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Nerds are fucking funny. It’s another point from The Nerd Handbook that I suggest is related to the relevancy engine, but I never explain. Let’s try now.

  

The processing of relevancy has three steps and it’s the third where the magic happens:

  
 
1. Collect the Relevant
2. Research and Index if necessary
3. Connect the Relevant in Efficient and Entertaining Ways
 
  

So, how is The Funny created in this flow? It’s a big question: what is funny? I’d say there are two big classifications of funny. There are jokes and there’s wit. Jokes are memorized comedy retold with moxy. Wit is original comedy created in real-time and delivered with precise timing. Nerds are fucking witty because they connect the relevant to the present quickly and in clever ways.

Read Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Don't think about hiring someone into this role until you've done it successfully for your company first.

How is the readme so different from the sprint's user stories? Working from the desired end docs looks like another version of the currently fashionable "pull" methods. Not a bad one for a particular kind of project though.

Over the next few months, we are going to be rolling out a new release process to accelerate the pace at which Google Chrome stable releases become available. Running under ideal conditions, we will be looking to release a new stable version about once every six weeks, roughly twice as often as we do today.


So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time:
• Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
• Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
• Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release

So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time:
• Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
• Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope
• Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release
The first goal is fairly straightforward, given our pace of development. We have new features coming out all the time and do not want users to have to wait months before they can use them. While pace is important to us, we are all committed to maintaining high quality releases — if a feature is not ready, it will not ship in a stable release.

This is sort of schizophrenic experience for me because almost always I have two different pictures of the same thing. I see senior managers praising people who are disrespected by their teams. I see folks who get credited for the work they didn’t do. I see line workers being completely frustrated while their managers are saying these guys are highly motivated. I see managers completely surprised when people suddenly leave while almost everyone saw that coming for past half a year.

I see it and I don’t get it. All these managers do very little, if anything, to learn a bit about their people but they claim they know everything. I may be wrong but I believe I do much more to learn about my team, yet I still consider I know nothing.

Tick-tock in action

Year 1: First the "Tick"

Intel delivers new silicon process technology, dramatically increasing transistor density while enhancing performance and energy efficiency within a smaller, more refined version of our existing microarchitecture.

Year 2: Then the "Tock"

Intel delivers entirely new processor microarchitecture to optimize the value of the increased number of transistors and technology updates now available.

A huge driver of employee engagement is a psychological principle called "locus of control" - the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them.  Increasing your employees' belief (and reality) that they have control over the outcomes will increase their desire to make changes and increase their engagement with the change.

Don't take HR's word for it... Your people aren't afraid of change - they're afraid of you trying to change them!

Three key goals of people at work
  To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work—and then satisfy those goals:

 
•   Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security. 
•   Achievement: To be proud of one's job, accomplishments, and employer. 
•   Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees. 

As a business owner, when you get screwed-over by someone, it's tempting to make a big grand policy you think will prevent you from ever getting screwed-over again. 

 One employee can't focus, and spends their time surfing the 'net. Instead of just firing or reassigning that person to more challenging work, the company installs an expensive content-approving firewall so that nobody can go to unapproved sites ever again. 

 One thief used a stolen credit card to make a purchase. Instead of acknowledging that was one out of 100,000 honest orders, the company makes all future customers fax a copy of their card and ID and wait days for verification. 

 It's important to resist that simplistic, angry, reactionary urge to punish everyone, and step back to look at the big picture.