Thinkers are rare, doers are rarer, and thinker-doers are the rarest of all” - paraphrasing Fred Brooks from ‘The Mythical Man Month’.
Learn an industry like the back of your hand. Be able to tell me the names of each and every CEO and CFO across the industry and what their Modus Operandi in terms of management and capital allocation are. Be able to contact many people in the supply chain to get a sense of what’s going on on the ground for distributors, buyers, etc. Know the customers and how companies are differentiating themselves from one another whether on price, service, quality, etc. Know the Wall Street analysts to get an understanding of the consensus view and be able to tell me why and how they are wrong. Even better, know other buy side analysts and understand their views and why THEY are also wrong. Like Li Lu has said, evaluate and know the business like you inherited it. I think by doing this, you will make yourself much more valuable and marketable for the years to come.
Source: distressed-debt-investing.com
Bottom line: if you value your school more than your accomplishments, you are destined to get eaten alive in the real world.
Source: 37signals.com
Emerson - Self Reliance
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this momemnt for you an utterance brave and gran as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriachs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
Source: en.wikisource.org
Organization structure matters
Nagappan recognized that although metrics such as code churn, code complexity, code dependencies, and other code-related factors have an impact on software quality, his team had yet to investigate the people factor. The Mythical Man Month is most famous for describing how communication overhead increases with the number of programmers on a project, but it also cites Conway’s Law, paraphrased as, “If there are N product groups, the result will be a software system that to a large degree contains N versions or N components.” In other words, the system will resemble the organization building the system.
The first challenge was to somehow describe the relationships between members of a development group. The team settled on using organizational structure, taking the entire tree structure of the Windows group as an example. They took into account reporting structure but also degrees of separation between engineers working on the same project, the level to which ownership of a code base rolled up, the number of groups contributing to the project, and other metrics developed for this study.
The Influence of Organizational Structure on Software Quality: An Empirical Case Study, by Nagappan, Brendan Murphy of Microsoft Research Cambridge, and Victor R. Basili of the University of Maryland, presents startling results: Organizational metrics, which are not related to the code, can predict software failure-proneness with a precision and recall of 85 percent. This is a significantly higher precision than traditional metrics such as churn, complexity, or coverage that have been used until now to predict failure-proneness. This was probably the most surprising outcome of all the studies.
Source: cl.ly
Bernanke and Inflation
Home prices in US
I’ve been testing the Series 9, and my verdict is that it is a solid, beautiful, speedy laptop that provides Windows users a good alternative to the MacBook Air. It bests the Air in some respects and trails it in others, but overall, I found the Series 9 satisfying to use.
Prospective buyers of the Series 9, however, should prepare to pay a lot—more than what even premium-priced Apple charges for the Air. And, based on my tests, I suspect they will see noticeably less battery life than Samsung claims, and significantly less than on the comparable MacBook Air.
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
Apple MacBook Air is value for money.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Over the last couple of months Google (GOOG) has reached out to the major carriers and device makers backing its mobile operating system with a message: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google’s purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google’s most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google’s Android group.
Source: businessweek.com
