Tag Archives: management

How the people of CERN work »

October 4th, 2012

Jeremy Keith, after visiting CERN in Switzerland:

“According to most established social and economic theory, nothing should ever get done at CERN. It’s a collection of thousands of physics nerds—a mixture of theorists (the ones with blackboards) and experimentalists (the ones with computers). When someone wants to get something done, they present their ideas and ask for help from anyone with specific fields of expertise. Those people, if they like the sound of the idea, say “Okay” and a new collaboration is born.”

I love this way of working. It reminds me a lot of how Valve works and also how this little team is being set up.

Using Dropbox as a photo management app »

September 17th, 2012

This is intriguing. Stephen Hacket took a que from Frederico Viticci on ditching iPhoto/Aperture and just using directories stored on Dropbox as a way to manage photos.

After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over iPhoto just for the organization in to projects.

Suffer is exactly the right word. Using my Macbook Pro without an SSD with Aperture is really an exercise in frustration. Even if I create brand new libraries for each month of photos that I take it is still entirely too slow to be useful. Closing Aperture takes about 8 minutes. And I’m with Hackett. I only use Aperature to easily manage/find photos later on. But clearly it isn’t working for me.

In fact, iPhoto and Aperture have the opposite effect on me. Rather than making it easier to manage and edit photos it is actually much, much harder. So much harder that I’ve taken less and less photos with my DSLR over the last few years. In spite of really wanting to take more and more.

I’m going to do a little more research into the method that these two have laid out but I’m going to consider ditching photo manager applications for a straight directory structure.

/via Stephen Hackett.

Management as administration

April 13th, 2012

Joel Spolsky guest-posting on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog about The Management Team:

This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”

Precisely.