Looking for answers

While this blog contains everything around my professional concerns, I would like to give some feedback in the language of Shakespeare about two smart guys, the type of people who mix fun with quality. They are the "Bureau des guides de Canyoning" at Castellane (Verdon, France). Find here their web site and Facebook account . While twenty years ago, mountain climbing was the central fashionable activity in these gorges, today, there is a larger diversity of sports/activities proposed. Agrandir le plan Between the familly rafting and the steep cliff climbing, you can spend a half or full day in a ravine canyoning. As this is still a new activity, crazy people, without knowledge, could bring themselves, their friends or familly into a dangerous situation because they didn't evaluate the potential risks. As when making a simple trip in the mountain, without at least, reading the forecast, canyoning has several well known real diffuclties: Canyoning picked-up ma...

I'm a big fan of James Hamilton'blog (Perpective) , because his material has a high value. Before going through his posts, you may watch the following 20 minutes video from Velocity 2010 , where the most important technical trends of the Datacenter world are presented. His slides are available here and the last one provides links to all the important blog posts, he talks in his show. Enjoy. Sources: Perspectives : Perspectives - Velocity 2010

Dan Ariely uses classic visual illusions and his research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions. Source: Ted : Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

Update. I would like to congratulate Sir Brad Neuberg for the quality of the following HTML5 presentation. Due to the number of concepts presented in this video, I spent an hour gathering further details about these subjects. Please find here below, the links and summary, to plunge into the next dimension of the Internet content. Video timeline: - Technical History: 0 - Vector graphics: 6 -- SVG: 7:15 -- Canvas API: 10:15 - When Canvas or SVG : 17 - Video: 20:50 - Geolocation:27:25 - Application cache & database: 30:10 - Web Workers: 35:50 Update: Brad's slides are availabe here (PDF) . If you want to test the demos, help yourself. Humm, first of all, make sure you have a modern browser (e.g Firefox 3.5) : Vector graphic - 1st person gifter : walk in the game using your keyboard arrow keys, - SVG Web Toolkit : Animated Population Pyramid, - Bespin : web code editor. For further explanation watch the mozilla team at Qcon London 2009, uell : Ger...

For the last 20 years, many industries have been trying to apply Toyota's concepts to their fields of activity.  Based on Scott Killen agile's antecedents and a few other readings, I would like to built a sort of timeline up to the after agile/lean movement. Please add comments and recommencations. From the beginning. Anything from the ancient world? 1785 , Honoré Blanc , Mass production is beleived to be Eli Whitney's invention, but in fact he borrowed the concept from a gunsmith named Honoré Blanc. See, The investor's guide to nanotechnology & micromachines and Implementing Lean Software Development. 1866 , Samuel Smiles : Self Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance. First edition 1859 (see wikipedia) . Why ? In The Toyota way (Jeffrey K. Liker) : Sakishi toyoda was significantly influenced by his reading of a book first published in England in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor : The Principles of Sc...

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: One: Those 20th century rewards those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. I also recommend this second video from Dan Pink. It is short with a really clever white board drawing. History: 11/4/09 : First publish 05/29/10:  Add RSA video

Six months ago, I felt like I needed to step back from my current activity. It was time for me to ask others what they felt were the basic and reference books about product management. The result of the thread I initiated showed two books. One for a newbie and one as reference which receptively are: The Phenomenal Product Manager The Product Manager's Desk Reference After opening the delivery carton, I pulled out the books and held one in each hand. Their respected weight confirmed to me the one, I would read first. After reading the third chapter of the Phenomenal Product Manager, I told myself: "My god this is another book about leadership". By reading this book, I was looking for product management knowledge but here I found something that described how to collaborate with people. But I continued up to the end, because it is well written and also because its end was not so far. Despite my disappointment, I was astonished by the quality of each tip and I ...