Journal: News & Comment

Halley Suitt on managing creativity at Gnomedex

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What is a creative leader? How can we manage creativity. Halley is from toptensources.com. She shops for shoes and companies.

• If her board had been watching my son's development at 8 months, they would have downsized him.
• He had no interest in crawling, he just went straight to walking.
• Had to leave space for him to be creative.
• There are some really weird creative companies who succeed in Web 2.0.
• What kind of developer environment do they like? The dungeon, elsewhere?
• Werner: keep teams small (6-8 people). Two-pizza teams.
• If they start to whine, they've lost interest. Swearing is fine, but no whining.
• Dan Pink: A Whole New Mind.
• Maybe optimum team size is 4.6, i.e. the Beatles with Brian Epstein.
• Fred Brooks: No Silver Bullet (from same author as Mythical Man-Month).
• The fundamental conclusion: hire good people and make sure they're passionately involved in what they're doing.
• The rest is ancillary.
• Don't take the wrong team and try to make it do what the right team would have done. You can't.
• If you don't train developers, they'll leave, even if they're learning things that would be useful elsewhere.
• Werner: others said get out of the way, and that's right. Don't just train for the immediate future, train for what interests people.
• Laugh at yourself. Know when you're full of B.S.
• Meeting deadlines: keep telling developers what the dates are, at every chance you get.
• People will want to leave at some point.
• Don't be afraid to let people move on if they need to.
• Keep channels of communications open, but avoid interruptions.

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