Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

I first read this book about 10 years ago. Re-read recently it to refresh my memory of some of the core concepts expounded by the authors – as it is very topical for the company, where we are at presently, and with several important decisions to be made.

1)  Binary Review

This one is a pretty easy read, with good insights (and many anecdotes).

The Book	What we thought
“Positioning – the battle for your mind” by Al Ries & Jack Trout	Very topical for us

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The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Book	What we thought
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell offers a compelling theory into what makes ideas, products, fashion trends, crime waves, or in fact any phenomena in society, transform into wide spread epidemics within a short amount of time. For example, Gladwell explained how the American Revolution was started literally overnight by one man on horseback spreading the news across the country that the British were coming.

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The self-made man and his rags-to-riches struggle is often glorified in our society, especially in Australia.  The most endearing is the story of Donald Bradman: his relentless practise with a cricket stump and golf ball leads to one of the most illustrious careers in sporting history.

The Don is a perfect example of an outlier.  His batting average is a freakish 4.4 standard deviations above the mean, a statistical anomaly that hoists his success well above any other sporting hero. Michael Jordan has nothing on Donald Bradman.

The story of The Don is also typical of an outlier.  He emerged from Australian bush leagues to make a lasting mark on international cricket.  His habit of hitting a golf ball against a water tank has become part of Australian lore.  We attribute The Don’s success to the hard work he put in as a youth - he is self-made. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that there is much more to success than a bit of hard yakka.
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Perhaps a year ago, we bought our first copy of this book. One of the guys read it then, and highly recommended that we get a number of copies such that everyone in the office could read (alas no book review online then).

We did this, and a number of others did read the book – giving similarly rave reviews.  Coincidentally, they commenced a software development project (our “UPIP project”) with the “lessons learnt” still fresh in their mind.

However, the wheels fell off – leading to the UPIP project being canned indefinitely.  This was one of the major triggers for me to instigate our Autopsy 1 process, which continued into the Autopsy 2 process, my stipulation that we were going to go Agile, and the commencement of our process for looking for our Chief Software Engineer.

Note that there is plenty more we can learn from the many things that went wrong in the UPIP project – with a view to improving ourselves for the future.  When I find the time, I will post a more detailed retrospective as a restricted post, just about that project.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand that we had significant shortcomings that were the root cause of our calamity.  For instance, it became clear through this process that our team collectively had no major project management experience – hence a read of a single book (no matter how good) was not going to make them competent (especially with respect to a complex project).

However I did wonder how a project to could go significantly off the rails (and in the early stages) so soon after a number of people had read, and raved about, this book. read more »