Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. – Samuel Wilkes, 1951, paraphrasing H. G. Wells from Mankind in the Making Read more →

Fallacy of the Week - Use and Misuse of Goodhart's Law

Goodhart's Law states when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it. Without a Macro Economics context, the Law is... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: "you... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The Ultimate Measure Of A Man is Not Where He Stands In Moments of Comfort And Convenience, But Where He Stands At Time of Challenge and Controversy - Martin Luther King, Jr. Read more →

Quote of the Day

Adde parvum parvo magus acervus erit - Ovid The Greeks knew what we seem to forget at times Add little to a little and you get a big pile. In our project management domain, this condition is very common when... Read more →

Quote of the Day

No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. - Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (26 October 1800 – 24 April 1891) Eisenhower co-opted this quote in Plans are... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." ~ Garry Kasparov Read more →

Quote of the Day

If you say a team member is “responsible” for a task, it means the outcome for that task is solely reliant on that person. However, in the event they fail to complete it, they are “accountable” for the outcome. Accountability,... Read more →

Management Principles

When I worked at Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (RFETS), for Kaiser-Hill (Joint Venture for the National Nuclear Security Agency) who was the prime contractor for $7B of nuclear weapons plant clean up (I was a VP of Program Management... Read more →

Book of the Month

In our current political turmoil, as well as project management and software development turmoil, claims are made - sometimes wild unsubstantiated claims - of how to NOT do something, how some process can fix your problems, without ever stating what... Read more →