Quotes from Scott Berkun

The trap is that even if you find a good metric that avoids the trap IBM fell into, people will naturally, even subconsciously, work to game the metric.

I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

You see a similar downward spiral at schools that try to measure teacher performance. They create new student tests for evaluating teachers that reduce time teachers have to teach real lessons, which lowers their scores, which, sad surprise, leads to more testing.

They don't have to be superhuman, or even particularly bright, to do this (as I've no doubt discovered). They just have to understand the advantage of their perspective and choose to make use of it.

Depending on anecdotal reports from users was a poor system. It'd be like running a restaurant where you waited for customers to complain about the food instead of tasting it ourselves before it left the kitchen.

Just as there is an advice paradox, there is a data paradox: no matter how much data you have, you still depend on your intuition for deciding how to interpret and then apply the data.

Beauty, inspiration, and pleasure are qualities that corporations hope customers find in their products, yet none are easily measured. If you want to explain the difference between Apple, BMW, and IKEA and Microsoft, Fiat, and Walmart, KPIs alone will not help you.

No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to "Be collaborative" or "Work as a team," if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.

Over time, creative masters learn to find, evaluate, and explore more combinations than other people. They get better at guessing which combinations will be more interesting, so their odds improve. They also learn there are patterns that can be used to develop new ideas.

somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility we're looking for: meaning. Depth of experience. Connection.

At the heart of the debate over how to overcome the challenges of shipping good things is an idea referenced in the title of Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar.1 The book, which is about observations on making software, raises a central question that is relevant to all work: Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

Toni Schneider used the term continuous deployment to describe the philosophy of endless small changes.

Technology does have an impact on behavior, but culture comes first.

Projects are complex non-linear systems and have significant inertia. If you wait to see acute problems before taking action, you will be too late and may make things worse.

Writers aren't the most well-adjusted people, and it's telling that our preferred means of interaction with civilization is throwing paragraph-shaped grenades at people from behind the safety of a laptop.

self-knowledge. You can't be productive as a creator if you're not paying attention to your own behavior and cultivating the unique wonder in this universe that is you.

E-mail empowers the sender. They can put in your inbox whatever they like

When there is a healthy system for recognizing, responding to, and learning from mistakes, over time fewer of them tend to happen

Some conversations need to be real time. Brainstorming and teaching

It's a great bullshit test of any boss who says, "X is important." If she doesn't match that statement with resources, she's incompetent, insincere, or both.

voices have more data. We get tons of information (humor, attitude, nuance) you can't get from text. When in doubt, go voice.

Some threads narrow to 2 people going back and forth, and they should get a room (email/Skype/hotel).

design the user interface first. This is a mandate at any organization that makes things people love to use.

But online, there is no way to calibrate. You never see the Skype chats you're not in. Remote work demands social proactivity. Some talented people find these freedoms overwhelming, preferring the structure of space and time that traditional offices provide.