personal stuff out of the way first. I haven't blogged much in this blog, but that is mainly because I have been busy, with work, and with other things. My hobbies, like digital art, may not seem to have much to do with my work on process and organization improvement, or my forages into Scrummastery, but actually they do. Almost everyone I know who is a really good software developer, or leader, or manager, does have some sort of interest in creative arts. Some play instruments or sing, others write, draw, are into photography, or some other creative activity...

I try to apply the principles I advocate not only in large things, but also in small. My business cards are a good example. When we design something, we need to consider the purpose of the thing we design. The purpose of my business card is to: • make it easy to contact me • make me memorable • make the card holder want to contact me The first item is easy. The contact information on my business card is no different from that of any other business card: Name, occupation, and contact info. I have stacks of business cards I've got from people I've met, whose faces I don't remember. I often take a snapshot with a camera when I meet someone for the first time, and add the picture to the address book in my computer. This is a bit of a hassle, so it was a pretty obvious idea to add a picture of myself to the card. I chose a picture of me when I am working. The idea is to show that I do work if you hire me. (The picture also shows that I drink tea while working, but I hope that do...