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I read an article that came in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review named “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity” containing a sentence that I’m not sure if Ed Catmull, the author, was the one who said it or not, but I really think it’s true.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.

I agree that it’s not about good ideas but about the people, talented people. Be sure to surround yourself with them.

On Wednesday I received my July copy of Communications of the ACM and I have to say that it looks nice, and new! The content has always been very good, but now the feeling is like you really have in your hands a magazine that features and talks about the latest and greatest.

Kudos to the team that produces the magazine! Well done!

I have been very interested lately in articles, studies, etc., about Virtual Teams scattered in different locations throughout the world and their interaction. Primarily because I’m in one Global Virtual Team since several years ago working on the development and support of IBM Lotus Domino for System i (including QuickPlace, Quickr, Sametime, Domino Document Manager, etc.).

Recently I found the link to this white paper titled New Methods for Studying Global Virtual Teams: Towards a Multi-Faceted Approach where one of the different findings, not surprisingly, was that of trust. This same issue of trust is something that we know happens also between people in a team working in the same place.

Communication and collaboration tools are critical to the success of a project, and thus every member of a team needs to be educated so that he or she can make effective use of the tool at hand.

I don’t remember where I found the link, but anyways I wanted to share it here.

I just finished hearing episode 27 of the No Agenda podcast and the stuff about China is pretty interesting. Worth a look.

Some time ago I read Andrew McAfee’s article “The Ties that Find” where he cites a really good article created in 1973 by Mark S. Granovetter called “The Strength of Weak Ties“. I didn’t have the chance at that time to read the article but, some weeks ago I decided to read it and I have to say that now I understand more clearly the real impact that the current social software makes in all aspects of our day to day activities, and more importantly for us knowledge workers who depend on finding the right people at the right time to be able to solve whatever the problem we’re faced with.

Definitely a good read; and by the looks of it, seems that there are a few other interesting papers in there, hope to have time later to check them out.

For several months now I’ve been interested in topics related to the technology industry, and one of them is that there are not much women doing development for Operating Systems, Applications, networking or hardware stuff. So I have been in the lookout for information, articles actually, that talk about the different skills involved (intelligence, social, etc.).

I found this article that mentions a couple of things that I agree on:

• They are more collaborative
• Groups work much better when at least one woman is in the group. They bring a different perspective and viewpoint.

Just spot on! That’s what I have seen in my team for a couple of years now. You need different “forces” to maintain a good team.

In the DSC episode 697 it was mentioned and played an interesting video that not only applies to the U.S. but to the rest of the Earth population/nations also. You must look at it, it’s The Story of Stuff.

Here’s some interesting stuff I’ve been hearing and reading lately, mostly heard on the Daily Source Code, tech5 and No Agenda podcasts which I really like.

First thing that [doesn’t] surprises me is that Microsoft won, again, a first place. This time because of Windows Vista being the Most Disappointing Product of 2007, I must say… Well deserved guys!
Did you notice how many Microsoft and Apple products are on the list?

Looks like HP paid Staples $100 million dollars to not sell inexpensive third-party ink cartridges. As John C Dvorak said, how many they’re doing from just ink? (FYI: a considerable portion of the company’s profits come from ink.) Ink definitely is overpriced. This makes me think about another company that pays to make its bad operating system be installed instead of Linux, although it isn’t working too well, right?

Another interesting tidbit is that the Intel Viiv initiative is officially dead. Hmm, I never heard about it before, could that be the cause?

And a non techy thing is that the U.S. actually “outsources” (sort of) the army (Blackwater) and jails (for example, this one) where by the way, people are put in prison even when they shouldn’t be there, but since these private companies may charge the government per “capita” then you know what that means, right? Go check the interesting commentary of it on the No Agenda podcast episodes 3 and 4.
Weird use of taxes.

I just finished seeing two very good videos on IET.TV. The first one is a lecture from Grady Booch on The Promise, The Limits, and the Beauty of Software. The second one is another lecture, this time given by Roo Reynolds, with the name of Walking the Digital Dog - Work, Learn and Play in Virtual Worlds.

Definitely you should not miss them!

One strange thing is that the webcasts doesn’t show up when using Firefox, I had to use IE.

If you have seen the “Mainframe: Art of the Sale” videos months ago, I recommend you go here and check the new series of videos. Lesson four was hilarious!