Category Archives: Life

mini-cases: better to beg for forgiveness, part 1

Posted on September 20, 2010 by mark

This case is about a time I should have started a skunkworks. While the historical origin of the term “skunkworks” is lightly disputed (it most certainly references a comic strip called “Li’l Abner” and stems from military projects in the … Continue reading →

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mini-cases: support your core

Posted on September 13, 2010 by mark

The new content-management system was done, and we breathed a sigh of relief. We needed it to support our ambitions of providing even more specific content to our users, who came to our site for our well-informed professional recommendations in … Continue reading →

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mini-cases: things take time

Posted on September 10, 2010 by mark

My manager uttered a phrase that, to a software developer, was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying: “It’s time for an upgrade.” I was working for a company in the financial services sector; their core business involved a proprietary system for predicting … Continue reading →

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mini-cases: keeping the lights on

Posted on September 8, 2010 by mark

You know your job is in trouble when you can’t log on to the Internet, and the Internet Service Provider tells you that the bill hasn’t been paid in months. Such was my situation at a small government contracting company. … Continue reading →

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mini-cases: more movement means more mistakes

Posted on September 6, 2010 by mark

I used to have the power to email over 250,000 people at my fingertips. We weren’t spammers; far from it: we were publishing a successful newsletter to all those subscribers, and had quite a few who were actually paying for … Continue reading →

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mini-cases: taking stock

Posted on September 3, 2010 by mark

It’s not unusual that writers occasionally need to do fact checking on the stories they write, and when your “stories” consist of stock recommendations, it’s even more important to keep your ducks in a row. Such was the situation at … Continue reading →

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upcoming entries: mini-cases

Posted on September 2, 2010 by mark

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be doing a series of entries on my (attempted) usual MWF update schedule: Mini-Cases. In school, virtually every class used the “case method” of instruction, where we would use short narratives about business situations as … Continue reading →

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wait to decide

Posted on August 30, 2010 by mark

Today’s entry is late, which is appropriate, because it has to do with waiting to make decisions. There’s a school of thought that says to commit to a course of action as early as possible; this goes hand-in-hand with the … Continue reading →

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one trip to the buffet

Posted on August 27, 2010 by mark

A few weeks ago, I wrote an entry which touched on a phenomenon I call the “Buffet Paradox“, which prompted a question from my old friend Alan: Curious about your thoughts on avoiding the buffet approach to begin with. Ive … Continue reading →

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you can’t save the princess

Posted on August 23, 2010 by mark

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about goals. I think that a lot of that stems from working on a product that’s built solely to measure progress: one of the first parts of the implementation is talking through … Continue reading →

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