Did it ever occur to you why there are so many different languages which people speak? How did they form and why are they so different? And most importantly, how do languages affect our thoughts and thinking process in general? Many years ago I was amazed by the novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. It really made me think about differences in human languages and their influence on our behavior. If you have not read this novel you definitely should. It tries to answer the question of how strong are the ties between language and thinking and elucidates the hypothesis of very strong interrelation of word and thought.

Why would I write about this? I was reminded of this by post on creative thinking from Presentation Zen. Summarizing psychologist and physician Dr. Edward de Bono's theory of Six Thinking Hats Garr Reynolds says:

People are reluctant to be creative out of fear of making "a mistake." Problem is (at least in the English language) we don't have a good word to describe creative ideas that just don't work...except to call them "mistakes." That is, we do not have a good word for this: "Fully justified venture which for reasons beyond our control did not succeed." If you do not succeed with your creative idea this is called a "mistake." And people generally like to avoid "mistakes." (We need a better word!)

How truthful this is! We are very social beings and we always care about what others say. Not having an adequate way of naming creative misleads(?) we are not able to perceive them correctly and express without unnecessary negative shade. Here we are once again caught in a labyrinth of the form (words, language) and the meaning (thoughts, feelings). But being aware of the problem we've got to find a way out.

There has got to be a way out.

http://osnews.com/story/19266/WTFsm

As many of you I read many blogs and sometimes I would like to let you know which articles really touched me. Touched me so that I want to share them with you. Posting something like "Hey! Check out this recent post by Robin Robinson" is kind of silly.

I'll use sharing feature of Google Reader to let you know which items I consider worth mentioning. Short guide to how it works:

Did you know that Microsoft recently added Mobile RFID to BizTalk server?

This event alone does not have an outstanding impact on the industry, but inspires some thoughts. Generally, each technology or product has (or has to have) two stages of realization, two waves of value generation:

• Vendor invests into product development and realizes its value by selling to customers.
• Product consumers invest into product deployment and learning and realize its value by generating revenue for themselves.

In general, this means that while they fully undergo their curve consumers are not ready to adopt new technology. Usually, you will not embarrass deployment of new technology until you realized the investment in previous.

This means that there are some natural limitations on how often vendors can release new technologies/platforms/products. If they release too often customers are not ready yet to make new investments and technology adoption will be hindered. If release cycle is too long less revenue will be generated.

Of course, these waves are smoothed over by large number of customers out there in the market, each in different phase of technology deployment; by number of vendors offering competitive products; and by a whole lot of other factors. But still it is important to understand these waves to build a successful marketing and release strategy.

Think of customers' pains and try to relief them not to amplify by asking to deploy new product when he is having hard times returning the investment from previous.

Some time ago I was reminded of an article by a man whom I know personally and am really proud of being aquatinted with. In article "10 software developers' books which shook the world, but are still unknown in Russia" (in Russian) Andrey Terekhov discusses top 10 books from his library which are definitely worth the time you spend reading them. These books are "must read" for those who want to be software engineers instead of mere "programmers".

What is interesting about this list is that not all the books would be "Yes, sure! You've got to read them!" for everybody. While going through the list I understood that, for instance, "Peopleware" will not cause reader's eyebrows to go up. But with following 3 titles:

• Jeffrey Ullman, "Elements of ML Programming"
• Clemens Szyperski, "Component Software"
• Andrew Appel, Jens Palsberg,  "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java"

I would expect that some people say "Hey! I'm a Java/.NET/PHP/Ruby/whatever developer! Why do I care?!" And those are people who fail maturity test.

Mature people (this has nothing to do with age or junior vs. senior developer) look for and appreciate opportunities to widen and deepen their knowledge and understanding of things. They realize that going to next level also means going beyond current horizons. And sure way to do that is study adjacent (and not only) areas of knowledge even if this new information is not immediately applicable to what they are doing now.

So do not miss opportunities to go beyond and know more than you need today to make sure you know enough tomorrow.

Time flows like the water through your fingers. Probably, time means to economics more than anything else.

"The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it and no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in exceedingly short supply."

Peter F. Druker "Effective executive"

My colleagues presented me with a poster We Can Do It!:

Do you think they are getting at something? :)

There are times when you say to yourself: "I really want to apply myself to this new idea. But I have to turn it down for the lack of time." Sigh... And later you ask yourself "How could this happen that you do not have time for important tasks?" And that is a really good question.

Essentially you can divide the time you spend into two categories: value addition and waste. Value addition activities are everything that advances you towards accomplishment of your mission. Anything else is waste.

It is not that we deliberately choose to do something that we would not like to do. But rather circumstances make us agree to assignments and tasks. When we look back at these agreements we thinks that we should not have accepted those tasks. Sometimes goals that seemed important yesterday become not so important today and suck our capacity to undertake new endeavors.

So when you find yourself in a situation when you can not find time for a new and valuable accomplishment you want get rid of two types of "time eaters":

• Inertia. Things important in the past, which have doubtful value today. Seth's Godin "The Dip" discusses this in detail.
• Monkeys. Something that sits on your back and distracts from important things. On this I'll highly recommend Monkey Management episode of Project Management Podcast.

Start with small. Send your colleagues link to the podcast and the presentation on Monkey Management and begin getting your time back.

On the average I receive from 50 to 200 e-mails in my corporate Inbox which I believe is not high number at all. Still despite of the techniques I use to keep my Inbox clean some e-mails need to be stored for reference for months in archive. As you might expect it is difficult to find required e-mails in archive although I try to keep them in logical structure. Right now I use Windows Desktop Search and this tool is really good in full-text search when you need to find single e-mail. It also has some basic capabilities in handling e-mail threads. But unfortunately nothing more.

A friend of mine told about Xobni. An Outlook plug-in which Bill Gates refers to as "the next generation of social networking". I hope to allocate time and give this tool a try as I see no way how my e-mail counts may drop.

This was a blogless month for me. For a number of reasons and for a none good reason among them. But this, of course, could not stop the world from revolving. So several events which worth attention happened last month:

• Ukraine Joins the W.T.O.
• SoftServe recognized among Top 10 Outsourcing Companies in Eastern Europe
• Ukrainians Took Second Place at World Championship in Biathlon

I have many things to say and I hope to start doing so over the next days.