Less is More

by Jason Jennings

"As I came to the end of my in-depth interviews with the CEOs of the companies covered in this book, I was struck by the fact that each shared this in common; the ownership of and fierce loyalty to a very simple big objective. The big objective was the strategy and it became the culture; everything else was tactics on how to acheive it."

"Imagine for a moment the power of everyone in your organization-whether a ten-employee restaurant or a thirty-thousand-worker transportation company-knowing and striving to achieve a simple big objective."

Dreaming in Code

by Scott Rosenberg

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project," Torvolds snapped. "You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important that it likley is at that stage. Or, worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some failry immediate need, it's almost certainly overdesigned."

"We've consistently overinvested in infrastructure and design, the fruits of which won't be realized in the next development cycle or even two - that is, not in the next six or twelve months. You pay a price for that in a loss of agility. The advice I would give is to do even more of what we've been doing in the last couple of years, which is to sequence the innovation, stage things, and be less ambitious. Do not build out infrastucture, like CPIA [generic data-driven UI system], except insofar as you need to meet the goals of the next year. I'm more and more feeling like the art here is to do agile development without losing the long-term vision - and, frankly, I didn't even define the problem as that to start with."

The Ten Faces of Innovation

by Thomas Kelley & Jonathan Littman

"An Experience Architect is the right person to remind your organization that the first step in becoming extraordinary is simply to stop being ordinary. To beat the competition, outperform the market, and exceed the norm, you have to create remarkable experiences for your customers, for your partners, for your employees. And if the Experience Architect can help you do that, then word will soon get out that there's something special about your team."

The Unix Philosophy

by Mike Gancarz

"Traditional programmers often harbor a secret desire to write the Great American Program. When they embark on a development project, it seems like they want to spend weeks, months, or even years trying to solve the entire world's problems with one program. Not only is this costly from a business standpoint, it ignores reality. In the real world, few problems exist that cannot be surmounted using small solutions. We choose to implement such massive solutions because we don't fully understand the problem."

"It is in the building of the prototype that the idea is first tested for merit in a visual, realistic way. Before then, you have little more than a collection of thoughts about the way something ought to work. The concept is barely understood at that point, and it is highly unlikely that everyone perceives it in the same way. You need a consensus of perception before the project can proceed. The prototype moves toward that consensus by providing a concrete representation of a goal."