Get geeky--at least a little bit more

Some quotes from a very good article:

I have sat in countless business meetings that were all talk. Rather than trying things to see what worked, we talked in circles for weeks only to end up doing nothing. It is quite different from my days as a digital circuit designer.

When I wrote VHDL for FPGAs, you could experiment. If we didn't know the best way to do something, we could try two different implementations. There was no shame in failure or missing the mark because we were always learning and iterating. No one ever nailed a design in one try.

In business though, there are too many people afraid to move forward. Failure can be a career killer, and the inertia factor makes it easier just to keep moving along the way you already are. An entrepreneur friend of mine doesn't consider it a failure when he gets out of a business, because as he says "I try businesses on like most people date. I'm trying to figure out what I like and what I'm best at." If business had more geeks, there would be a more experimental culture in business that would help make everything better by focusing on what works and encouraging small scale tests....

Too true, too true. And if something is decied on and implemented, when it doesn't work, it's not because the idea is bad, no, that could never be, but it's because someone isn't carrying his weight or we didn't get buy in--sign a pledge?-- or we suspect the loyalty of a gatekeeper somewhere. How about this: The idea was bad.

You can find countless articles on the web and in computing magazines about why Perl or Ruby or Java or Lisp is better than C or Haskell or VB or PHP for certain kinds of projects. Geeks like to talk about best practices and debate the merits of various approaches to programming or web design or hardware development or system configuration. Business people like to talk about who moved their cheese.

Ouch. That one's gonna leave a mark.

All I can say is "amen to that." I wouldn't take the geek part too seriously but his points are all spot on. More of this, please.