Before his untimely death in 1973, Bruce Lee managed to shake up the martial arts world with his theories of combat and training. Why? Because he felt – much to the chagrin of his peers – that the traditional martial arts were too rigid and formalistic to be practical when applied in an actual fight.

Lee referred to this rigidity in the martial arts as a “classical mess” that wasted time and energy. His real concern was that concentrating on a specific style as the only way of fighting prevented someone from becoming a truly capable fighter. This is because focusing solely on any one style of fighting restricts your options. (more…)

The Challenge in Defining True Success
Let’s examine the question of the classic definition of on time, on budget, of high quality, with the expected features as a traditional measure of success. Is it possible for a project to meet this traditional measure of success and still be regarded as a failure? I’ll answer that question with a question: What if the project ultimately fails to provide the anticipated business value?

Conversely, what if a project fails on the traditional criteria, yet delivers greaterbusiness value than anticipated? It happens; in fact, CIO Magazine reported on this very phenomenon in an article called Applied Insight – Tracks in the Snow, by R. Ryan Nelson.

In the article, Nelson cites an example of a financial services company that developed a new system to improve collections performance that was six months late and cost twice the original estimate – failing in the classic sense. However, once in production, the system provided a 50% increase in the number of concurrent collection strategy tests in production. On that basis, the project was judged to be a great success!             (more…)