Yesterday I visited Marketenderiet, a seriously hip meeting- and event venue in Copenhagen. On one of the walls, I saw this wonderful painting of a chicken with a shark fin strapped on it’s back.
Which immediately reminded me of the corresponding cast iron sculpture I saw at the Danish National Art Museum a while back. That just HAS to be the same artist.
Great art! And it made me laugh :o)
Does it matter whether IT people have fun at work? Autrijus Tang thinks it does, so when he set up the Pugs Open Source project, he had an explicit goal: Optimize for fun. The results are clear: More people get involved in the project, their work is of a high standard and they’re more creative.
Of course, this should come as no surprise. As any cognitive science expert will tell you, fun is a great way to focus the mind. Developers that aren’t enjoying themselves will slow down, write buggy code, make poor decisions, and eventually leave the project (even one that pays). Conversely, rampant fun will bring coders in droves, and give them a passion for their work that shows in quality, quantity, and goodwill. It’s a pretty good bet that optimizing for fun will produce a better product than almost any other method.
Here are the main thoughts of Autrijus on the subject (translated from geek-speak – sometimes it pays, having been a geek myself):
* Make fun your primary goal
* Embrace anarchy
* Avoid deadlocks
* Cast responsibility far and wide
* Working code is more fun than mere ideas
* Build a rich, supportive community
* Excitement and learning are infectious
Damn, that guy’s good!
What a weird and wonderful idea: A daily planner spanning not one year but 82 years – the average life expectancy of people in the western world. Look how thick that thing is! So what exactly is it you don’t have time for?
Via Kottke who went to a design conference and saw a presentation by Stefan Sagmeister on happines and design, which included the following excellent life advice:
* everything i do always comes back to me
* trying to look good limits my life
* everybody thinks they are right
* money does not make me happy
* thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now
* complaining is silly. act or forget
* having guts always works out for me
Traci Fenton of Worldblu wrote to remind us all that:
We’re now about six weeks away from the launch of THE WORLDBLU FORUM in Washington, DC, October 26-29th!
The theme
Rewriting the Rules of Business for a Democratic AgeThe big idea
Organizational democracy and freedom-centered leadership and what it means to YOUThe take-aways
HOW organizational democracy can recharge your company
WHY freedom-centered leadership matters
WHAT tools and skills you need to outsmart your competition and get in front of the business shiftThe speakers
Everyone from CEOs to best-selling authors, technology gurus to high-stake revolutionaries, former prime ministers to movie producers (see list)The audience
Dynamic thought-leaders from around the worldThe setting
Washington, DC?s only five-star hotel, the stunning Mandarin Oriental. Situated in the heart of Washington DC?s monuments and museums, the hotel offers breathtaking views overlooking the Potomac Tidal Basin, Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument. This urban resort features elegantly hip guest rooms, a 10,400-square-foot spa and fitness facility with indoor pool, and the award-winning CityZen and Caf? MoZU restaurant. (I just had lunch at Caf? MoZU last week; it was outstanding.)The updated program
http://worldblu.com/forum/program.html Nutritious and delicious!You can register here
http://worldblu.com/forum/registration.htmlThanks to everyone for spreading the word. The response has been fantastic and I can?t wait to see you all in October!
I’m going. Are you going? If you’re going from Denmark, we’re organizing a trip to make it real easy for you.
Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure. The paradox of hedonism is that, pursuing pleasure or happiness for it’s own sake doesn’t seem to make people happy while pursuing worthwhile goals outside of yourself seems to bring about happiness and pleasure as a side effect.
Interesting, huh?
This article by Pat Kane on the play ethic is one of the most inspiring, electrifying and just wonderful manifestos for play, fun and happiness at work. My biggest problem in blogging it was to choose a quote from it because the whole damn thing is eminently quotable. Here’s an appetizer:
Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take ‘play’ to mean anything idle, wasteful or frivolous. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic’s most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is ‘play’ as the great philosophers understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.
The play ethic is about having the confidence to be spontaneous, creative and empathetic across every area of you life – in relationships, in the community, in your cultural life, as well as paid employment. It’s about placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world.
…
So to call yourself a ‘player’, rather than a ‘worker’, is to immediately widen your conception of who you are and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realising your full human potential; to be active, not passive.
Now go read the whole thing :o) His book The Play Ethic is on it’s way from Amazon to me.
Here’s a batch of Open Source Software news:
Open Source leader Eric S. Raymond got offered a job at Microsoft. His answer is classic:
…I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997. You’ve maybe heard about this “open source” thing? You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in. But don’t think I’m trying to destroy your company. Oh, no; I’d be just as determined to do in any other proprietary-software monopoly, and the community I helped found is well on its way to accomplishing that goal.
Gartner Group says Linux is only 5 years away from mainstream use:
Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005…
And governments are starting to get it too:
In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation. …the spread of open-source software in recent years has probably been the most striking example of the benefits of openly sharing information technology to reduce costs and make it easier for users themselves to innovate.
Yaaaay!
Funny parody of a consulting company website:
Our creative team will come up with design and marketing ideas you never even thought of. How could you? You don’t have the talent we do. Don’t take it personally. That’s our job. That’s what we do. We do stuff.
Most consulting companies just provide regular marketing solutions. Not us. We provide groundbreaking solutions. Our marketing solutions are newer than anyone else’s, and they sound better because we give them cool titles like “Global Awareness Paradigms,” and “Market Consciousness Philosophies,” and “Creative Product Re-development Support.”
When we deliver your new designs and business strategies to you, they’ll be in really snazzy binders that look nice sitting on big, round meeting tables, so you’ll think you got your money’s worth. When your project has been completed, we’ll give you several follow-up phone calls to give the appearance that we even remember who you are or what we sold you.
From huhcorp.com.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away
– Philip K. Dick
That definition works for me :o)
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