I recently needed to print a map of a small town in germany to fill up a wall and used this tool. You set the area you want, it takes the map data from open street maps, then if formats it into separate sheets and creates a pdf for you to download and print. The hardest part is cutting the pieces of paper and sticking them together. Apart from that it’s awesome!

Try it here : mapsomatic.

Also not a bad team building exercise, if you have a really big one to stick together…

Success is not the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

It’s origin’s aren’t 100% confirmed, but I saw this quote on my recent travels and it struck a chord with me.

“The secret to building large apps is never build large apps. Break your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application” -
Justin Meyer, author JavaScriptMVC

It made me think the same is true of organisations, so to riff on the original:

“The secret to building large organisations is to never build large organisations. Create or break your organisation into small pieces. Then, teach those small bite-sized pieces to self organise into one large emergent agile whole.” - Simon Kenyon Shepard

Don’t get me wrong now, feedback is important, every parent knows that there are some circumstances where you have to use corrective feedback to stop a child hurting itself or hurting something else, but these cases are the exception not the rule.

If you are a CEO and you need to be almost fired to realize you are doing something wrong then you need THERAPY not corrective feedback from the board. Most normal people should have the ability to survey the real sentiment to events and pick up when you are doing something wrong versus right. You don’t need to be hauled in front of the board, just ask the person sat next to you - can you give me some feedback?

The problem with all these articles is that they lead to this image that a leader should be a mini-hitler, marching around giving orders, eviscerating people who don’t perform and setting people against each other in a display of darwinian primalism designed to get the best product ever made. The only thing this results in is a team of broken, fearful, demoralized employees and a leader wondering why his team isn’t working when he’s read all the latest articles on the web about leadership and corrective feedback.

Peter Senge has some more thoughts on what real leaders do best:

If you’re really interested in the relative value of collective feedback on your employees vs. other improvements in your company I suggest you read W.Edwards Deming’s “Out of the crisis” first.

1. Education
2. Health
3. Energy production
4. Tele-communications
5. Transport
6. Entertainment

Have I missed anything important? What do you think?

Deming questions.

Some of my favourites:

What actions cause fear? What keeps people from raising issues, proposing solutions, and working with others?

For educators, inspection is the Final Exam. At the end of the semester, it is too late to help the student. The only purpose for the Final is to decide which students are to be “rejects.”

When forging a team, stories are the the underlying anvil that supports the form taking it’s shape.

But why is this and what makes some stories result in a better outcome than others?

According to new research into strengthening the family unit, it turns out that there are underlying principles at work when story telling during family bonding.

The first core finding is the effect of having a heritage on children, it seems that heritage is more than just the older generation indulging in nonchalant reminiscing.

The study involving a scale based on some family history probing question of children, measured how much they knew about their parents and grandparents lives:

The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.

So the more your team knows about the history of your product, infrastructure, company, people the more likely they are to be able to weather the stresses and strains of modern corporate life.

The insight doesn’t end there however. Further details show there is a specific type of story telling that’s most effective in giving people a head start in stress control.

Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.

It seems that a balanced story, in both positive and negative, are the most effective in translating to a healthy approach to problems, somewhat similar to the Hero’s story style of Hollywood screen writing.

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. but times were tough…

So it seems that a bias to overly negative or overly positive story telling, is not as good as telling a story of overcoming adversity. Which, when you think about it is the challenge that will most of your team is likely to face in modern lanscape of work. The ability to resolve these types of issues being at the core of keeping your business moving.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment, about boot camps, at various large companies and scaling them in a Lean start-up fashion. For the research on stories, I think it’s clear that most companies should at the very least teach new employees about the history of the company to give them a chance to feel part of something larger.

Every day brings new victories, new adversity overcome and new rewards gained. Make sure you celebrate and tell those storys for the sake of generations to come.

Several year’s ago, I wrote a post about tablets coming to steal market share from smartphones, I was half right, but I missed the main target, which was netbooks.

Net books and laptops were really the main causality of the tablet not smartphones, they adapted by just getting a bit bigger.

Now, it’s happening again.

Things are changing but this time, the main casualty will be the humble desktop computer.

This christmas, I was fortunate enough to receive a (alright I admit, I asked specifically for it, alright I admit, I sent them the link to the web page, alright I admit, I ordered it myself…) a new Miniand MK802 PC. Android on a stick.

I didn’t have the greatest expectations, to be honest, I had read bad things, but I wanted to know if I could use it as a home server.

To my surprise, I could, it was actually quite easy, and it had some great capabilities that I did not expect.

So the question becomes, when this get’s popular - who needs a real PC for anymore? Gamers, perhaps, but not for long when OnLive figures it’s stuff out. Power graphics and video users. That’s it. Every normal person, every pleb, just gets a screen and a stick to carry round with them.

So what does this have to do with Dell? Well, they recently announced they are going back to being private, why? Well read this article :

Why Dell is going private.

Suddenly it makes sense, they’ve woken up to smell the coffee, microsoft have woken up to smell the coffee, everyone’s realizing the days of massive profits from consumer driven PC hardware sales are coming to an end.

The future is Pc’s on a stick and they are cheap as chips. Time to find another revenue source.