The June 12, 2006 edition of Fortune magazine is themed around Teamwork. In typical Fortune fashion, they illustrate their topics with examples from the business world, all of which one could apply to building out a QA team (something I discussed back in here and here). Below are my notes.

  • My job is to motivate and inspire and create an atmosphere in which you do your best work – Howard Stringer, Sony CEO
  • Coordinate teams to avoid duplication. Silos are bad.
  • Put all the fish on the table. You have to go through the smelly, bloody process of cleaning it, but the reward is a great fish dinner at the end – George Kohlrieser, Professor at the International Institute for Management Development
  • This next batch is from Jim Vesterman. An MBA student (at the time) who signed up for the Marines and did a stint in Iraq. (article content is here)
    • You can’t survive in the Marine Corps (or anywhere else) without helping the guy next to you
    • The strongest teams have members who can transistion through every role
    • Learn to be both a leader and a follower. No one says you have to lead all the time
  • Actual Organizational Networks rarely align with their associated heirarchies. Figure out who the hub of the Organizational Network is. How come it seems that the hub usually resides somewhere in QA/Test?
  • If a team cannot be fed with 2 pizzas, the team is too large – Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO
  • From the Motorola RAZR V3 development team
    • Reasearch is not necessarily gospel. Temper research with instinct
    • Missing deadlines does not mean failure of the project
  • From MySQL
    • The brightest engineers like the calmness and coolness of night
    • Be wary of people who have nothing in their life aside from work (no spouse, pet, parents, etc) to keep them from working up to and beyond the point of burnout or insanity
    • Build loyalty with people by responding honestly to inquiries and comments in a timely manner. Email black holes are Bad
    • Let customers log their own bug. This isn’t really a Teamwork related entry, but it is one that came up, so it is here. I’ll work on a seperate ‘Involve the customer’ post later