Category Archives: Behavior

QUOTE: Heroics in the workplace

…People respond with heroic behavior. And when they act heroically, they stop improving. They just act heroically again, again, and again, and they stop learning. David Anderson in interview for Software Engineering Radio.
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Positives of negative New Year’s resolutions

By this time most of us (at least those who care to make our lives better) have made their New Year’s resolutions. From what I hear here and there most of these resolutions are around new things which you are going to do this year: work out regularly read more books spend more time with family improve foreign language [...]
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Intrinsic motivation vs. Extrinsic stimulus

Great talk by Dan Pink at TED about pitfalls of extrinsic stimulus and scientific evidence for intrinsic motivation: I kind of always felt that way, but now I’ve got evidence to refer to. Plutarch was right that The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. You can not stimulate creativity, you can [...]
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Vendor-Client talk

Sounds familiar?
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How long does it take to fail?

Failure means distrust. Distrust to you about delivering on your promises; distrust in your ability to make a difference; distrust in you taking care. Basically, it is as simple as: Drawing attention to a problem without communication of causes and planned corrective actions. Repeating the same error again (when you do not change anything after step 1). Making problem [...]
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Professionals are always around you

Today I had an inspiring chat with one of fellow QA engineers about one of the systems we recently developed. I had a new requirement in mind that triggers complete re-test of the system. Me: How long does it take to re-test our solution? QA: Any new features or components? Me: No, “just” another communication protocol. QA: Give me [...]
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Be reasonable

Be reasonable with your requests. Be reasonable with your responses. Human actions (at least, in professional and business fields) are mostly driven by reasons. People never (or very-very rarely) do something out of spontaneous wish at work. Yes, you can have a spontaneous idea, but it, anyway, will serve some particular purpose. Idea tries to solve a [...]
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Tell me what you read…

Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are. Old saying tells so. In modern world you often say who the person is by looking at what she reads or what she thinks of some books. Same this is applicable to blogs as well. Recently the Time posted 25 Best Blogs 2009. It [...]
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Do not stop. Keep going

I just could not resist posting this godsend from Merlin Mann: You don’t stop the journey just because one of the donkeys died. Keep going.
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Take on the change

Leo Babauta of Zenhabits describes an interesting concept of pigeonholes in interpersonal communication. My personal experience with this suggests that there is always a hassle that stops people from changing for better. Changing for worse usually happens gradually and unconsciously; and when it is conscious (I can not imagine that, but still) you do not care [...]
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