The Guardiola way

Y'all remember the del Bosque way?

Barcelona just won the football == soccer UEFA Champions League in the final against Manchester United.  It seems that everyone agrees that Barcelona is the best team in Europe, perhaps in a generation.

Barcelona's manager is Pep Guardiola, he's 40 years old, the youngest manager ever to win this title.

What is his management style?  In the interest of deliberate practice, we take a short pause to guess.  Then (Guardian article):  "impeccable, almost exaggerated politeness", "skills and simplicity", "intelligent", "flexible and resourceful", "he keeps going until he gets it right, no matter what he's doing".

Switch then to Barcelona, the club:

Eight of the team’s leading players are products of its football school, La Masia. That includes Mr Messi, an Argentine who moved to Barcelona as a boy, and the team’s coach, Josep (“Pep”) Guardiola. La Masia is unique among football schools. It is a boarding school that puts as much emphasis on character-training as on footballing skills. The students are relentlessly instructed in the importance of team spirit, self-sacrifice and perseverance. They are also taught that Barça is “more than a club”: it is the embodiment of Catalan pride that kept the region’s spirit alive during the years when Spain groaned under the fascist Franco regime. Fans regularly sport banners proclaiming that “Catalonia is not Spain”

Very simple lessons return from out of the noise; have a simple idea, be disciplined, build a team.  Beyond that, here and in other places, the organization and the leader are explicit about their purpose and their philosophy of work.

How to design and how to discuss

I really like this post by Linus Torvalds on the discussion about git and the default behavior of the git commit command:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/32843

I see these rich themes:

1. Get the concepts right, and understand them.  Proceed from the concepts and the rest of the design will fall out right. Then the argument for the default behavior of git commit is that the "[git commit] behaviour is absolutely REQUIRED once you get the whole "git tracks content" logic".
2. An argument that boils down to "I cannot imagine anyone doing that" is weak.  Linus calls this the "argument from incredulity".  Of course it disappears like mist in sunlight in the face of the counter-argument "The fact that you cannot see it doesn't change the fact that I use it all the time".

In a follow-up post, a classic:

I don't think people generally are all that stupid, and I think it's
actually counter-productive to try to basically lie about how things work.
It will just make it harder for people later.

Not a stinky product

From the very beginning, we have been inspired by the thinking of Corky St Clair, in "Waiting for Guffman":

Mr Guffman brings with him a reputation, something bigger than anyone in this town has ever known, and if I am to get back to New York City on my terms, I cannot deliver him a stinky product.

Teams, funny

I'm reading "The wisdom of teams" by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith.

The main pleasure of the book is a series of little biographies of successful teams.

Quoting from the end of their chapter 4: "High-performance teams: very useful models":

[High-performance teams] achieve beyond any measure of reasonableness, and they have fun doing it.  The finely developed sense of humor in these groups seems to distinguish them as well.  Not everything they do is laced with fun, and there may be some humorless high-performance teams out there.  But we doubt it.

At this point obviously I should say something funny, but nothing came to me.  I end the post on a note of self-reflective anxiety.

The GPL license is a artefact of war

In the early 80s, a company called Symbolics split off from the MIT artificial intelligence lab.  Richard Stallman stayed behind and wrote code to replicate features of the Symbolics software.

The GPL is an artefact born of this battle.  It is a weapon for the academic or hacker community to use against proprietary developers.

Richard Stallman on why you shouldn't use LGPL

Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.

The GPL smells of struggle and dispute.  It is a finger raised to 'proprietary' where the second 'p' sends out a little spray of spit.  I think I understand the dangers that the GPL wants to avoid, and I agree that there are real dangers.  Is the GPL the best solution?

I (the man Matthew) don't like the way it feels to set up barricades.   The thing that makes me happy, is to give away my stuff.  If I give you something, and say 'promise never to give this to a bad person' - I feel bad - because it's not really giving it away, but something else.

If I try to generalize,  I feel instinctively that the world will change faster under the influence of true generosity.   I realize that not everyone thinks that is true or even meaningful.   Still, what can we do, but say it out loud?

Parkinson's law

Sorry - I just can't help but quote again from the master himself.  This is his classic essay on the tendency for the number of administrators to increase whether there is work for them or not:

We may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other."

To comprehend Factor 1, we must picture a civil servant, called A, who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial, but we should observe, in passing, that A's sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy: a normal symptom of middle age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance in history, however, of A choosing any but the third alternative.

Killing passion

Searching for a favorite painting, I found this article on diseased management in IT.  It's a nice article and well written, but better still, it pointed me to  Cyril Northcote Parkinson and his very funny essay on injelititis.  A person suffering from injelititis is "an individual who combines in himself a high concentration of incompetence and jealousy".

The great sage Parkinson recommends three potential treatments: Intolerance, Ridicule and Castigation.  My favorite quote from a very enjoyable essay:

Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility.