Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Brainless Strategies

Today I listened Steve Pavlina's podcast "Kick-Start Your Own Business". He landed on the point witch I was molding over for a while. Why we smart intelligent egg-heads are soooooo slow and behind when it comes making business? I think it is because we tend to overcomplicate things. We look for universal solutions, for effective processes, and we spend so much time to do things right that no time is left to actually do anything.

Steve's recipee is to come up with a brainless strategy and execute on it.

Brainless strategies don't live well in software organizations.
I see it over and over in software companies. Too many smart people make too many things too complicatedd. It begins with programmers overengineering their software. It continues with managers who overcomplicate their organization processes.

French River Straigt Street

When organization encounter a problem, the incstinctive question is often "how are we going to resolve such problems in the future". Meetings are called, responcibilities are defined, the process is documented and put in place, resulting in more meetings and more documents, all to ensure that if eventually this problem comes again we are armed to solve it a little more effecively.
Sometimes solving a problem is all what you need. So brainless: just do it, and as soon as it is solved, great! May be it is not the most efficient way of solving it. But it doesn't steal time of a few smart high-paid people for defining and documenting a process. It doesn't leave that process burden that organization is doomed to maintain to the end of the time. Just get the damn problem solved!

I'd think smart people don't need a disclaimer, but practice shows that we love to get things wrong. So here it is, disclaimer. No silver bullets. No absolute statements. Often times process is necessary. Often times they pay off. We all know it. Let's just watch out.

Catch youself next time you'll be asking "how are we going to resolve such problems in the future". Pause and think. The brainless strategy of "just do it" may be all what you need.

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