I am reading a book by Garteh Morgan called “Images of Organization” - the central idea behind this book is that we view organization from various views/metaphors, such as burocratic organization, organization as living organism and etc. And I especially liked this statement about rules in organization when viewing it from Organization as Political System metaphor: “… What is the real significance of the rules? Although their formal purpose may be to protect employees, customers, or the public at large, they alo are there to protect their creators…”. How often we observe the situation when some accident has occurred and a special commission, assigned to investigate this accident, makes conclusion that it happened because of broken rules. But, the point is, “… that broken rules that accompany that accident have often been broken thousands of times before as part of normal work practice, since normal work is IMPOSSIBLE without breaking the rules..”. Morgan is damn true, we may successfully manage projects without all those GPs and SPs of CMMI, but if we fail the project - audit team is the first to tell us that this happened because rules were broken…

I really recommend everyone to ready Morgan’s book!

Hi everyone! I have just spent wonderful week of vacation with my classmates. I haven’t seen them for 10 years and they have vissited me here in Moscow :)) It was really great to talk about our school life, the way we joked, played & etc. We have decided to do it annually, make it a-la “Classmates Olympiad” and we will held this olympiad in each classmates current hometown. The 2008 olympiad willl be in St. Petersburg We even plan to design a logo of current Moscow olympiad and do the same for each olympiad in future. We have even found our teacher who taught us first 3 years of our school life!

One of the problems I face when working with maintenance projects is that developed system loses its system characteristics. I mean, when maintaining systems, developers fix bugs, implement new functionality but do not think about overall system - this leads to not usable user interface, custom (non-standard) implementations of some modules & etc.

System has to be consistent - and consistency is the problem I usually face on maintenance projects

Check out this link (thanks to Guy Kawasaki): “Should You Start Your Own Work at Home Business?”

Would you like to analyze WWW for a particular word (company name, issue, interesting topci) and have a visual map representing most popular sites describing this word?

 If yes, then try out Issue Crawler (http://www.issuecrawler.net) - it allows you such things.

Check out the map generated for “System Dynamics”

US has started campaign against products made in China. I don’t think that this is right from ethical point of view, but what opportunities does it provide to other countries?

I think Russia and other BRI (without China :)) countries may try to benefit from this - any ideas?

Thanks to my friend Maria for this funny link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bK63uSTTNs 

Outlook 2007 - Key Features (Russian)- This PPT describes the Outlook 2007 features I find most useful.

What is the most obvious way to set a sound tone for an incoming SMS?

 My first impression was - the same as with melodies, you just find your tone in phone file manager, click “Options” — and that’s it!

Well, I was wrong. And I and my friend spent like 10 mins to understand that it should be set from “Profiles”… ughh.. usability rules :))

Frankly, I really like Nokia and its menu, but such simple feature was not provided. Even more, the more sms I send and receive, the more personalization I need - I don’t understand why I can’t set a personalized sound tone for incomins SMS

This movie is great and the idea I talked about in “Virtual Reality to Improve Performance” post is used in this movie! 4 guys (one marketer + 3 geniuses) invented a computer without the keyboard and monitor and which costs only 99$. I really recommend this one to all!

Another idea used there: “everything genius is simple”.