We had the opportunity to interview Tim Besse, co-founder of Glassdoor.com, which is not only based on transparency, but also offers transparency as an online free service.

I am not sure if this is good news or bad but recent rulings show that courts are increasingly more willing to uphold Open Source licenses.  People who have taken them seriously have suffered the consequences.

We first published this reading list on June 9, 2009 of books for people interested in creating great workplaces.  This is the first update to the list to include my review of The Starbucks Experience by Joseph Michelli (hint: not recommended)

I cannot recommend The Starbucks Experience, by Joseph Michelli.  This book is little more than a long infomercial for a company that does not need one.  What Starbucks has done, and continues to do is extraordinary, but this book does not do it justice.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Blogs, Luke Hohmann talks about how Innovation Games can help improve the Democratic (political) process.  The nice thing is that they can also be used to improve the democracy@work process.

It feels like déjà vu all over again.  A team of experienced developers is having trouble meeting its deliverables.  It feels just like the last team that struggled with the same problem.  Even when you’ve instituted Scrum, you’ll have to pay attention to these issues every day.  Here’s a list of common mistakes and how to address them.

Last Wednesday I attended a social mixer put together by an organization called CHispPA.  The name is a play on the word chispa, meaning spark in Spanish.  The event was great, with lots of smart, successful people from all walks of life.  It certainly did "spark" a lot of high quality connections for me.

There are a bunch of myths out there about software development, but one that's more insidious and pervasive than the others.  According to this myth, to solve most problems, just "write a good spec."  As a good friend of mine says, "it is IMPOSSIBLE to write an accurate enough spec."