Yesterday I had the good fortune to have a chat with Woody Zuill over Skype. I was a really nice hour that just flew by, where we exchanged stories, ideas and had a few laughs.

Let me, as a side note, just say that I love that; just exchanging stories with people. I always learn new stuff and quite often stories from my own experience pop back into my memory. This is the best part of conferences - meeting, interacting with others. That’s what I miss the most, being a little sidestepped here in Indonesia. Praise the Lord for Skype and Twitter… ah well for the Internet too (although I’m not entirely sure He had any hands-on action on either of those inventions).

I just thought I summarize some of the things that I took away with me from our conversation.

It was never about the estimates,...

Source: Amazon

I’ve just concluded a vacation during which I had time to build a lot of Lego with my sons. That’s really a lot of fun and very developmental for the kids, I noticed. With my oldest, Albert, we had much fun following the instructions and building the house to the left. My other sons prefer to build something that just comes up with the pieces they have in hand.

After spending a couple of hours with Albert, I started to recognize the personality that Lego building brought forth in me; this was coaching-Marcus talking.

I think this is a really good exercise, and in this short post, I’ll show you a couple of things that I noticed and that were very eye-opening for me.

How to Run This Exercise

The whole thing is quite simple. Get a Lego model that you...

The last couple of days I have enjoyed the speed and easy-going-flow that Node, KoaJs and Heroku gives me. It’s truly blows me away and I have been tweeting stuff like:

Once @heroku tool belt is set up the first time deployment is SILLY simple. I’m talking 20 seconds, including #mongodb provisioning #amazed — Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 18, 2014

and

Again: From idea (we should put this into prod now) to complete: 25 min. #koaJs #heroku #nodejs Like last time: http://t.co/GSvpuV4xsA — Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 18, 2014

But… In one regard I have lied. I told Woody Zuill (friend and role model) that I could push to production with a single command. While that was true the command (git push heroku master) did just that....

I’m a programmer. But I, for some strange reason, often find myself doing management consulting on different levels. Since my basic schooling is in programming I sometimes often find myself using principles that work well for programming in management.

One such principle was something I picked up about 10 years ago and I’m still reaching for that every day. Here’s my current desktop background, showing that principle to me every day:

This is a so-called truism that nobody says again, but I fail to reach just about all the time. I find it very useful as a guiding north star both in organizations and programming. But what does it really mean?

I have the good fortune to coach some managers in my current position and today we got to talk about that statement above with one of them. She obviously bought into that, as do...

A couple of days ago I had a great experience in why a modular framework is a great thing, that I wanted to share in this blog post. You will follow the EXACT path of my thinking. Yes, it might scare you but… it will not take very long.

Before we start, I’m sure theres a number of times when a very modular framework, like Koa Js and NancyFx for example, might be bad too - but for the most part I think my experience is the most common one.

In my current job, management consulting for the Salvation Army hospitals in Indonesia, we have seen the need to do a quick poll. Simple questions like: “What did you like your stay?”, “Are you happy at work?” or “How was your meal?”. So I built a very simple little application, using Koa Js and called it KoaVote....

A couple of days ago I learned about the 7 Levels of Delegation in the Management 3.0 book by Jürgen Appelo.

The last level of delegation (aptly named Delegate) is defined as:

You leave the decision to them and you don’t even want to know about details that would just clutter your brain.

Yes, that. Give someone a responsibility and then step away. Today I got the opportunity to talk with a manager that has a tendency to micromanage a lot, and we came up with a conversation template that I think was worth remembering.

I told her that she needed to delegate an area of responsibility to a manager of one of her departments. And I introduced her to the definition above. Because she’s really involved in almost everything that happens in the company right now. And a lot of the tasks depend on and...

There’s no secret that I like the writings (and presentations) of Captain David Marquet. If you haven’t seen this video do that instead of reading this. It changes a whole lot about how I look at leadership.

One of the best tips in the book is the small imperative sentence:

Move the authority to the information!

However, often when I explain this to people and clients I often end up adding the opposite to this sentence. From that, I got some interesting conversations going. Let’s see if I can explain what I mean here.

With the added continuation (that, to my recollection, is not in the book) would make the quote like this:

Move the authority to the information instead of the opposite; move the information to the authority.

What caught my attention was how much time, money,...

When I was a kid (and teenager… oh, well still today too) I messed up a lot. I forgot things or did them in a stupid order and all of a sudden I was in an emergency. For example, I forgot that I should be in a rehearsal 1 hour away and here I was in my home, 2 hours from the rehearsal room.

Quite often in those situation someone, my parents predominantly, of course enlighten me about how stupid this was and gave helpful advice on what I should have done instead in order to not ended up here.

This made me very mad a little upset, since those advice didn’t improve my situation one bit. I often “told” them (talk about re-writing history) about the futility of these tips at this point.

Years after, in my twenties I found support from one of the...

Walking my oldest son, Albert, to and from school is one of the highlights of the day here in Indonesia. At least when he’s in a good mood. Today was not one of those days. He was angry because something didn’t turn out as he planned. He very often does that: makes up his mind about what we should do (often involving TV or games) and then gets very upset when it doesn’t happen the way he wanted.

I tried to talk with him about that and in doing so I had a little epiphany about me, the IT industry, estimates, and uncertainty. Oh, I should probably add that I re-watched this great presentation by Dan North two days before. It probably affected me, to maybe be wiser than I otherwise would.

Here’s what I said to Albert:

Albert, you know what...

I recently ran into a concrete example on waiting that showed me, again, why it’s bad. And how easy the alternative is.

At one of our facilities the cleaning has long been neglected. It was super-dirty in places and you could see that no one had clean here for months, maybe even years. A rescue operation was put into place and in just 5 days the facility was cleaned. About 15 people was engaged in the effort.

That’s really awesome because not only is the cleaning done, but the next time we clean it will not take as much time.

In this post I wanted to share some thoughts on how this is general and what we can do to avoid this situation.

To explain what just happened to the people in the room I drew this diagram on the whiteboard:

We talked for awhile...