Haupz Blog

Innovation Heroism

Does innovation require heroic acts? It shouldn’t. In fact, it’s a sign of a problem in an organisation if innovation is considered heroic, or requires heroic acts to begin with.

There is a relation between ease of innovation and free flow of knowledge (the article mentions it as well). A while ago, I’ve had the pleasure of delivering a training session on knowledge management to managers at different levels of seniority from across the company. The model I described in the talk (not my idea, but that of greater minds) encourages many things that I love to see as well: free exchange about knowledge, documentation and abstraction of knowledge, collaboration to derive new knowledge, and prototyping to test new knowledge and make it practical.

Back to the heroics problem: a group or company that tends to rely on a Sole Glorious Figure to address problems - be it in innovation or decision making - does not tap into the collective wisdom of the team. That, however, is buried and needs to be brought to the light by allowing it to emerge. Which, in turn, is only possible by allowing - no: encouraging, maybe enforcing - collaboration.

Thank you, no silos please. Let’s build bridges to cross, communication channels to talk, windows to observe.

Tags: work

Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony

More than three decades ago, Sergei Rachmaninoff was one of my first contacts with classical music. I had heard the name and something that insinuated his music was interesting, so I bought an audio cassette (this is how old I am) with his first and second piano concertos. These - especially the second concerto - struck me hard, and I instantly loved this music very, very deeply. I still do.

A while later, I came across Rachmaninoff’s second symphony, which struck me similarly hard as the piano concerto. In particular, the slow movement had an impact. The opening theme with its melancholic yet light mood, and then the clarinet solo that just won’t end … until it ends after all, only to be continued by the strings, which loop it back to the opening theme … incredible.

Hear it please. The entire thing, or just the slow movement.

Tags: music

Managing To-Do Lists

Dawn Springett here has a concise suggestion for managing to-do lists. It’s related to my series about WIP from a few weeks back. I like Dawn’s list for the brevity and pragmatism: it’s a combination of tools that make sense, and it makes sense as a whole, especially where it reminds the reader to embrace change (priorities may shift, schedules may have to be rearranged).

One of the suggestions is to “[s]chedule your tasks in your calendar, in order of priority”, and to “allocate enough time for each task”. This is way more complex than it seems, especially for people with certain kinds of roles that involve meetings, lots of them. Allocating enough time for any given task isn’t going to be easy in such a setup. On the upside, many of the meetings are connected to the tasks in one way or another, and can be leveraged to keep things moving. This is what I’ve been practicing, too.

Tags: work

Music and Nature

Music time, and nature time. I’ll give a bit of a brain dump of music (of the classical variety) that describes nature. I’m curious to hear more suggestions (also for alternative interpretations to the ones I’m pointing to) to keep the list growing. Here goes, in roughly chronological order.

We’ve all come across Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”. They’re a collection of four violin concertos describing in baroque terms the characteristics of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Eccole.

Joseph Haydn, prolific grand master of symphonies (and wit), is represented with two pieces here. First, his “Sunrise” string quartet, which ever so slightly hints at its title in the first bars of the opening movement. Second, his late masterpiece “The Creation”, which narrates the early days of the world as described in the Bible. The opening, beginning with nothingness and developing unto the “fiat lux” moment are stunning. Hear for yourselves - even if only the first 8 minutes.

Ludwig van Beethoven, in his 6th symphony, famously depicted a thunderstorm (whole thing, just the weather).

Rivers have something about them that makes them interesting for composers. Bedřich Smetana’s immortal “Vltava” - here convincingly delivered by a young orchestra - is perhaps the most popular example. Don’t forget Kurt Atterberg and his symphonic poem “Älven” though.

But how about mountains, you ask? Rightfully so. Here we go. The opening of Gustav Mahler’s 3rd symphony is meant to describe, in music, the Höllengebirge in Austria. (Mahler composed the symphony in a hut on the lakeshore at the feet of that mountain range.) And let’s not forget Richard Strauss, whose “Alpensinfonie”, in an audibly compelling way, describes an entire day in the alps, from night and sunrise to sunset and night, including a hike to a summit.

Austrian composer Siegmund von Hausegger wrote an entire large-scale work entitled “Nature Symphony”. It’s quite majestic, and full of slowly unfolding beauty.

I’ll close with two symphonies by English 20th century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. His first, “A Sea Symphony”, set for large orchestra and chorus, makes rather clear what it’s about with the opening call to “behold the sea!” It’s a grandiose description of oceans, ships, shores, and seafarers. Vaughan Williams' seventh symphony, “Sinfonia antartica” takes us to the far south and its vast, majestic, cold landscapes.

Anything else?

Tags: music

"I Can Take It!"

One kind of person one comes across frequently is that one whose communication philosophy can be summarised like this: “I am very direct, even blunt, and can be perceived as rude, because I hate sugarcoating things. Don’t worry, I can take it, feel free to talk the same way to me.”

Now, that’s not helpful. The principle at work here - treat people like you want to be treated - can be a bit short-sighted sometimes. So is the opposite - treat people like they want to be treated - but can’t there be some middle ground?

The concept of “radical candor” is a good and important one. It has two components: care personally, and challenge directly. The two philosophies above each embody one of those components while ignoring the other. Neither one is ultimately great.

Check this out for a heads-up.

Tags: work

Mini Profiler

Profilers are power tools for understanding system performance. That doesn’t mean they have to be inherently complicated or hard to build. Here’s a great little specimen, in just a couple hundred (plus x) lines of Java code, including flame graph output.

Tags: hacking, the-nerdy-bit

Old Standard Textbook, Renewed

Back in university, one of my favourite courses was the one on microprocessor architecture. One of the reasons was that the lab sessions involved building logic circuits from TTL chips with lots of hand-assembled wiring (imagine debugging such a contraption). Another reason was the textbook, which explained a RISC processor architecture (MIPS) in great detail and with awesome didactics. This book was “The Patterson/Hennessy” (officially, it goes by the slightly longer and also a bit unwieldy title “Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface”).

This was the Nineties. Fast-forward 30 years to today, and we have a new and increasingly practical RISC architecture around: RISC-V. The good thing about this architecture is that it is an inherently open standard. No company owns the specification, anyone can (provided they have the means) produce RISC-V chips.

Guess what, that favourite book of mine got an upgrade too: there is a RISC-V edition! This means that students, when first venturing into this rather interesting territory, can learn the principles of CPU design on an open standard basis that is much less convoluted than certain architectures, and - unlike certain others - entirely royalty-free.

Makes me want to go to university again ...

Tags: the-nerdy-bit, hacking

Output is Small Steps

In the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, the author argues to focus on small steps to reach a big goal, instead of focusing on the big goal and getting frustrated by what seems to be slow progress, or intimidated by the sheer size of the end. This reminded me of the good old output / outcome dichotomy.

Outcome (the big end) takes time to achieve. Keeping the eyes on that can lead to losing sight of what’s important: the concrete next step. This step, like all the others, is a small change, and reaching the end goal is a journey of such small changes that will eventually have big consequences. These steps are the various instalments of output we need to generate to eventually deliver the outcome.

Next time you or your team are hit by analysis paralysis, and feel the tendency to slice those user stories in an epic way too big because the smaller ones don’t feel like making progress, take a step back, and err on the side of slicing the story smaller. It’s quicker to achieve, quicker to generate that nice bit of satisfaction when completed. And it will contribute to the epic nonetheless. What’s important is to be confident about getting there.

Tags: work