Lie: "People are our most important asset."

Truth: "People are our most worrisome and unpredictable asset. Our most important assets are really our financial assets."

How is this true? A pile of capital – so what does it do? Really, I’d like to know about this autonomous manifestation. If true, I could retire today. While I agree, people are our most worrisome and unpredictable asset, they are no doubt the most IMPORTANT asset.

Lie: "This was a rational decision."

Truth: "I wanted to do this."

Well maybe you wanted to do this because it was a rational decision. Emotional or irrational decisions in business lead to disaster.

Lie: "We judge people by their performance."

Truth: "I judge your performance based on how much I like you."

On what else can you judge them? Paul LaFontaine mentions that we keep people we like and get rid of people we don’t. This makes sense because generally people we like do a good job and people who get along with no one generally make a mess of things. Why is that so hard to understand? Is he honestly trying to say that companies get ahead by promoting suckups over performers? No, people you really like tend to be people you respect. Respect is a clear marker for a solid performer. This one’s a no brainer, Paul.

Lie: "This is business, it isn’t personal."

Truth: "Everything’s personal."

Yes, everything is personal, but those that can get past it and see the sunk cost, or eliminate the factors that really have no bearing on the problem, then we can get ahead. Look, I don’t hate you, but the fact remains, I performed $100,000 of work for which I have not been paid. That makes me mad, but I’m not taking action because I’m mad. I’m taking action because I can’t write off $100,000. I’m sorry that your company is in a bind, that your several hundred employees might be in the unemployment line next week. If you don’t pay me X% by %Y, I will file suit. It sucks, so yes, go ahead and yell. Everything is personal, but the fact that you can rise above and maintain objectivity regardless of the sob story will be the difference between your employees in unemployment or his.

Lie: "The customer comes first."

Truth: "I come first."

Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb by Philipp Lenssen

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb.

Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production.

Of course, we work very hard at being lazy.  We’ll find resources you might not have thought of (because we’re lazy).  We might write a business automation system (because punching numbers is boring and computers are good at it… and we’re lazy).  We might help you better program your employees because we don’t want to do their work and neither do you.  And we will ask the dumb questions you might not.  In short, we don’t assume we know more than you do about your business.  In consulting there is no shortage of professionals who help you spend your hard earned money to complicate your processes, accounting, Internet strategy, or software implementation. 

We’ll probably lose our membership in the Secret Order of Consulting Professionals for saying this, but we don’t suppose it’s any secret – consultants obfuscate things to render the illusion of success or progress while billing by the hour.  OG Consulting is neither motivated enough nor smart enough to pull that off.  We’d rather help you make your business processes brain-dead simple so we don’t have to think so hard and neither will you.

And that’s the bottom line.  We’re too lazy and dumb to fail.

except from "Calculating the True Price of Software" by Robert Lefkowitz

… the major difference in worldview between open source advocates and proprietary software license advocates is explainable as a differing opinion on the correct value of the volatility of maintenance and upgrade pricing. People who believe that the pricing on maintenance is stable and unlikely to change see greater intrinsic value in the software. People who fear that the pricing is subject to large fluctuations see no intrinsic value in the up-front license; stripped of the options, the license value approaches $0.

For the open source movement, perhaps a better way to position the change that OSS is making is this: we’re converting warrants on future maintenance and enhancements into options, which means that instead of having a sole supplier (warrants), we have created a third-party market (options) of these derivatives.

How capitalistic is that?

The conclusion is that even without all the financial analysis, Free/Libre Open Source programmers have stumbled upon an inevitable truth; software by itself isn’t worth much and the proprietary vendors know it.  What has flourished in recent years is a free flowing market where vendors may compete to sell customers maintenance, support, and upgrades.