I made the switch to a new blackberry. As I’m not a fan of calling my new “device” Pearl, I’d appreciate you referring to it as Earl thank you.

My main reasons for the switch? Smaller, lighter, and it’s just a new gadget to mess with.

Pleasant surprises? Trackball works very well. Data speed is significantly faster and makes browsing the web possible. The voice recognition software is just cool. When I noticed the voice stuff I assumed it was one of those train it to recognize my voice deals. Nope, push a button and say “call 9 6 7 1 1 1 1” and you’re dialing pizza pizza.

Stuff I can take or leave at this point? Camera, mp3 player. Maybe I’ll use those more down the road.

In a conversation with a client a few years back, they lamented the failing of their personal relationships with clients. They complained customers were no longer loyal, that personal relationships didn’t last.

I brought up the idea that maybe people are no less loyal today. In the past they viewed relationships as being between organizations when the truth is that organizations aren’t loyal or disloyal, organizations don’t have relationships. Those people had relationships with people in those organizations. Turnover within those companies has increased, making it rare that you’re dealing with the same individual over time thus making it difficult to maintain those personal relationships.

The client went on to blame some of these lost relationships, or failure to build new ones, on technology. They blamed the fact that they don’t see clients face to face as much or even talk on the phone. They tend to deal far more over email or messenger. Note that every person in the room from this client had a blackberry strapped to their waist and thumbed away at it during every break.

I asked why they used email and IM more and their response was that it’s faster. Some clients even demand communications over email. To me, this is yet another example of a non-decision controlling individuals. Whether they realize it or not they’ve decided to leverage other forms of communication over phone calls and face to face meetings. Why, because it’s perceived to be faster. Is there a tradeoff? Clearly there is, and it’s one they’re now complaining about but one that they either ignored or didn’t truly understand at the time.

I brought up the idea of banning IM and email within an office. Personally, I want my people to have every opportunity to get to know each other. The speed of these communication methods isn’t worth it to me. I want my people talking to each other as much as possible.

What about moving towards a process that says we always want to see the people we talk to? If I need to communicate with someone then here’s my ordered list of methods:

1. Talk face to face.
2. Talk on the phone.
3. Email or messenger, as a last resort.

If it’s at all possible to talk face to face then do that. No emailing a co-worker across the office, get up and go talk to them. If that’s not possible then move on the next, a phone call, etc… Do I always adhere to this? Not even close, it’s an ideal.

I’d have to wholeheartedly agree on Tim’s seven truths of good code…

“Good code, yes, has grace and beauty. But what makes it worthwhile is that it’s easy to work with. It’s easy to add to good code. It’s easy to take away. It’s easy to make changes. It’s easy to fix bugs. And bugs are rare. Good code does what you want it to, usually the first time. Good code is a joy, not a burden.”

“But the projects in trouble are those whose developers do not pursue good code. They may not even know good code. And they neither ask for counsel nor accept it.”

Oh, and good luck to Tim who recently quit his day job.

What’s below is verbatim from here…

Can absence make a team grow stronger? In 2002, NetAge teamed up with two business school professors to try to find out whether virtual teams really work. Harvard Business Review publishes the results this month as its Best Practice. We found that “far-flung” teams are more productive than their face-to-face counterparts if they keep three practices:

They exploit diversity. The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.

They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.

They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.

The place on the web for virtual work.
HBR article

“Among the changes she experienced for the first time was people emailing or IMing each other across the room. It’s no different from working at home, she concluded. And she’s considering doing exactly that.”

It’s true, I talk as much, or more, with project team members now that I work from home than I did in an office. Not only is working from home becoming more intimate with the tools available, including screen sharing, IM, voip, etc but a lot of office environments are becoming less intimate for the exact same reasons. Tools and technology will never build you a team or a community.

In the last office I worked, I used to love suggesting that we ban email and IM within the office. If you’re both in the office then you have to go talk with the person, or at least pick up the phone. I’m willing to sacrifice so-called productivity in order to build community.

I’ve spent years mouthing off about how important the systems and environment around a companies people are. I used to work the argument from the improvement angle, let’s improve our systems in order to get more out of our people. Stereotypical manager types are tough to convince of this and tend to take the ‘few bad apples’ approach to explaining away any problems.

Next I moved to the ‘give me your bad apples’ approach. Give me your supposed rejects and I’ll work the environment around them and shape them into A players. That still didn’t seem to convey the point.

Of late, I’ve landed on this one. Give me your A players, your superstars and let me run the environment around them. I guarantee you I can ruin your A team within months. Not only that, I promise to only use techniques that are published, acceptable HR techniques and practices within the world’s top 50 software companies.

All of the above are simply meant to illustrate that the talent myth is just that. Getting a company to allow me to prove it is another thing. Hey, this has TV show written all over it!

I had a chance to try again tonight with Firefox and I could see buttons that would allow me to give my money to Apple. Apparently flock is looking out for me and decided not to show me checkout buttons. I’m liking that browser more and more.

I’m sure all the kids in the orchard will be quick to let me know what I’ve done wrong. I was contemplating buying the new shuffle but I reach this screen and can’t figure out the next clickity click to point my mouse at. I don’t get it, do you have to buy two things? I’m no expert but you’d think it’d be simple to find the ‘give you my cash’ button.

Joel on management consultants. You have to read it all as the last sentence is worth the trip.

I should have known better than to get too excited about this until I tried it. Unfortunately all I’ve been able to get is errors.