www.nickhodge.com

Watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” last night.

The doc­u­ment­ary was not as in-depth as the book: detail­ing the “mark to mar­ket” and “off-balance sheet entit­ies” cre­ated by the man­age­ment of Enron. The impact of the res­ult­ing US Law named Sarbanes-Oxley made fin­an­cial aud­it­ors more respons­ible and power­ful within organ­isa­tions; and per­son­ally changed my last 3–4 years at Adobe. Paper­work and legal city.Thanks to tech­no­logy, you are able to do some fil­ter­ing through 500,000 of Enron’s emails from 1999 to 2002. (link thanks to Andrew Smith). Just like look­ing through someone’s trash, there are few dia­monds amongst the organ­isa­tional announce­ments and spam.

Suc­cess does not equal Man­age­ment.

eknow­ledger lists the top 10 stress­ful pro­fes­sions. IT is top of the list.

Bad Man­age­ment seems to be also a bug bear.

Joel on Soft­ware, one of the top ten blogs on the web fol­lows the life and tribu­la­tions of CEO Joel Spol­sky and his com­pany, Fog Creek Soft­ware.

The movie/DVD, Pro­ject Aard­vark, 12 Weeks with Geeks is an excel­lent view into a mod­ern soft­ware com­pany as you fol­low interns through the cre­ation and release of Fog Creek Copi­lot.

In recent days, Joel has been over-simplifying man­age­ment into what I clas­sify as the push, pull and mingle methods:

Push: Com­mand and Control

Pull: Econ 101

Mingle: The Iden­tity Man­age­ment Method

What Joel hasn’t talked about is Leadership.

In truth, good man­agers are using a com­bin­a­tion of all three of these all of the time. Man­aging and motiv­at­ing employ­ees is one of the most dif­fi­cult skills to learn. Once mastered, you are leading.

More week­end read­ing: The Skep­tics Dic­tion­ary. For instance, were the Druids in Celtic times purely the nerds of a highly warrior-oriented com­munity? Any why when I think druids, I make a men­tal con­nec­tion to Spinal Tap?

Inter­est­ingly, Grace Hop­per is accred­ited with the quote “It is always easier to ask for­give­ness than it is to get permission.”

Man­age­ment zen phrase of the day: Ideas are easy, imple­ment­a­tion is hard.